It all began with Yolanda Chen's great yearning to see dragon boat races and her love of the Potomac River. Yolanda Chen is the wife of Chen Chien-jen (程建人), the head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Relations Office in Washington and Taiwan's unofficial ambassador to the US.
After Chen, Taiwan's former vice foreign minister, was first stationed here in July 2000, the couple took a drive up and down the Potomac River, which runs between Washington and northern Virginia. Yolanda Chen thought to herself: "It's such a beautiful river, but there is one thing missing: dragon boats," she says. "But I never knew that it could be a dream come true."
TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
Now, less than two years later, that dream is about to become a reality, with the first of the boats scheduled to hit the Potomac's waters today.
TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
More than 1,100 participants from several East Coast states will converge on Washington over the weekend to take part in the US Eastern Region Dragon Boat Championship. It will mark the first time in US history that the capital city has seen a dragon boat in action, and the race will, organizers hope, become a major annual attraction in the nation's capital.
The races will coincide with the Memorial Day weekend, an important national holiday in which America remembers its war dead, and which marks the unofficial beginning of summer for most Americans.
Yolanda Chen first approached her husband with the idea and ran into her first setback.
"I didn't know how she came up with the idea," Chen told the Taipei Times. "We had so many things to do already, our hands were filled, and I thought it would be too difficult."
Unfazed, Yolanda Chen turned to her Chinese-American female friends, of which she has many. She is the chairwoman of the Metropolitan Washington Area Chapter of the Chinese Women's League, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.
Last spring, when the organization started thinking about doing something big to celebrate the anniversary, Yolanda Chen resurrected her idea.
"I said, why don't we just ask if we can race dragon boats on the river," she recalled. "Some people said, `No, it would be too much trouble.' I said, `Why don't we just try. We have nothing to lose.'"
Navigating bureaucracy
Getting permission, it turns out, was no easy feat. The women had to navigate Washington's government, known for its infuriating bureaucrats and miles of red tape.
"We found out that if you want to use a public park [the river is part of a public park], you have to start one year ahead," she said. That meant that the application had to be in by the end of last May and the women got it in just in time.
A few weeks later, an official called the women in to discuss the plan.
"They said, `I didn't know that Chinese women like to row boats.' I said, `There are a lot of things you don't know.'"
But after she described the boats and the event, the officials became excited about the race's prospects.
"Maybe you can bring the boat to show us and we can display in publicly," Yolanda Chen said one official told her.
"I said, `What's the point of seeing the boat? We should have it [paddle] on the river.' They asked themselves, `Is this woman really serious?'"
Eventually, the city came around -- with a vengeance. Both the mayor, Anthony Williams, and the chairwoman of the City Council, Linda Cropp, have volunteered to be honorary co-chairs of the festivities, along with Chen. The city itself will field three teams, and the city government has opened the banks of the Potomac to the throngs of spectators expected to attend.
Forty-five teams, including one from the Falun Gong, will take part. Thirty-seven of those teams will be from the Washington area and each team will be made up of 24 paddlers and a drummer.
They will race in eight dragon boats built especially for the event in Taiwan in the Taiwanese style. The boats' construction and shipping were paid for by Tai-wanese donors at a cost of nearly US$100,000.
Yolanda Chen made several trips to Taiwan to raise money for the festivities and the vessels and to oversee the construction of the boats and design of the official logo.
Gala event
The preliminaries will be held today and the finals will be held tomorrow after a gala ceremony that will feature addresses by the mayor, the council chairwoman and Chen, followed by the capital's first dragon boat eye-dotting ceremony and Taiwanese and Chinese-American dance performances.
The winners will go on to the national dragon boat championships in Oakland, California in August, and the winners of the nationals will go to Shanghai next year to represent the US in the world Dragon Boat championships.
Dragon boat racing is not new to the US. Boston has had races on the Charles River for 21 years, Yolanda Chen notes. Portland, Oregon, has had dragon boat teams for 16 years, Los Angeles for nine years, and several other cities including New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco all have teams.
The organizers fully expect that dragon boat races will become an annual Memorial Day tradition on the Potomac.
"The Dragon Boat festival is not going to be a one-time event," says Jeffrey C. Chen (
"What we are trying to do is to have this race go on year after year. We will use [the city's] facilities to become the center for racing dragon boats in the Eastern Region. We want to ensure that every Memorial Day weekend will have Dragon Boat races on the Potomac."
"In our minds, this will become a cultural event like the Cherry Blossom Festival is to Japanese-Americans, and the St. Patrick Day's parade is to the Irish-Americans. This will become a Chinese-American cultural event."
The organizers also have their eyes on the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. They would love to have a Washington-based team represent the US in the Olympic Dragon Boat event. If they do, they might have a Taiwanese-American team vying with a Taiwanese team for the gold medal in the first Olympic Games held in the Chinese capital.
A needed break
But for now, Yolanda Chen and the hundreds of volunteers who brought the festival together are looking forward to getting some rest. For the past several months, they have been staying up well past midnight, sometimes for many days on end, to get everything ready.
Was she surprised it all came together?
"Yes, really surprised," she said. "I was surprised it took only 12 months. I thought we would have to wait another two or three years."
Her husband had a chance to paddle one of the boats with some friends on the Potomac recently. "It was fun," he said, although he woke up with some aches and pains the following morning.
After the race, one of his colleagues blurted out, "It shouldn't be every year, it should be every weekend."
A first shipment of five tons of Taiwan tilapia was sent from Tainan to Singapore on Wednesday, following an order valued at NT$600,000 (US$20,500) placed with a company in the city. The products, including frozen whole fish and pre- cooked fish belly, were dispatched from Jiangjun Fishing Harbor, where a new aquatic processing and logistics center is under construction. At the launch, Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) called the move a “breakthrough,” marking Taiwan’s expansion into the Singaporean tilapia market. Taiwan’s tilapia exports have traditionally focused on the United States, Canada, and the Middle East, Huang said, adding that the new foothold in
An electric bus charging facility at Taipei Metro’s Beitou Depot officially opened yesterday with 22 charging bays to serve the city’s 886 electric buses. Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) told a ceremony to mark the opening of the facility that the city aims to fully electrify its bus fleet by 2030. The number of electric buses has grown from about 650 last year to 886 this year and is expected to surpass 1,000 by the end of the year, Chiang said. Setting up the charging station in a metro depot optimizes land and energy use, as the metro uses power mainly during the
An exhibition demonstrating the rejuvenation of the indigenous Kuskus Village in Pingtung County’s Mudan Township (牡丹) opened at the Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency’s conservation station in Taipei on Thursday. Agency Director-General Lin Hwa-ching (林華慶) said they have been promoting the use and development of forestry resources to local indigenous residents for eight years to drive regional revitalization. While modern conservation approaches mostly stem from western scientific research, eco-friendly knowledge and skills passed down through generations of indigenous people, who have lived in Taiwan for centuries, could be more suitable for the environment, he said. The agency’s Pingtung branch Director-General Yang Jui-fen (楊瑞芬)
Traffic controls are to be in place in Taipei starting tonight, police said, as rallies supporting recall efforts targeting the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers as well as a rally organized by the KMT opposing the recall campaigns are to take place tomorrow. Traffic controls are to be in place on City Hall Road starting from 10pm tonight and on Jinan Road Section 1 starting from 8am tomorrow, police said. Recall campaign groups in Taipei and New Taipei advocating for the recall of KMT legislators, along with the Safeguard Taiwan, Anti-Communist Alliance (反共護台聯盟), have previously announced plans for motorcycle parades and public
RSS