As many as 60,000 people came to last weekend’s Dragon Boat Festival, which has grown out of the first such event in North America, held back in 1979. This year’s festival saw a different novel moment, as the first-ever dragon boat team from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School competed.
The festival kicked off Saturday June 13 with the event’s youth races, which started at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Richard J. Resch Boathouse.Teams race in what look like oversized canoes decorated with dragon heads at the front and tails at the stern. Each boat must have a minimum of 16 paddlers but no more than 20. Beginning youth teams from local racing teams, clubs, and organizations competed in preliminary races. The team from CRLS, the Cambridge Falcon, raced both Saturday and Sunday.
“I really wanted to bring this into our school as a way to form bonds between people of all grades and all races,” said the team’s organizer, CRLS sophomore Claire Zou. Because “the Dragon Boat doesn’t really require any experience,” Zou said, she thought it could encourage people who weren’t athletic to participate.
Zou started the team after a family friend invited her to a dragon boat practice last year. She recruited 22 other teammates, including members of the school’s crew team, and secured a spot in the race. The CRLS team included alternate rowers just in case. Next year, she hopes to get even more people involved. She said, “I was hoping since it’s really a seasonal sport we could meet as a club and just hold practices throughout this year, making it something that’s really informal and really chill where people can just relax and socialize and have fun.”
Connecting across cultures
It all started on a rainy day in 1979, when Boston Children’s museum hosted the first-ever Dragon Boat Festival to take place in North America. It began as a way for the Chinese community in Boston to connect with each other. It has since grown into a large cross-cultural festival that includes cuisine, customs and performances from several different Asian communities in the area. The event’s organizers encourage everyone in the area to get involved in the multicultural event.
Co-founder Leslie Swartz said they wanted to have an event that was outside of Chinatown, something “that would be attractive to all the different Chinese constituencies and the general public. It was an effort to bring the Chinese communities together, and eventually the Asian communities, and to make it open and welcoming and accessible to everyone.”
Swartz and her two co-founders, Marcia Iwasaki and Nancy Sato each worked with different Chinese community groups as part of programming for the Boston Children’s Museum. With the help of local artists who volunteered to decorate city-provided long boats, the three women put on the first ever official dragon boat race in the United States.
According to Swartz, the event really took shape when the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Organization asked if they wanted dragon boats from Hong Kong. The offer was accepted, the race was moved a bit further down the river to accommodate a larger crowd and continued to expand from there.
Eventually, the Festival became independent from Children’s Hospital and was registered as a nonprofit in 2009. Around that time, Swartz passed her duties off to Gail Wang, who served as Board President of the organization until last year.
To Wang, the most important aspect of the boat festival is the community it has been able to serve and create. “It really accomplished the goal of bringing different communities together,” she said. “A lot of people want to come for the day, sit in the shade, watch the dragon boats, and see performances. So we have a huge tent, and that’s what people do, is they come and enjoy all the performances.”
Wang said the Dragon Boat Festival has something for everyone. “There are a lot of food vendors, there are arts and crafts activities that are run by Chinese organizations, there’s an area where you can learn Tai Chi Tran and it’s just a whole event,” she said.
Throughout the festival’s tenure, it has expanded beyond the Chinese community. This year, performances included Indian and Vietnamese dance groups and a long list of food vendors from several different Asian countries.
As the festivities on Memorial Drive were taking place, races happened simultaneously along the river. The race itself features racing teams ranging from dedicated Dragon Racing clubs all the way to companies who are looking for team bonding exercises, the only requirement is team registration, which usually happens at the beginning of the year.
This year, despite heat and strong winds on the river, Cambridge Falcon and the other competing teams were able to pull off impressive feats. For the CRLS first-timers, they had a last-place finish on Saturday but were 25 seconds faster on Sunday.
Brianna Earle is reporting this summer for Cambridge Day as part of a partnership with the Brandeis University journalism program.
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