Marysville Bok Kai Festival

Like most students, my spring break is one week. I would usually spend the entire week at home, but I had a Crane performance up north so I flew back to Sacramento on Thursday. I arrived in Marysville, an unimpressive town about an hour north of Davis, on Friday evening.

The Bok Kai sponsors were quite generous since our little group was paid for this gig and they put us up Friday Night at the Holiday Inn Express. The rooms are pretty nice with comfy beds, nice tub/shower, mini fridges and microwaves, free continental breakfast and no bedspreads. Who wants bedspreads right? If you watch those investigative news stories they find all sorts of nasty stuff with UV light. Instead, there are just nice fresh, clean sheets.

We were booked to perform at the 127th Annual Bok Kai Festival. I learned that it's a festival in honor of Chinese-Americans that came to work in Northern California. There's even a small Chinese temple in the town which I visited. It also sort of doubles as a Chinese New Year celebration since the posters for the festival always shows the zodiac animal for that year.

"The Bok Kai Festival, honoring Bok Eye, the Chinese God of Water, pays tribute to the many Chinese who worked the gold mines in the 1800s. The rare Bok Kai Temple, recently listed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the country's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, came to be a symbol of gratitude and hope for the Chinese who had left their homeland with hopes for a better life in America." Festival web site.

I didn't expect such a small town to give so much recognition to a minority group but it was nice to see. Our first performance was in front of about 15 people, but we were warned that the Bok Kai organizers were asking $10 admission to see "Lord of the Cranes" so we didn't expect much of a turnout. We had even fewer people show up for the Saturday afternoon performance, and half of them were relatives of our narrator. But really it didn't matter because the best part of the trip was Saturday morning's big parade through downtown Marysville. I had no idea what it would be like but it was a huge deal with maybe 500 or more people lined up and down to watch all these cars with local dignitaries, beauty queens, organizations with their own floats, martial arts club, marching band. It was so impressive coming out of this little beat-up town. And we got to be a part of it! All of us dressed up in our costumes and us cranes danced and frolicked in the streets for an hour. It was exhilerating and I'd do it again if could. All the little kids were happy to see the cool costumes and the dancing. I thought this must be what dancers in a Disneyland parade must feel like. How fun! The other actors in our play had their masks on so people were curious as to who they were supposed to be, but alas, it did not generate enough interest to pay $10 to see the play.

The big parade finale was a 150 feet dragon which arrived among drums and exploding firecrackers thrown at its entrance.




















Those parade guys must have been exhausted running around for over an hour carrying this thing, and they weren't running slow either because it's supposed to be a scary dragon. Every time they stopped to run around in a circle, they'd set off firecrackers so you constantly heard them going off. At the end of the route near the grandstand, they set off so many fireworks that it sounded like cannon fire. Kind of frightening actually.

Marysville also opened it's new Chinese-American Museum on Saturday and many people flocked to the museum after the parade. Some smart vendors camped outside the museum and temple's entrance and sold these big red plastic goodies with 5 or 6 small pinwheels in different colors. The day was really nice and breezy so I would see little old Asian people carrying these big red ornaments around with the pinwheels spinning like crazy. I loved it! and I had that feeling little kids get when they want something impulsively because it looks so fun. I also thought it would look great on the balcony near my plants on a windy day. But they were $5, and my practical side took over and I didn't end up with a cool pinwheel ornament.




















Some older Asian folk resting their feet while admiring their pinwheels. I was jealous.