BAK CHANG / ZHONG ZI

"Bak Chang" (in Hokkien dialect) or "Zhong Zi" (in Mandarin) which literally means Pork Dumplings made from glutinous rice stuffed with variety of filling and wrapped in bamboo leaves. It falls every year on the fifth day of the fifth month in the Chinese lunar calender. It was a tradition family event to making Bak Chang when my mother was still around. She would gave away most of them to friends and relatives, and kept a whole bunch which filled up half of the fridge for us. At that time i was consider far too young to learn the preparations and wrapping techniques or skills so usually i was not allow to go in the kitchen when my mother was busy preparing it. I didn't get the change to learn it either when I grow up as i had moved out from the house and has been drifting outside the world ever since. Now, sadly to say there is no one in my family knows how to make Bak Chang anymore.

As always Chinese delicacy has its own legend about how and why it was invented. It is prepared during the "Duan Wu" festival, honouring "Qu Yuan", a famous Chinese poet and statesman of the ancient state of Chu in the Warring States period of the Zhou Dynasty. Due to hopelessness of the corrupted government and the defeat of his country, he committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo river on the fifth day of the fifth month in 278 BC. His last poem was:

Many a heavy sigh i have in my despair,
Grieving that I was born in such an unlucky time.
I yoked a team of jade dragons to a phoenix chariot,
And waited for the wind to come,
To soar up on my journey

Upon hearing Qu Yuan's suicide, the local fisherman paddled out in their long boats, beating drums and shouting out loud in the hope to scare the fishes or sea creatures away (it was believed that this is how the Dragon Boat event is related to the festival). At the same time, the local people would also threw in sticky rice balls into the river, so that the fish or sea creatures will be distracted and feast on the rice balls instead of his body (that is how Bak Chang was born).

Most of the Chang is filled with glutinous rice containing fatty pork meat, Chinese mushroom, salted duck yolk, chestnut, dried prawn, etc. There are also those with very little ingredients, some just filled with beans, lye water, black-eye bean, shrimps and many more version and style of Chang.

My colleagues and I were talking the other morning about all sorts of Chang, and only then i found out that eating lye water Chang with caster sugar was origin from Toi San, which is why i realize that was the way my mother taught me when i was small, and her ancestors was from Toi San. 


I come from a family steep with traditions. Thus, when it comes to festivals like this I could feel the emptiness and gloominess setting inside me as the hour approaches for me to go home, eventually.