Speaking Part 2 你國家的節日 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a festival or holiday that is important in your country.

You should say:

• what the festival is
• when it takes place
• what people do during it
• and explain why it is important to you personally.

¹ The festival I'd like to talk about is Tomb Sweeping Day — known in Mandarin as Qingming Jie — which falls in early April each year and is, in my opinion, the most quietly meaningful holiday on the Taiwanese calendar. ² It's a public holiday, so most schools and offices close for the long weekend, and the entire country effectively migrates back to its ancestral villages.

³ What people technically do is visit family graves, clear the weeds around them, repaint the engraved names if they've faded, and burn paper money for ancestors as a symbolic offering. ⁴ In practice, though, the day is just as much about the living. ⁵ My family drives down to Pingtung early in the morning, usually arriving at the cemetery before the sun has fully cleared the hills, and we work for about an hour pulling out grass and washing down the gravestones with bottled water.

⁶ Afterwards we always go to the same noodle shop my grandfather used to take my father to, and we eat run-bing — thin spring-roll wrappers filled with cabbage, peanut powder and shredded omelette. ⁷ It's the only day of the year when all four generations of my family are reliably in the same place at the same time.

⁸ I'd say what makes Qingming important to me personally isn't the ritual element so much as the social one. ⁹ It forces a pause in the calendar that nothing else in modern Taiwanese life really does — no shopping, no presents, no obligation to be cheerful. ¹⁰ You're just standing in front of a row of names, with the people who share them, and quietly remembering. ¹¹ I find that strangely restful.

A festival I'd like to talk about is the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month — usually somewhere in late September or early October. The traditional activity is admiring the full moon, but the modern Taiwanese version has become almost entirely about barbecue.

The festival I'd like to describe is the Dragon Boat Festival in early summer. It commemorates a poet from over two thousand years ago, but for most Taiwanese families today, it really comes down to two things: dragon boat races and zongzi — sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves.

Lunar New Year is the obvious choice, and I'll admit it's mine — but not for the usual reasons. The reason it matters to me is specifically the third evening, after the relatives have gone home, when only my immediate family is left in the apartment.