Rite of Passage

This article was written by Oscar Chung and published by the Taiwan Review on November 1, 2005. It features the Tainan International Chishi Art Festival in southern Taiwan's Tainan County, which features the traditional coming-of-age ceremony. Numerous parents in Tainan County were initiated into adulthood when they themselves were 16 years old. Now they are taking their own teenage children to participate in this time-honored ceremony.

The ceremony is held every year in August in the small Kailong Temple in Tainan City. The temple is dedicated to Chiniangma, the collective name for seven goddesses responsible for protecting children under 16. There are words painted on the temple's walls: "May sons grow into dragons and daughters into phoenixes." These words reflect every parent's aspirations for the future of their children.

The coming-of-age tradition originated in Mainland China's Fujian Province. Today it is still observed in Tainan City, as well as in Changhua County's Lukang Township and in Kaohsiung County.

The Tainan International Chishi Art Festival was launched four years ago. "Chishi", the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar, is widely known in the Chinese-speaking world as the Chinese Valentine's Day. According to folklore, a cowherd worked so hard that the Emperor of Heaven decided to reward the young man with his own weaver daughter. But the newlyweds were so happy together that they abandoned all their work. In order to punish the couple, the Emperor of Heaven ordered that they could only meet once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. He turned the cowherd into the star Altair, and the weaver girl the star Vega. He then scratched a river in the sky, which became the Milky Way that forever separates the two stars. The only day the cowherd could see his wife is also the birthday of the weaver girl and her six sisters. This is why the day is called "Chishi", which means "seven joys" in Chinese.

The article introduces all the details of the coming-to-age ceremony featured in the Tainan International Chishi Art Festival, and how the Tainan City Government and its local residents have been promoting it as the city's prominent cultural event. For those who are interested in traditional Chinese folk culture, this article is definitely worth checking out.