At first glance, the 12-foot-long golden dragon hanging at The Forum at Rancho San Antonio’s main entrance looks like a professional art piece with its precise designs and carefully chosen colors.
But the team behind the project is actually a group of diverse residents at the senior living community in Cupertino, led by 89-year-old Rowena Chow, who describes the process of researching, planning and crafting the dragon.
The making of the dragon
With limited time, budget and materials, former Los Altos resident Chow began the project in September by building a team.
“We just put out a notice saying, ‘Did anybody want to work with us?’” Chow said. “And from there, people volunteered, and we ended up with a team of about six steady workers.”
From learning the history of the Year of the Dragon to designing and building the dragon itself, Chow didn’t shy away from matching tradition as closely as possible, despite having little background in arts and crafts.
“There are very specific things that make a Chinese dragon a Chinese dragon,” Chow said. “Its parts come from nine different animals; its head is the shape of a camel, ears of an ox, horns of a deer and there’s more. So, I went on images and everyone’s dragons look different. So I thought, ‘Oh, we’re safe because whatever we create doesn’t matter as long as we follow those characteristics.’”
Since the team only met once a week, Chow – who took the lion’s share of the work – describes the next step as the most difficult and time-consuming.
“After discovering what to do, then I had to discover how to do it,” Chow said. “We had to figure out how to create teeth or what to use for scales, and we had to make it all up as we went along.”
She added that the team aimed to use as much repurposed material as possible, including wire from The Forum’s wood shop, bubble wrap from Chow’s garage and gold glitter from Chow’s daughter. The dragon’s body, made by papier-mache, was made entirely out of using recycled newspapers and cardboard.
“The project was about being resourceful and repurposing a lot of ‘junk,’ which is just wonderful,” said Chow’s friend Belinda Chung. “They’re using what they have available at The Forum rather than going out and buying expensive materials.”
In the face of technical and design difficulties, Chow was forced to think outside of the box, using rather unconventional materials and methods.
“Chinese dragons have this feeler that Western Dragons don’t, but the pipe cleaners we got were too thin proportion-wise to that body,” Chow said. “Then I remembered my children having an aquarium, and there’s this tube you use to suck the dirt out of the sand. So I got up one night at three in the morning, went to the computer and found an aquarium-cleaning tube narrow enough to make it work. Really, the whole project was just about trying to make it work.”
Despite the challenges Chow and her team faced, the dragon was complete with time to spare before the Chinese New Year, Feb. 10, and The Forum gained its largest cultural art project to date.
(Re)learning Chinese culture
From the outside, Chow’s process of making the dragon may seem to come from a lifelong accumulation of knowledge and tradition about Chinese culture. But surprisingly, Chow said she didn’t grow up following “typical” Chinese customs.
Growing up as a third-generation Chnese-American in Hawaii during World War II – before it was part of the U.S. – Chow’s little knowledge of Chinese traditions came from her grandparents, who migrated to Hawaii in the late 1880s but died when Chow was only 8 years old.
“We celebrated a very traditional Chinese New Year, so we wouldn’t wash our hair, we wouldn’t clean our house and we’d bow and serve tea and candy before getting hong baos,” Chow said. “After our grandparents died, everything just became more Americanized.”
At the same time, the ongoing war made learning Chinese less accessible, according to Chow, and immersion in Hawaii’s local culture caused Chow to drift away from her grandparents’ Chinese roots.
“My mom cooked Chinese food once in a while and we celebrated Qingming, but otherwise we didn’t do anything really ‘Asian’ growing up,” Chow said. “The Hawaiian heritage has a very different spirit because you belong to a multiethnic culture, so it makes a real difference in how we understand ourselves and others.”
Eventually, Chow moved to the U.S. mainland, attending graduate school in New York and then moving to Southern California to work.
In 1964, Chow moved to the Bay Area, where she has stayed since. Here, Chow got married and relearned some Chinese cooking and traditions from her mother-in-law, as her husband was raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
“We were learning more about foods and we were told to respect our parents and grandparents and all that,” Chow said. “We knew we were Asian, but being raised as Americans, we didn’t necessarily think that we were from China.”
As a result, upon being approached to lead the making of the dragon, Chow took on the challenge of heavily researching Chinese culture for the project, from observing the physical parts of the dragon to researching and learning hundreds of years of Chinese history.
Dotting the eye
In Chow’s research, she discovered one of the most important details was drawing the dot on the eye of the dragon.
According to a Chinese myth, a man who was commissioned to paint four dragons on a temple wall refused to dot the eyes. When he was finally coerced by the crowd, after dotting the dragons’ eyes, the dragons immediately flew away.
“Dotting the eye essentially brings the essence of life into another form, and the form was not complete until it was done,” Chow said.
As the dragon was unveiled Jan. 7, Forum executive director Nancy Kao was given the honor to dot the eye.
Today, the dragon is hung on a balcony over The Forum’s main entrance, where residents and visitors alike can see the hard work of Chow and her team.
When asked about her favorite part of the dragon, Chow explained that, despite the accolades the work has received, there always seemed to be room for improvement.
“None of its (my) ‘favorite,’ really because I see it as a whole dragon, not parts of a head or body or scale,” Chow said. “But here’s one thing I learned, which is when you try to do something, whether it’s a painting or a project, you – the artist – know what it should be. And you’re never really satisfied with it. When other people see it, they don’t know that. Whatever you produce, they think is great. But we were a team, and there was a point where we were all quite happy with what we’ve done.”
