The current situation of the spread of the dragon boat culture in Chebei Village is examined in this paper through in-depth interviews and the analysis of two key short video productions, including one documentary series. The Chebei River, which stands for the memory of water, is the most surviving component of the dragon boat culture in Chebei Village. In order to better understand the cultural significance and mechanism of the memory media related to Chebei’s dragon boat culture, this study separates the cultural memory media representing the dragon boat culture in Chebei Village into material and immaterial forms. It also looks at how the villagers of Chebei perceive the dragon boat culture through cultural memories.

The memory of water: the Chebei River

The Chebei River as a medium of waterside village culture

Chebei River was formerly recognized as Longxi (the Dragon Stream), a small urban river that flows through the center of Chebei Village. Thanks to its advantageous location, Chebei’s dragon boat culture has a history spanning more than 150 years. The width of the Chebei river channel is moderate. As one of the Pearl River's main branches, the Chebei River is close to the Pearl River. The entire course of the river has a 30-meter narrowest section and a 50-meter broadest section, with a combined length of more than 800 meters. Four dragon boats can compete side by side in a race. Additionally, there are more than 1000 meters of shoreline embankment, allowing visitors to view the dragon boat racing from the shores (Chu et al. 2014, p. 84 ).

Chebei Village is representative of the harmonious coexistence between people and the local environment. Chebei Village, which is situated on both banks of the Chebei River, relies on water to survive, and the water environment has nurtured the village's distinctive dragon boat culture. Water is the medium for dragon boating at the material, institutional, and spiritual levels. As the core, essence, and cultural foundation of Chebei's dragon boating, the Chebei River is where the culture's charm radiates and acts as its most significant carrier. The river water serves as both the dragon boat race's material transporter and a component of the ecosystem that supports the villagers’ existence.

Culture, which is formed in the daily lives of community members, facilitates the pursuit of creating meaning and identity in life for both the cultural community and the individual. As a result, collaborative construction by the group residing in the social context is the main characteristic of culture. A Guangzhou folk proverb says, "You are not considered a true dragon boat paddler if you have never participated in Chebei's Inviting Scenery Day."Footnote 1 Whether it is the ancient dragon boat culture of the Chebei River or the daily life of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, water is an integral part of the Chebei Village's cultural identity. A local water culture has developed around the Chebei River as a result of its abundant water resources and geographical convenience. The core value of the dragon boat culture on the Chebei River is harmony between man and nature. The traditional Chebei dragon boat culture is still a significant component of village life even though the village is located in a contemporary metropolis with many high-rise structures.

Traditional festivals act as cultural landmarks for a specific area or nation. With the rapid development of modern life and the diversification of media and entertainment, some traditional festivals have faded away. However, the custom of the Inviting Scenery Day, which occurs annually in Chebei on the third day of the fifth lunar month, survives the quick transition well enough. Chebei’s Inviting Scenery Day is still the most vibrant and extravagant traditional event nowadays. Every year, more than 200 dragon boats come to Chebei Village to visit their relatives on this day, attracting more than 100,000 people from the surrounding area. The Chebei Cup Dragon Boat Race is well-known for featuring the most competitive and fierce dragon boat racing in the Lingnan area. As a result, it is often referred to as the miniature of the game at the Guangzhou municipal level. “Dongpo”, the longest and best-preserved ancient dragon boat in Chebei Village, has been granted a spot in the annual Guangzhou International Dragon Boat Invitational Tournament, which is organized by the Guangzhou Municipal Government. There have been numerous participants for more than 30 years. This not only perpetuates the memory of Chebei villagers' dragon boat culture but also spreads the collective memory of Chebei's water culture, which has become a popular topic of folk festivals celebrated by Guangzhou citizens.

In order to further investigate the villagers' memories of the Chebei dragon boat culture, in-depth interviews with a number of local residents in Chebei Village were conducted in January 2022. When asked what they remembered most about Chebei Village and the local dragon boat culture, the majority of the villagers who participated in the interview concurred that the Chebei River was the item they recalled most. The interviewees’ descriptions of their memories of the Chebei River are listed as “Responses and Comments” in Table 1. The key aspects of each interviewee's memories regarding the Chebei River are extracted from the responses and comments.

Table 1 Interviews with Chebei villagers on their memories of the Chebei River
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According to the interviewees' responses and comments (Table 1), the Chebei river has ingrained itself into the villagers' daily routines and collective memories. Whether it be playing by the river after school or watching the dragon boat race at the Dragon Boat Festival, the Chebei River holds a special place in the hearts of the villagers, carrying the recollections of the Dragon Boat Festival as well as their childhood memories. We might claim that the Chebei River is the shared emotional and collective memory of the Chebei villagers. Furthermore, those memories have contributed to the growth of the Chebei dragon boat culture and the public's awareness of the need to protect the Chebei River. The transformation of the Chebei River from being black and stinky in the past to being crystal clear today is the most memorable to the locals. The attitudes of the locals regarding the river in Chebei village are directly correlated with their way of life. The cultural community in Chebei village is continually strengthened and consolidated as part of the effort to conserve the river. In addition, the community is simultaneously developing and preserving its own water culture and dragon boat culture.

Symbolic space: the Chebei River

The Chebei River and its environs symbolize the cultural space of Guangzhou's waterside communities. A distinctive Lingnan waterside urban village environment has been created by the bridges spanning the river, the banyan trees, and the stone stairs on the riverbank (Yao et al. 2019). The peculiar dragon boat culture of Chebei Village is characterized by the Chebei River, the boat, and the dragon boat head. According to religion, the trinity of the dragon, boat, and water can achieve cosmic balance. In actuality, in addition to its religious value, it has positive economic effects (Huang 2018, p. 3). The public area that radiates out from the Chebei River's center serves as a hub for community interactions as well as a location for residents to dwell and unwind. In other words, Chebei's villagers have developed an emotional connection to the river, and the changes to the river have had an impact on how they feel about this public cultural space.

After the 1980s, Chebei experienced fast industrial and urban growth, which resulted in the construction of numerous nitrogen fertilizer plants and the dumping of large amounts of industrial waste into the Chebei River, which quickly degraded the aquatic environment (Jing and Su 2019). Chebei, a typical Guangdong urban village, is situated in the center of Guangzhou's Tianhe District. It is a well-liked community for migrants due to the low cost of living and accessible transit options. The locals' available dwelling space was somewhat reduced. Interpersonal interactions weakened as a result of the progressive exodus of residents from Chebei village. It was the cause of the memory gaps between the older and younger generations. In the interview, the younger respondents described the river as “black and foul-smelling” and mentioned its transformation. In contrast to the younger generation's perceptions, the older generation has fond memories of the Chebei River's excellent water quality and the success of dragon boat racing in the past. Nevertheless, despite population shifts and river pollution, the tradition of dragon boat racing has persisted unabatedly.

In social anthropology, any symbol with classification relevance serves a symbolic purpose (Wu 2007). The Chebei River has a symbolic significance that is expressed in the daily lives of the villagers as their spiritual space and imagined community. Since 2017, the government of Tianhe district has been carrying out joint conservation of the Chebei River through the collaboration of official river chiefs, civic river chiefs, and volunteers. A strong bridge connecting the government and the Chebei villagers has been made possible by the collaboration between the three parties involved in the conservation of the river. Through the joint efforts made in the course of conservation, villagers have developed a sense of identity and responsibility, as well as an awareness of environmental sustainability and protection. Consequently, there is peaceful coexistence between the Chebei village, the river, and the dragon boat culture. This has strengthened the cultural bonds that affectively connect people of different generations through the Chebei River as a medium, linking the villagers, the water, and the dragon boat.

The collaborative efforts of the government, volunteers, and villagers have had such an effect that the Chebei River has recently been cleaned up and returned to its previous clear state. The river's improvement sparked the regeneration of Chebei's water culture as well as the rebirth of the historic dragon boat culture. Interviewee No. 22, Mr. Du, claimed: The tradition has not changed since the Chebei River was designated as the official site for “Guan Jing” (官景, literally, “the official scenery”), an annual dragon boat ceremony in the Qing Dynasty. In the 1980s, there were over 100 dragon boats that came to race on the river from other villages or towns. The tradition is known for its popularity, which has attracted many people and boats to come to Chebei for it, particularly in 2018 and 2019 before the pandemic.Footnote 2 The International Dragon Boat Culture and Arts Festival took place in Chebei, Guangzhou, on June 5, 2019 (Fig. 1).Footnote 3 The age-old sport of Chebei dragon boat racing has thus been revived and is growing in popularity on a bigger stage. This modern equivalent of "Guan Jing" invited over 200 dragon boats from various Guangzhou villages, including local boats from Chebei and others from Haizhu, Panyu, and Huangpu, who were invited to row and compete on the Chebei River as a gathering of friends and relatives.Footnote 4

Fig. 1
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Source Economic Daily

2019 International Dragon Boat Culture and Arts Festival, Chebei

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Each clan's ancestral hall would prepare a feast to welcome "Lao Biao" (老表, old cousins) and clan relatives from other villages after "Guan Jing". The annual ceremony embodies not just the dragon boat culture that has been passed down from generation to generation but also the Chebei people's deeply ingrained nostalgic recollections. The Chebei River has become a cultural hub, connecting distant relatives and friends. It is not only the dimension of physical space but also a combination of unique dragon-boat cultural connotation and fields derived from the Chebei River, where cultural-psychological space is constructed for the villagers through folk activities such as the “Guan Jing” dragon boat racing ceremony. The co-experience of the villagers promotes the formation of collective memory and thus outlines the cultural space full of symbolism and metaphor, materiality and spirituality, actuality and virtuality.

The following characteristics define the Chebei River as a medium for regional customs and the Chebei dragon boat culture:

  1. (1)

    The historic dragon boat culture and its spirit are passed down and continued in the villagers' memories of the Chebei River.

  2. (2)

    The Chebei River holds a wealth of both individual and societal memories. Villagers’ sense of identity within the Chebei cultural community is developed by the memory of the river. To be more explicit, the Chebei River plays a significant role in building the villagers' way of life and experiences. "We pick river clams to cook soup and serve it with rice." A line from the local children's ballad, "Chebei Hao" (《车陂好》), portrays one typical way of life the villagers live near the river.

  3. (3)

    The Chebei River, as a repository of collective emotion, is an embodiment of the villagers’ nostalgic affection and recollections of their lost childhood.

  4. (4)

    The Chebei River has cultural value that links clans and families, strengthening the villagers' sense of clan affiliation and cultural identity.

Imagery and memory: short film and documentary

Acting as a visual storage of history and culture, images serve in part as a “memory filter” for communications between different generations. They record and reflect changes in ideologies, culture, and history. Also, images help viewers create a sense of public identity through visual presentation (Li 2013).

The Chebei Village Dragon Boat Promotion Association has been widely promoting the Chebei Village dragon boat culture since 2020 through a number of online media platforms. A typical example is that it created its official account “One River, One Dream” (“车陂同舟”) on Bilibili, a video-sharing social media platform that is very popular among Generation Z in China. On Bilibili, the official account has released two series of short documentaries, namely the "Chebei Dragon Boat Culture" series (《车陂村龙舟文化系列》) and the “Biographies of Dragon Boat Cultural Figures” series (《龙舟文化人物志》). On the day of the Dragon Boat Festival in 2021, a dragon boat-themed short film called “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race” (《龙舟最有戏》) was launched by the account “One River, One Dream”. In this way, a larger audience than before is exposed to the intangible culture of the Chebei dragon boat through images and short videos on online media platforms.

Memory expressed in a short documentary series

The images of the Chebei Village, the Chebei River, ancestral halls, and temples have been archived in a documentary series, “Chebei Dragon Boat Culture”. By preserving the visual representations of memories connected to the dragon boat culture, it contributes to an abstract construct of cultural space. Regarding its sociality, the cultural practices of the dragon boat ceremony, such as the annual reunion of the villagers and their relatives, the rituals associated with the dragon boat racing, and the representation of the dragon boat culture on new media, jointly create a cultural space where the general public and the villagers can interact. From the angle of dynamism, a chronological narrative is employed to demonstrate the dynamic development of the dragon boat culture as it adapts to a modern setting for cultural transmission. Besides, the way that people connect with water culture has been documented by depicting the evolution of the dragon boat culture across time in Chebei Village.

Narration of space in panorama

In terms of shots, wide shots are primarily used to capture the dragon boating scenes in Chebei Village in the documentary series "Chebei Dragon Boat Culture", establishing a panoramic perspective that captures the entirety of the cultural space.

The documentary “Inviting Scenery” (《招景》), one of the “Chebei Dragon Boat Culture” series, reflects the grandness of the Inviting Scenery Day. Wide-shot sequences are mainly used to portray the spectacular scenes of dragon boat racing. A panoramic environment with a wide-ranging perspective was produced via aerial videography. The camera’s movement creates an inner rhythm corresponding to the drum beats that propel the dragon boat ahead. In another short documentary in this series, “Long Tai Tou” (《龙抬头》, literally, "dragon's raising head"), wide shots of architectural vistas and the inner space of an ancestral hall establish an atmosphere of the clan’s cultural tradition and legacy, which sparks the audience's historical and cultural memories of the traditional Cantonese countryside. The day, “Long Tai Tou”, is known as a traditional Chinese festival on the second day of the second Chinese lunar month. The video also features a scenario in which a senior man trims a younger man's hair in an ancestral hall as part of a custom to honor the dragon on this day.

The visual construction of cultural memory

This collection of short documentaries primarily uses eye-catching white fonts for their titles, which precisely identify and explain the themes. With the outstanding Chinese calligraphic-style characters, the composition of the opening scene establishes a simple but outstanding aesthetic for the entire collection, providing more room for the visual expression of the dragon boat culture.

The Chinese-style typeface is utilized at the opening of the short documentary “Awakening the Dragon Boat” (《起龙船》, Fig. 2). This short documentary shows the ceremonial of the dragon boat's awakening, which is symbolic of the “heavenly dragon's” reawakening. People unearthed and cleaned the dragon boats that were submerged in mud at the bottom of the Chebei River's shallow section the year before. To emphasize the dragon boat as the story's primary focal point, the Chinese character for "dragon" (“龙”) is expanded and stands out in the middle of the title. The predominant color is white, creating a stark contrast with the background's green hue to intensify the color and render a sharp on-screen visual effect. Since English is a language commonly used for international communication, the English translation of the title is included along with the text, which implies an attempt to spread dragon boat culture in a cross-cultural context.

Fig. 2
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Opening Scene of “Awakening the Dragon Boat” (《起龙船》)

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Music and sounds: the aural construction of cultural life

A video is an artistic work that blends sound and image. For a video to be considered complete, it is necessary to choose the appropriate aural elements for its visual expression. In a documentary story, music and sound can be utilized to evoke emotions, establish the setting, and depict the environment for the narrative. The authenticity principle of documentary filmmaking objectively and directly reflects the realistic landscape and rituals of Chebei Village's dragon boat culture, which not only stirs up nostalgia among the villagers but also shares Chebei Village's rich cultural heritage with the audience. The background music for the documentary series "Chebei Dragon Boat Culture" has a quick tempo and a strong sense of movement. Owing to the rhythmic background music, the audience can feel more intense emotions, be reminded of traditional dragon boat culture, and have a richer, more nuanced cultural experience.

Ambient sounds are employed to match the theme of each documentary in the "Chebei Dragon Boat Culture" series in order to create the desired atmosphere. The sound of drums permeates the entire documentary. The intro of a documentary in the series, “Inviting Scenery” (《招景》), is pictureless but features the typical drum rhythms from a dragon boat race. Despite the sequence's lack of visual components, the audience is led by the drum's rhythmic sound to envision a dragon boat race on the basis of shared cultural memories. Following the intro, the visuals of the dragon boat race reverberate to the drumbeats. Along with drumbeats, the most frequently used sound is that of firecrackers. The grand scenes of Inviting Scenery Day in Chebei Village are thus created by fusing the sounds of drums and fireworks, providing the audience with a deeper understanding of the village's humanistic significance and dragon boat culture. Another documentary in the series, titled "Practice and Preparation"(《练船备战》), synchronizes the character voices with the visuals. Moreover, above and beyond the premise of capturing the reality, which is the documentary's basic aesthetic, the synchronization represents the subjectivity of people in the activity of dragon boat racing. The tension and atmosphere created by paddlers’ joint efforts to advance in a dragon boat race are sparked and conveyed by music with a strong sense of rhythm. Voices, firecracker sounds, drumbeats and the image of water all contribute to the audio-visual construction of the vibrant cultural space of Chebei.

Time–space of memory in a short film: “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race”

On June 21, 2021, the day of Chebei’s Inviting Scenery Day, a small-scale premiere of “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race” (《龙舟最有戏》), a short fiction film co-produced by the Chebei Culture Promotion Association and MEGA Studio, a local youth drama troupe, was held in the Dragon Boat Exhibition Hall in Chebei Village, Tianhe District, Guangzhou. The film was officially launched on major online video platforms in China.Footnote 5 The film is about a man called Weihang Su, a Macau-born descendant of the Su clan in Chebei Village. Motivated by a school assignment themed "My Hometown", Weihang comes up with the idea of exploring the past of his father, Shenmao Su, and his hometown. The story unfolds itself through Weihang’s visit to Chebei Village to find the root of his father and the Su family. The audience can be given a glimpse of the traditional dragon boat racing through the course of the narrative, which serves as the film's major plot. The plot progression, scenes, and character relationships all give insight into the local values and cultures of the clans and families in Chebei.

The storyline: an interlaced narrative of time and space

Combining storytelling with intangible cultural heritage is a brilliant method to highlight the inherent meaning and cultural significance of traditional culture through the framework of storytelling and to increase the story's appeal to the audience from a cultural standpoint (Wang 2014). The protagonist of the film “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race”, Weihang, whose initial intention is to finish his school assignment titled “My Hometown”, decides to explore his father's birthplace, Chebei. He sets out on a journey in search of his familial roots, which drives the plot forward. As a result of the exploration, Weihang gains a deeper understanding of his father, Shenmao. Shenmao reflects on his earlier heartbreak in a relationship as well as his defeat in a dragon boat race back in Chebei Village. The story incorporates the cultural memory of the Su’s ancestral hall and the dragon boat into its plots.

The storyline of the film also exemplifies the idea of cultural heritage through bridging generational gaps with cultural memories. Given his unpleasant background in Chebei, Shenmao and his son Weihang argue about going back to Chebei. Shenmao returns to his room in silence after the quarrel with his son and pulls out a wooden paddle that he carved himself when he was young. The plot reveals Shenmao's individual memories of his youth spent in his hometown, Chebei Village. A flashback transports the audience to a past time-space in which Shenmao was around the same age as his son Weihang at the time of the story's present. The father's memories are shown in a fuzzy, yellowish tone in the flashback (Fig. 3). By contrast, the tone brightens when the scenes shift back to the present in the story (Fig. 4). The clash of tones metaphorically starts a dialogue between these two young guys from different generations by denoting heterogeneous time-space in the narrative. In later plots, Shenmao reconciles with his son Weihang and encourages his son to look into their genealogy in Chebei. The handcrafted paddle serves as a key to the history of the Su family's cultural legacy of dragon boating in Chebei. In other words, the paddle is a material medium that witnesses and stores Shenmao’s cultural memories of dragon boating and his hometown. When it is passed down from Shenmao to Weihang, the materialized cultural memory extends from one generation to the next, triggering the crystallization of the past and the present.

The storyline leads the audience into a narrative time-space that explores the past and the present, the generational divide, and the loss or inheritance of cultural memory—problems that may be prevalent in most families in real life—and serves as a catalyst for them to visualize their own time-space of family memories through the process of viewing (Figs. 3 and 4).

Fig. 3
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Memory of time and space in a flashback scenein a flashback scene

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Fig. 4
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Source “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race” (《龙舟最有戏》)

Realistic time and space in a present scene

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A handcrafted paddle: a symbol linking the past and the present

A symbol, one of the cornerstones of linguistics, is an essential tool for conveying and exchanging information. Moreover, in the realm of cinema, a symbol is also one of the fundamental building blocks of cinematic language. For a deeper understanding of a film's sophisticated metaphors and meanings, it is necessary to examine the aesthetic and cultural implications of the cinematic symbols.

The paddle handcrafted by young Shenmao takes on symbolic significance throughout the film, uniting modernity and tradition. The truth is that due to the demands of professional sports and the advent of technology, the old handmade wooden paddles gradually disappeared from the market and were replaced with superior carbon fiber paddles. In this film, Shenmao's passion for dragon boat racing and his youthful love are both symbolized by the wooden paddle. More than its symbolic meaning in culture, the paddle in this story is also a reflection of Shenmao’s love story, which brings about another narrative dimension of Shenmao’s personal experience at a young age. In the film’s past, he fashioned his darling girl a little wooden paddle as a love token. However, the girl was "forced" to get married to another man in Macau due to disagreements with her family's values. After tragically losing his beloved girlfriend, Shenmao left his hometown, Chebei, for Macau, where he concentrated on learning new technology that he could employ in dragon boating. He never returned to Chebei Village, contrary to what he had hoped. At this point, the plot reaches its emotional climax with the dramatic action of separation.

Weihang, Shenmao's son, has been eager to visit Chebei to learn more about his father and Chebei, the birthplace of his father, as he has grown older. Nothing occurred until his father eventually chose to share the memories of the past in Chebei and decided to give Weihang the wooden paddle. The handcrafted paddle of this time–space leads to the next dramatic action, a reunion, which contradicts the separation. It emerges as a sign of unity, which is commonly acknowledged as one of the primary ethos of dragon boating. Building on the symbolic meaning of unity, the sequence developed from the handcrafted paddle represents Shenmao’s emotional, familial, and cultural ties to his hometown of Chebei. In addition, the story raises a realistic concern about how a family's culture and connections may deteriorate over time. The narrative mechanism in the story suggests one potential solution, which is Weihang’s journey in search of the Su family’s history back in Chebei, so as to connect Weihang, his father, and the Su clan in Chebei.

Mr Jian, interviewee No.1 is one of the film producers. He talked about the production of this short film and he revealed: Making a film requires a lot of work, from production to finding the right locations, but our main goal is to convey our passion for dragon boating and the history of the culture. The dragon boat in this film is more about tradition and legacy than it is about a single instrument or prop. Let’s take the carbon fiber paddle as an example. At the end of the story, the father said, “This is the most recent model of boat paddle we have produced.” People started out utilizing wooden paddles in dragon boating. The wooden paddles now stand more for inheritance. The switch from wood to carbon fiber suggests that tradition needs to change with the times in order to meet modern people's demands. Before filming, the most difficult thing was the script. We eventually settled on the final version of the script after many discussions and revisions.Footnote 6 Weihang, the son, carries on his father's generation's cultural memory of dragon boat racing. The film presents a typical pattern commonly used in China to pass along intangible cultural heritage from one generation to the next. Folk customs and practices are portrayed in the short video as more than just aspects of daily life. There are more than just physical places represented by the buildings and local landscapes. All of these are the residents' emotions and memories from their upbringing in Chebei Village.

The Cantonese dialect: a symbol for nostalgic local memories

Language can be the cornerstone, an essential element, and a defining aspect of culture (Chen and Li 2021). Besides, language contributes significantly to the inheritance and maintenance of cultural diversity. Therefore, it is crucial to conserve languages, especially dialects. The short film “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race” mostly uses the Guangzhou dialect, Cantonese Chinese, which matches well with the local linguistic culture and habits of the villagers in their daily conversations in Chebei Village. As a "living fossil of ancient Chinese" (Yang 2018), Cantonese is one of the main dialects in South China and is widely used by overseas Chinese. It is also a carrier of regional culture and historical memory. The Zurong Dialect Film Festival, China's first dialect film festival, was started by a private organization in 2015. It aims to preserve and promote dialect culture while inspiring young people to create varied and digitalized dialect-based films. This promotes the viewers' sense of cultural identification while showcasing China's unique linguistic culture.Footnote 7

Viewers gain a better understanding of the characters' image constructs through the dialect-based conversations of characters in a film, which helps to establish a feeling of identity. The dialect can simultaneously highlight the distinct regional cultural traits, making the plot seem more realistic. The short film “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race” provides an introduction to not only Chebei Village but also the down-to-earth local dialect and expressions, leaving a nostalgic impression of Chebei Village for people with a similar lingual and cultural background to preserve their emotional ties and perception of affiliation. Through the auditory presentation, the dialect in the film acts as a medium that preserves and encodes the collective memory of Chebei. It facilitates creating a lingual atmosphere of the Cantonese-speaking regions through the story of this film, which evokes the viewers’ homesickness and emotional attachment to their hometown by decoding via the same dialect they speak.

The original soundtrack: a fusion of tradition and modernity

In order to complement and support the emotions and feelings that cannot be expressed in the form of acting and dialogues, the original soundtracks are purposefully created in accordance with the setting and characterization of the film. To progressively guide the spectator to the recollections of the main characters, a close-up of the theme song "One River, One Boat"(《一水同舟》) playing on a taxi car stereo is presented at the beginning of the film (Fig. 5). After that, there is a fade-out that transitions into the scene in which Weihang and his father, Shenmao, are arguing about whether or not to return to their hometown in search of their roots. A flashback is employed at the conclusion of the film to bring the time-space back to the taxi scenario that was first displayed at the beginning of the film. When the theme song returns at the conclusion, it echoes the opening sequence of the film. The two different time-spaces resonate with one another through the music.

Fig. 5
figure 5

The close-up of the theme song "One River, One Boat" playing on the car stereo

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In addition to dragon boat culture, dragon-form boxing (龙形拳), a kind of local martial art, is also one of Chebei Village's distinctive customs. The lyrics incorporate both dragon boating and dragon-form boxing as a means of preserving and promoting Chebei Village's cultural heritage. A stunning sense of contrast is created for the audience when traditional Chinese instruments are combined with hip-hop and rock elements in the theme song, “One River, One Boat". The perseverance and unshakable character of the dragon boat racers are also emphasized in the song.

Moreover, two major intangible cultural heritages in Guangdong, dragon boat culture and Cantonese opera, are both embedded in the creativity and production of this theme song. Hence, two singing genres are applied as the art forms of the two vocal parts in the song. Shanshan Liang, a new-generation pop singer, sings one portion of the song, while Feifan Wu, a renowned singer and inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage of Cantonese opera, performs the Cantonese-opera portion. The innovative method through which the two cultures have been merged fits the contemporary urge for the spread and preservation of traditional culture. Whether modern or nostalgic, the lyrics are cohesive with the concept of "hometown". The fusion of pop music and traditional Guangdong cultural and art forms breathes fresh life into dragon boating, one of the ancient cultures in Guangdong.

Conclusion

Intangible cultural heritage is abundant and diverse in China. However, in today's rapidly evolving society, it is getting harder to identify the best method to preserve its cultural essence, sustainability, and diversity as time passes. Online short-video sharing sites like Bilibili are new media platforms that can significantly expand the immaterial area for storing cultural memory. The development of 5G technology, which has its roots in the new media era of the internet, offers converged digital media platforms for short video content, which can be leveraged by a much broader audience than before. Utilizing mobile devices like computers, tablets, and smartphones, online short video platforms transform the traditional one-way communication mode into two-way interactive features that allow viewers to watch movies and television shows and share them with other online users whenever and wherever they want, regardless of limitations of time and space.

To sustain or revitalize the intangible cultural heritage in digital times involves its adaptation into spreadable digital media so as to provide its cultural recipients with flexible accessibility and options of interaction. This is exactly the case with dragon boat culture. When asked why Macau was chosen in the setting as the geographical symbol of the cultural other in the film, Mr. Jian, interviewee No. 1, responded:  Actually, there was no particular reason or meaning for it. It wasn't deliberately picked. The alternative is Hong Kong. Simply put, a large number of villagers left for employment at that time in Chebei and even Tianhe District. Back then, Macau and Hong Kong were the two most popular job markets. No matter what the setting is, the story's main theme is the homesickness of migrant laborers.Footnote 8 In another interview at the Qingchuan Su’s ancestral hall in Chebei, interviewee No. 18, Ms. Su, a teenage member of the Su clan, spoke about her feeling about the short film, “The Well-Played Dragon Boat Race”. She said: “The story is fairly true to itself. It may improve public perception of the value of preserving Chebei's dragon boat culture. At least, the dragon boat culture won't vanish.”Footnote 9

While traditional culture has benefited from the expansion of digital media in terms of audience reach and the support for the progress and protection of intangible cultural heritage, the digital media platforms themselves are also fostered by traditional culture, which serves as diverse and valued cultural content for the platforms. They have developed a symbiotic relationship in the age of digital media. A new era of cultural memory in the form of digital narrative is opened by the complementary integration of these two aspects.