How We Celebrate Chinese New Year Overseas--Our Chinese New Year Festival

Actually, celebrating Chinese New Year abroad is a very bleak affair. Every festival originally had its own special meaning and mood, but overseas these fade, and one may even end up just going through the motions.

Of course this has to do with the way someone living far from home in a foreign land can't help losing touch with their traditions. But most importantly, as times have changed and standards of living have improved, people's need for festivals as a source of joy and amusement, and as a time to express hopes for the future, has lessened. Furthermore, living overseas, even if you shut the door and just celebrate the Chinese New Year with your own family, the atmosphere is inevitably rather lonely, and although the celebrations organized by overseas Chinese community associations draw a wide public, their content always revolves around the same old eating, dancing, karaoke and so on. Frankly speaking, at best these activities are good for some weekend amusement, but they are not in tune with the spiritual life of traditional festivals, nor are they suitable for families with very young children.

Chinese festivals are a part of the Chinese cultural content which Chinese schools transmit, and a colorful, varied Chinese New Year celebration is an activity which every Chinese school puts on each year to let teachers, students and parents get together and celebrate. It's more fun to celebrate together than alone, so two years ago, after I took over as executive director of the Washington Metropolitan Association of Chinese Schools, its 24 member schools decided to organize a large-scale new year celebration with a traditional flavor, aimed at bringing out the meaning of the festival. On 18 February last year, we proudly presented a grand "Chinese New Year Festival" in the Walter Johnson High School in Maryland.

Searching for roots

The first two main events were an Indoor Circus and a Cultural Exhibition. The Indoor Circus basically comprised stands set up by volunteer parents from different schools, selling downhome Chinese snack foods which they had brought along themselves, such as zongzi rice dumplings, noodles and luroufan (spicy ground meat on rice). These cheap and tasty dishes not only delighted the palates of visitors, they also indirectly helped the Chinese schools to continue their educational mission: the profits all went into the schools' contribution funds, to help cover teachers' expenses when attending teacher training seminars, to create scholarships for students, or to support the schools' work in any other way.

For the Indoor Circus, as well as selling foods we also encouraged the Student Councils organized by the schools' senior students to come and put on game programs, on the one hand to get these children out from under their parents' wings for a while and let them give rein to their own ideas and creativity, and on the other hand to also let them experience the good and bad sides of serving others, and to learn the skills of supporting their own civic organizations.

The Cultural Exhibition, meanwhile, was intended to serve as a showplace for the Chinese schools' academic achievements. Under their teachers' guidance, students chose individual topics, and expressed their understanding of them in two- or three-dimensional exhibits. We also asked the students taking part in the Exhibition to stand in front of their own exhibits and answer visitors' questions, both to be stimulated to further thought and investigation by visitors' questions, and to gain practice in explaining their own culture to other people, and in communicating with others about culture.

The topics presented by last years' participants ranged from the Chinese New Year to mahjongg, from customs and rituals to clans and surnames, from historical costumes to the evolution of the writing system, from calligraphy and painting to paper- cuts and flower arrangement. The more than 60 exhibits unfolded a rich kaleidoscope of the cream of Chinese culture. The visiting public were full of praise for the knowledge which these children of Chinese descent had gathered while searching for their roots. By inference, such appreciation affirmed the effectiveness of the Chinese schools' teaching. This section of the event also gave students and teachers from different schools a chance to observe and get to know each other, thus promoting exchange between the schools.

Passing on the flame

The next section, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., was a series of live stage performances. It kicked off with an auspicious lion dance, specially performed by a professional martial arts team. The thunder of drums and the lithe, spectacular dancing lions immediately brought out a festive new year atmosphere. The lion dance was followed by programs from each of the schools in turn, all performed by students under their teachers' supervision. There were all kinds of lively performances, including shulaibao (rhythmic storytelling to a clapper accompaniment), shuang-huang (a two-man act with one speaking or singing hidden behind the other who acts), xiangsheng comic dialogues, kungfu, young children singing and acting out songs with a teacher conducting, up-tempo song and dance numbers, and many more. It was extremely lively. The children up on the stage put all their effort into their performances, while the children down in the audience watched in complete absorption. Meanwhile the parents of the performers elatedly clapped and photographed, and even those families who had simply come to watch applauded continuously. This was the high point of the whole festival.

When we first began planning our Chinese New Year Festival, some people doubted whether it would attract any outside interest, and others worried that the cold weather would keep people away. But on the day, although the ground was still covered in ice and snow, almost 3000 people showed up, and all the food was sold out by 12 o'clock. In the Cultural Exhibition, there was an almost impenetrable throng of visitors, and during the live performances all seats in the school's auditorium were taken by visitors young and old, amid an atmosphere of bustle and excitement.

The event's success, which was built on the solidarity and cooperation of our local Chinese schools and the concerted efforts of all the volunteer workers who took part, was the best answer to those initial doubts. This year the Association of Chinese Schools, now with 27 members, held this unique event once again, on 24 February, the fifth day of the Chinese New Year. Compared with last year, there was a greater variety--and greater quantity--of food, the Cultural Exhibition included festive flower arranging and Chinese calligraphy competitions, and the students' stage performances included both more traditional items such as Peking Opera, huangmeidiao opera and leather shadow-puppet theater, and modern numbers such as sign-language singing, fashion shows and so on. One could sense how the quality of the whole event had gone up several notches. Of course, it drew even bigger crowds of visitors than last year, including US congress members and state education officials from Maryland and Virginia, which created quite a stir.