3rd Annual Chinese Fall Festival

 The celebration of Mid-Autumn Festival, an annual event since Chinese classes were established in our department, took place last Friday afternoon in Blum Student Union. It is a good opportunity to arouse students’ interest in Chinese and at the same time let more people get to know Chinese culture and its people. This year’s celebration was arranged by Jianhua Lian, our exchange professor who teaches CHI 100 & 101. About 60 people participated in the celebration, including students, faculty members, ESOL high school students and St. Jo residents.

The program began with the introduction to the origin, customs and food of the festival. Students from both 100 &101 as well as some audience participated in a role play of one of the legends of Chang’e, which was both entertaining and impressive. Following the role-play was our routine poem introduction and recitation. In order to let people know more about China, a quiz of “How much do you know?” was carried out in the form of the game “Ji Gu Chuan Hua”---Chinese version of Hot Potato. Whoever held the toy panda when the music stopped would be asked a question about China. People managed to get more right than you would expect!

Traditional Moon Cake

Songs about the moon and festival were introduced and performed by both students from the Chinese classes and Chinese exchange students who came to obtain their master's degrees.

Dr. Mei Zhang (left) poses with Chinese exchange students

At the end of the performance, festival food, fruits, and tea that represent harvest were served: mooncakes with salted yolk, steamed buns with fillings, salted eggs, spring rolls, dates and fried Ma Ye.  

“I would have been very homesick if there were no such celebration. This just made me feel at home, celebrating the festival with my family, a big family!” Jianhua observed.

This program included the efforts of Brian Ramsay, Jennifer Webb, Amellia Johnson, Kaitlyn Vang, Philipp Schimdt, Dr. Susan Hennessy, Amy Kotwani, Pi-Ming Yeh, Mei Zhang, Huan Huang, Yue Zhang, Siyi Zhang and Jianhua Lian. 

President Vartabedian and Jianhua Lian