Students run an exciting Lunar New Year Festival
Lion dancers emerge from hiding, students and a former student play beautiful music, and people cheer as they win games towards the end of the night. On Jan. 31, the CVHS culture clubs hosted a Lunar New Year Festival to celebrate the year of the snake.
For the third year in a row, the Lunar New Year Festival was held in the cafeteria, which included a presentation, four performances, Asian food, and cultural games!
Participating in this event were the Japanese Culture Club, Vietnamese Culture Club, Chinese Culture Club, and Korean Culture Club. This celebration was entirely student-run and would not have been possible without the primary organizers, Ryan Yang and Susanna Mo.
After people got settled in with food of their choosing, the festival opened with lion dancers. The crowd exclaimed with excitement at the enthusiastic performance on stage.
As the lion dance concluded, the two hosts of this event, Yang (Japanese Culture Club president) and Angie Deng (Chinese Culture Club president), introduced the presentation that all clubs took part in.
The presentation consisted of each cultures’ cuisine, how they celebrate the new year, the outfits worn, the games played, and other interesting facts.
Along with the hosts, the presidents of the various clubs spoke on stage during their cultures part of the presentation. Kathy Phan represented the Vietnamese Culture Club and Leslie Ha represented the Korean Culture Club.
Between each club’s segment, students and a former student put on spectacular performances.
Jeremy Siu demonstrated his martial art skills using a Shaolin Spear. Following that performance, music duo Raynee Lin and Peyton Tang produced a lovely melody using a yangqin and a ruan–Chinese string instruments. For the last performance, former student Tiffany Liu was welcomed back to this Lunar New Year event to perform the guzheng, a Chinese instrument as well.
The presentations ended about an hour into the festival, leaving the rest of the event to be dedicated to the games.
Games were laid out on tables, each from their respective culture club. Most of the games were from the clubs running this event, but there were also some other clubs’ games on a table, such as the Asian American Culture Club and Origami Club.
Some games people played were the trivia wheel from Asian American Culture Club, using the kendama toy at the Japanese Culture Club’s table, and the famous Korean games gong-gi and ddakji, widely recognized from the Netflix series “Squid Game.”
The Lunar New Year Festival this year was a great success. If interested, don’t forget to attend this enjoyable event next year!