The Faulkner County Library teamed up with the Conway High School Asian Club and UCA Center for Asian Languages and Cultures to encourage the community to learn and celebrate Lunar New Year on Jan. 7.
Mary Spears Polk, youth services manager at the library, said that it is important to celebrate as it is a part of our community member culture.
“We are really excited to partner with a couple of community organizations to bring this here where as many people from the community can come in and experience it together and have a sense of community,” Polk said.
“I think this is a great opportunity for our community to get to know the Chinese community here, because often people don’t really know that we actually have a decent amount of Chinese population here. And this kind of helps people to know who we are, what we do for our celebration, and also understanding us and knowing more about us will help them to accept us more. This is a great opportunity for local Chinese communities to have connections with our Conway community,” Penny Chen, Conway Junior and High School’s Chinese teacher said.
The celebration brought many activities and learning opportunities. 10 different stations were set up for attendees starting with learning about traditional calligraphy and moving onto practicing on their own.
“Instead of using traditional black ink, they’re going to use water. It’s very safe and fun for kids. When they are doing calligraphy they can learn how to write as well as say number one to 10 in Chinese,” Chen said.
Other stations such as Wheel of Fortune with trivia questions, and creating bookmarks with their Chinese name attendees learned.
“There’s a rocking horse paper craft station and temporary tattoos. Those are always fun. A couple of Chinese games, pitch pot and chopsticks, which I played this morning. I got three arrows in the pot and I won a fortune cookie. My chopsticks game is top notch. I was able to move the little tiny hard beans,” Polk said.
The most popular station both last year and during this celebration was making dumplings.
“The reason Chinese people eat dumplings is because the shape of the dumplings looks like traditional Chinese money. So Chinese people celebrate Chinese New Year by eating dumplings. By eating dumplings, you are eating wealth, so you’re hoping that you will be rich and wealthy next year.” Polk said.
The Center for Chinese Language and Culture helped run the celebration in preparation for UCA’s Lunar New Year celebration on Feb 20.
“According to the Lunar Calendar, this is the year of the horse. The Center for Asian Languages and Cultures, we celebrate festivals like that with the community and with the UCA students and faculty,” Guo-Ou Zhuang, Associate Professor of Mandarin Chinese & Director of the Center for Chinese Language and Culture at UCA said.
Zhuang said that UCA has students from several Asian countries and the celebration on campus allows for them to celebrate even away from home and relieve homesickness.