Ancient Chinese Lantern Festival Performed at Mason

By Broadside Assistant News Editor Dan Abernathy

Last Wednesday, much of the world’s attention was focused on the total lunar eclipse, the third this year and the last until it happens again in 2010. But another portion of the world, including members of George Mason University’s Asian community, were about to celebrate that moon for a different reason.

Thursday afternoon, beginning at 3 p.m. at the Johnson Center, Mason students staged their own version of Lantern Festival, the perennial Chinese-inspired celebration held worldwide on the 15th day of the first month in the Chinese lunisolar calendar.

Led by members of the Peer Empowerment Program, dozens of American and international students gathered to perform the holiday’s two major traditions: hanging red lanterns from the ceiling and eating yuanxiao, a glutinous rice flour rolled into a ball.

This year, year 4706 on the Chinese calendar, is the Year of the Rat, so students went beyond the basic décor requirements by fashioning paper rat carvings.

Ming Li, a member of PEP who also attended the festival, stressed the significance of yuanxiao, which has been known to stand for things such as wholeness and unity.
“We roll it into a ball to symbolize the reunion of families,” Li said. “We just enjoy our family.”

The turnout was indicative of the strength of Mason’s Asian community.

“We cooked [and ate] a lot…There were about 20 people,” Li said. “We talked about American culture, American studies.”

The success of Mason’s Lantern Festival shows the symbiotic relationship between culture and heritage, perhaps symbolizing another mantra, “Get to know and love the community you’re in.”

As far as the Chinese community goes, that concept definitely fits the bill. Mason, and the Fairfax area in general, are self-proclaimed multi-cultural landscapes, diverse in race, faith, ethnicity and language, all concepts advocated by Mason’s many Asian organizations, such as the Chinese Students & Scholars Association.

The New World Bilingual Institute, explicitly aiming “to provide the resources and opportunities to enrich the lives of all ethnic groups,” hosted a larger event on Feb. 7 to mark the actual beginning of the Chinese New Year.

The Lantern Festival has been practiced around the world for 2,000 years and the tradition is going strong, a fact supported by Li’s most telling statement about the event’s original one hour schedule, “[It was going so well] we had to extend it.”