Last Friday night, the Chinese Student Association (CSA) hosted its belated Lunar New Year Banquet in the Glass Pavilion. Approximately 250 students attended in observance of the beginning of the new Chinese year, the Year of the Horse.
Students arrived at 7 p.m. dressed in black and white formal attire with accents of color. The windows of the Glass Pavilion were lit up with strings of white lights and red paper lanterns. Dining tables were adored with scarlet tablecloths and centerpieces of pink carnations.
According to CSA Presidents Jasmine Wang and Jason Zhang, both seniors, the banquet took five weeks of planning and careful preparations. This was also the first year that CSA planned a formal entirely on its own.
“Because this is my first time organizing such a large scale event, I was really nervous about forgetting small details like serving spoons and figuring out how the light system worked,” Wang wrote in an email to The New-Letter.
In the email, the presidents commented on how planning this year’s event differed from planning events in past years.
“From previous years, I’ve noticed that the board works much better when there is more structure and the freshmen board is sorted into committees under each chair. This time around, planning was much easier because we did not have to micromanage each task,” Wang wrote.
At the banquet, five long tables were laid out with catered Chinese food that the specially-organized Cooking Committee had ordered for the event. Members emphasized the authenticity of the food served.
“I ordered all of the food in Chinese,” freshman Songnan Wang said.
Although the planning was done entirely by the 47 members of the CSA board, many other cultural groups were invited to partake in the event.
“We were aided financially by IAC; other groups that held booths were JSI (with mochi), TASA (with bubble tea), HKSA (with drinks), aKDPhi (with origami cranes and a photobooth), VSA (with banana pudding) and SSA (with red bean soup),” Wang wrote.
Wang attributed the participation of other cultural groups in the event to an inclusive attitude shared by the Chinese community at Hopkins.
“I like how we have a huge Chinese community at Hopkins that isn’t closed off to non-Chinese people. For the formal, we had non-Chinese groups such as JSI and VSA hold booths. In addition, attendees were not all Chinese — it’s just great to see everybody, regardless of background, come together for our event,” she wrote.
Although the community is open to non-Chinese students, Zhang expressed concern about a divide within the community.
“To me, the most striking facet of the Chinese community is the partial segregation between the Chinese Americans and the International Chinese students. This tension manifests itself apparently in the fact that we have two distinct organizations: CSA attracts only undergraduates and mostly Chinese-Americans and the Chinese Student Scholar Association (CSSA) attracts mostly graduates and International Chinese; they very rarely collaborate or even interact with each other,” Zhang wrote.
He attributed the division primarily to language barriers as well as to less obvious cultural differences. However, he remains optimistic about what CSA can accomplish in the future without worrying about labels.
“My personal goal for the organization is just to foster a strong sense of friendship with the common goal of celebrating Chinese-ness, American Chinese-ness or not,” Zhang wrote.
At the beginning of the evening, most of the attendees were happily socializing between tables and commenting on each other’s attire.
“There aren’t many other opportunities to be classy,” freshman Mallika Iyer said.
After all of the guests had been served food, the performances began. The Lion Dance performed first: four dancers, acting as two lions, wound around the dinner tables, delighting students. SLAM performed next, followed by Music Dynasty, the Chinese a cappella group.
After they performed, DJ Yunus Sevimli played music and the students got up to dance and explore more of the booths. As the night wound down, student left feeling satisfied.
“[This event] allowed me to walk around and talk to all my different acquaintances in different friend groups, rather than sit with one group the whole time. I really like these large-scale events where you get to see everyone in the community get together and celebrate,” Zhang wrote.
Wang has high hopes to improve upon the event in upcoming years.
“I was really pleased with how the event turned out. It made it feel like all the planning I did was really worth it. . .There are a few things that could have been better planned and next year’s board can learn from these mistakes and make 2015’s formal even better,” she wrote.
