Josh Falcone – General Assignment Reporter
Southern Connecticut State University recently celebrated the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Horse, on campus in an event sponsored by the Chinese Student Club, Multicultural Center, and the Student Activity Fee Allocation Committee and held it in Engleman Hall room B121 A&B.
Chinese Student Club President, Meredith Peterson said the event was supposed to be held Feb. 5 but due to the inclement weather had to be rescheduled.
“Today we are celebrating the Chinese New Year, which was actually a couple of weeks ago and we were going to have our event last Wednesday but since the school was canceled we had to postpone it,” she said.
The event included Chinese cuisine, ornaments, craft activities, and live entertainment, Peterson said.
“So what we do is we just brought in a bunch of Chinese food, decorations, music,” she said. “We also have some crafts and activities going on.”
Those in attendance could have their name written out in Chinese calligraphy by volunteers.
The local Amity Regional High School Honor Chinese program provided a live performance at the event as well, Peterson said.
“We had the Amity Regional High School Honor Chinese program come and perform for us,” she said. “They sang us a couple of songs in Chinese, it was very funny, they sang us a Backstreet Boys song where all the words were in Chinese. So everybody knew what they were saying without knowing what they were saying.”
Peterson’s involvement with the Chinese Student Club started freshman year when she decided to switch which language she took at the university and settled on Chinese due to it being easy, she said.
“That started when I came to Southern and I was taking Chinese as a language because Spanish was just too hard for me, so I wanted to switch to something else. Chinese was easier because you don’t have to conjugate verbs and you don’t have to use tenses, and so it was just easier.”
Peterson said her professor asked the class if anyone was interested in the club and she found an opportunity to socialize with more of the Southern community, not realizing she was about to become the president of the club.
“The professor, Wu, asked if anyone was interested in the Chinese Club and since I was a freshman on campus I really didn’t know anyone on campus I was like yeah I’ll go to their interest meeting or whatever,” Peterson said. “Turns out the meeting I went to was actually a university sanctioned meeting where all the club presidents were suppose to attend, so Professor Wu was like well you can just write that you were the president so I put down that I was president and it seems to have stuck, three years later, here I am.”
The Chinese New Year celebration was a rousing success according to Peterson though there was almost a catastrophe.
“It went very well, when we had all the food out, we had people snaked around the room in line, we had so many people, we ran out of forks and had to get more forks, it was kind of a crisis,” Peterson said laughing.
Peterson said she was really happy to see how positive this year’s celebration was.
“But it is really great to see because when I started it was a dozen or so people who knew about this event and maybe a few people would trickle in from the hallway,” she said. “But now over the years people have come to expect it and they are waiting for it and it is something they know happens every year, so they are very excited for it.”
Peterson said she is pleased by the encouraging effect the yearly event has had on the appreciation for Chinese culture at Southern.
“I’m really happy to see the cultural awareness and diversity spread across campus as people get used to the event and to remember it.”
