Celebrating Culture: Chinese Club’s Lunar New Year celebration took place for the first time since COVID on Feb. 15 and the Multicultural Student Union is working on their annual Black History Month board

After canceling the annual Lunar New Year celebration due to COVID, Chinese Club hosted their first full celebration since 2020 on Feb. 15 in the cafeteria.

Through extensive planning, Chinese teacher and club sponsor Hau-In Lau and other members of the club planned a variety of activities, decorations, food, games and speakers to entertain and educate students who attended the celebration, according to Chinese Club secretary Finn Kloster. 

“Mrs. Lau [has been] super excited about it,” Kloster said. “We started planning right when the semester began.”

At each meeting, the club strives to teach attendees such as students learning Chinese at East about various Chinese holidays and incorporate traditional food such as dumplings along with activities like giving out fortunes. They work to make knowledge about Chinese culture accessible to everyone at East. 

“We usually do meetings according to different Chinese holidays,” Kloster said. “Earlier this year, our first meeting was about the Mid-Autumn Festival where we had traditional stuff like Chinese moon cakes.”

Their Lunar New Year celebration is the biggest event of the year for Chinese club due to the historically large turnout. Keeping with the trend, they planned their celebration just five days after the real holiday’s date on Feb. 10 and followed the layout of previous celebrations to ensure its success. 

“It’s gonna be pretty similar [to the celebration before COVID],” Kloster said. “There’s going to be a lot of people speaking and the same activities and we’re still going to have the same food.”

With 2024 designated as the year of the dragon, decorations and activities were centered around dragons.

In addition to Lau talking about her experiences with the holiday and her personal connections to it, other speakers were also brought in to read poems in Chinese and explain them. 

Students in the club also performed a lion dance and fan dance as further entertainment for attendees — both traditional dances performed around Lunar New Year in China. 

“Me and Finn Kloster are [reciting] a poem,” Chinese 3 student and junior Avery Williams said. “The poem is in Chinese. There’s going to be two poems, the one that Finn and I are [reading] and the one that James Quance is [reading].”

To promote the revival of the celebration, members of the club put up posters advertising the party as well as marketing it by word of mouth. 

“We’ve been inviting people for a while and I think I’ve managed to get a lot of people from our classes and clubs [to come],” Kloster said.

Members of the club hope to make this celebration an annual event again that students will look forward to, according to Kloster. 

Over the past few weeks, the Multicultural Student Union has been planning and creating a billboard design for the fourth floor to celebrate Black History Month during seminar and in their free time. 

This year, members have decided to mirror last year’s design — which featured prominent black leaders and important figures in Black history — but with some slight alterations. The design hopes to incorporate students from each grade level who’ve worked to promote inclusivity at East. 

“We’re going to represent some of the Black students from East from each class and then a couple of iconic historical figures as well as some lesser known unsung heroes of the civil rights movement and people who have been protesting for civil rights,” MSU president and senior John Mendy said. 

Pictures of the featured students and influential figures will be accompanied by a short description of why they’re important to black history and any other important facts or moments in their life. They hope to keep them short but informational, according to Mendy. 

“We have some icons like Martin Luther King [and] Rosa Parks but we also wanted to educate people [so we included others like] Coretta King, who was Martin Luther’s wife,” Mendy said. “We also had Stokely Carmichael, W.E.B. Dubois, who founded the NAACP, Claudette Colvin and then Tommie Smith and John Carlos.”

During this planning, the union brainstormed the idea of spreading the message to other parts of the school as well. Posters with quotes from different inspirational figures can be found in places like the front office. 

“[This is more] preliminary but we’re planning on moving throughout the school and putting up decorations,” Mendy said.

Planning for the billboard began at the end of January and is set to be finished mid-February, in time for students to observe and learn from it during Black History Month according to Mendy. Despite the loss of the actual bulletin board during the painting of the fourth floor, the Black History Month display will still most likely be put up in the fourth floor hallway by the counselors’ offices.