The Ann Arbor District Library welcomed the Ann-Hua Chinese School Saturday for its annual Lunar New Year festival celebrating the Year of the Snake. Hundreds of attendees celebrated the Lunar New Year with lion dance, drumming, string instruments, folk dance and arts and crafts.
Ann-Hua Chinese School in Ann Arbor provides courses in Mandarin for native speakers, in addition to classes to teach the language to new speakers. This year marks their first Chinese New Year event since the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Wei Cao, Ann-Hua Chinese School assistant principal, expressed the importance of holding Lunar New Year events to foster community involvement and knowledge about the holiday.
“It’s good for us to be together, regardless of race or culture or your religion,” Cao said. “It’s important to know we are not that much different. We are just celebrating our similarities, being human, enjoying all cultures.”
The event featured speeches from Cao and Lingzhi Chen, Ann-Hua Chinese School co-principal. Chen highlighted the Ann-Hua Chinese School’s 31-year commitment to multidisciplinary education.
“We are now currently an accredited, bilingual, multidisciplinary, supplementary educational program,” Chen said. “This is who we are and we are so happy to serve the community and to share the culture.”
Cao followed, saying she enjoys sharing her culture with the broader Ann Arbor community.
“Coming together as a community, celebrating in the traditional way, does bring a lot of sweet memories,” Cao said. “Not just (for) us. People of all faiths and cultural backgrounds are here. It makes me feel like this is Ann Arbor.”
The Ann-Hua lion dance troupe then took the stage, with dancers performing a traditional lion dance. They were accompanied by a percussion ensemble of symbols, drums and gongs. The dance troupe was followed by a solo performance on the erhu, a traditional Chinese string instrument. The Ann-Hua yaogu troupe then performed a yaogu waist drum demonstration.
Ann-Hua music teacher Chuling Lu then performed “The Fisherman’s Song at Dusk” on the guzheng, a Chinese string instrument. Inner Action Dance and Ann-Hua students took the stage to perform a traditional Chinese children’s fan dance. The drum ensemble and lion troupe closed out the show, dancing through the audience and greeting attendees.
Manuel told The Daily that the library enjoys hosting cultural events to bring the Ann Arbor community together.
“The library is always looking to provide events that people in the community enjoy, whether it’s cultural, author events or informational,” Manuel said. “We have such a wide range of things we offer that it’s great to know that people can always come and find something to do.”
After the performances, attendees could create Chinese lanterns, snakes to represent the year of the snake, red envelopes and paint traditional Chinese calligraphy. Guests could also try playing the large yaogu drum.
LSA sophomore Adele Havlick told The Daily that the festival was an effective and fun way to understand different cultures in Ann Arbor.
“I feel like it’s a good way to connect with the community and probably bring awareness to different cultures that we have in Ann Arbor, and learn more about a culture that is either different from your own or is your own,” Havlick said.
Daily Staff Reporter Sarah Spencer can be reached at sarahsp@umich.com.
The post AADL hosts Ann-Hua Chinese School for Lunar New Year Festival appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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