Today on the Great Lawn, Oak Park High School held its annual Lunar New Year celebration. Students and teachers flocked to 12 booths for a variety of food and cultural activities. This year, the event expanded to include Korean and Thai traditions, such as Thai tea.
Lunar New Year celebrates the harvest after a year of hard work, as well as family reunion. Rice cakes, sesame balls, dumplings and oranges—many of which were offered at the booths—all symbolize this fortune.
Freshman Melody Tu, junior Nini Tu and their mother, Angela Hong, had the honor of organizing this year’s event.Â
“My sister, my mom and I had to organize,” Melody Tu said. “We have to plan out all the activities and the food tables and what each table is going to be.”
Teamwork was essential to the success of the event.Â
“It takes a village,” Hong said. “There were a lot of volunteers, and people who could not come just donated whatever they could. They either donated homemade food, or they gave money so that we could order delicious food from restaurants.”Â
Some of the activities included calligraphy, chopstick races, red envelopes and history behind tea. The main event was a lion dance, organized by OPHS parent Eric Kong, who also played drums for the dance. Later displays included martial arts and a ribbon dance.
The preparation that goes behind the scenes in this event takes weeks of diligent work and order. The volunteers even decorated the staff lounge and office on Friday afternoon prior to the event.
“It took us around a month,” Melody Tu said. “My favorite part was seeing everything come together, because we have been planning it for weeks and this is my first year helping out with this celebration.”
The preparation was harder due to a delay: the event was supposed to be held Feb. 18, but was pushed back due to rain.
“It truly takes a village, especially since we dealt with uncertainty because it was postponed from Thursday,” Hong said. “We had resilience.”Â
