The University of Minnesota Crookston celebrated the international Mid-Autumn Festival through club events with a private hot pot party for students and leadership, and a campus wide celebration September 17 with crafts, activities, and food. Lecturer and club advisor Grace Menze and Director of Global Programs Sok Leng Tan helped Chinese Calligraphy Club students, and new students from Vietnam and Mongolia coordinate the private event, and Coordinator of Student Engagement Rae French assisted with the campus wide celebration.
The Mid-Autumn Festival is a harvest festival held to thank the gods, and celebrated in East and Southeast Asia on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. There are several legends surrounding this festival and one popular ancient tale is of a woman, Chang’e, who swallowed the elixir of life and floated to the moon where she now lives with the jade rabbit.
“If you look at the moon hard enough, you will see a pair of rabbit ears!” says Tan. “The eighth lunar month also is a very auspicious month, with many people choosing to get married during this time.”
“It was a great honor that many of the school leaders and teachers, as well as Chancellor Mary, took time out of their day to attend this event and celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival with our students from China,” shared student Lechen Kang, a communications major from China. “In China, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a very important festival where all families get together to admire the moon and eat mooncakes together. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, if you look up at the moon, you will find that it is unusually round and bright, which also symbolizes the reunion of the whole family. Every year, all of my family members would reunite for dinner to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival every year, which is so important to my family that it is almost second only to the Chinese New Year festival in terms of its significance to us.”
Kang says this is the first time they have experienced the festival abroad and felt happy to get together with classmates and teachers to enjoy traditional Chinese food such as hot pots, mooncakes, and buns.
“It made us feel like we were in China, like we were celebrating the festival with our families,” Kang added. “It gave us a sense of belonging, and we were proud that we could bring our country's traditional festivals to the United States.”
Student Emma Nhi Vu, an English education major from Vietnam, said she had a very meaningful evening.
“Vietnamese students spent an evening playing Werewolf and eating mooncakes together to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, and we also had the participation of students from Mongolia, Ethiopia and Korea,” she explained. “Although this is not a traditional Vietnamese game during this holiday, by role-playing, students were able to demonstrate their debating and persuading skills to find the wolves among the villagers.”
“The reason we chose the Werewolf game is because the Mid-Autumn Festival is on the night of the fullest moon, and the wolves will appear on this night and confront the villagers,” Vu added. “We ate traditional mooncakes for this holiday together and hung out to make new friends.”
