Alyssa Xu ’27 found a home away from home at the Cornell Chinese Student Association’s annual Lunar New Year celebration on Saturday.
“Usually, I would celebrate Lunar New Year at home with family, but it’s my first time being away at college, and I’m not going to get to be at home with my family, so it’s nice that they’re holding this event,” Xu said.
Cornell CSA hosted its annual Lunar New Year celebration on Saturday in the Klarman Hall Atrium to ring in the year of the Dragon. The event boasted food, games, a photo booth and hongbao, or red envelopes.
Lunar New Year serves as an important annual celebration for Cornellians who identify with several Asian ethnicities. The holiday emphasizes family connections across generations and is celebrated across Asia including in China, Vietnam and Indonesia.
“We want to provide a space for Chinese students to still celebrate Lunar New Year — even when they’re not with their families — and for anyone else interested in Chinese culture or Lunar New Year to enjoy the festivities as well,” Co-Vice President of CSA Tiffany Lee ’25 said.
Hongbao are given as gifts during holidays or special occasions including weddings, graduations and birthdays. Traditionally, hongbao contain money, but the hongbao at the event held candy, and three special hongbao contained a paper slip to claim a prize from a Jellycat stuffed animal raffle.
Lee emphasized the importance of establishing community during the holiday — both with family and friends.
“Celebrating Lunar New Year is a way for us to keep in touch with our culture even as we’re away from home and family,” Lee said. “I still FaceTime my parents for Lunar New Year, but I think being able to celebrate it with friends and follow similar traditions is important as well.”
Claire Wang ’27 said that she continues her family traditions of eating dumplings and decorating her home at Cornell.
“There’s someone painting the character for ‘fu’ which means luck and prosperity and we hang it upside down,” Wang said. “We hang it upside down because in Chinese you say ‘fu dao le’ which sounds the same as saying ‘fu is upside down,’ [which means] that luck and prosperity have arrived at this house.”
Beyond its Lunar New Year celebration, CSA intentionally fosters a close-knit, family atmosphere in several activities. For example, CSA prioritizes creating “families” of students, consisting of typically older students labeled “bigs” to mentor typically younger students labeled “littles,” to help ease students’ transitions into college.
“We want to provide a space for Chinese students to still celebrate Lunar New Year, even when they’re not with their families,” Lee said. “Growing up a Chinese-American with immigrant parents, I often wanted to be more “American” like my peers, which I think is a common experience, but now that I’m older and understand my parents better, I realize it’s important that I try to stay connected with my culture and continue family traditions.”