Last Friday, February 8, the Choate Chinese Club, Asian Student Association, Choate Korean Friendship Association, and Japanese Club co-hosted the annual Lunar Banquet to celebrate Chinese Lunar New Year. At 6:00 p.m. in the Library Reading Room, a crowd of Choate students gathered to enjoy traditional Asian cuisine.
The idea of the Lunar Banquet is to provide an opportunity for not only Chinese students but all members of the Choate community to come together and celebrate as a family. Deanna Tan ’20, a cabinet member of the Chinese Club, recalled a traditional Chinese tale of a monster that is “scared of red and loud noises, so on this day families would gather together and they would have a lot of fireworks to scare off this monster.” This soon developed into a tradition where families would gather together to celebrate — with or without believing in this monster. The monster’s name was “Nian,” and Lunar New Year in Chinese is “Guo Nian,” which literally means pass the monster.
In previous years, the Lunar Banquet has consistently featured staples of Asian cuisine such as dumplings and potstickers. This year, however, Jayden Khuu ’21, a member of the Chinese Club cabinet, said that the cabinet members of the co-hosting clubs worked to expand the menu in hopes of providing “a more authentic experience to the community.” The redesigned menu included Mapo Tofu, fried rice with pork and bell peppers, wok-fried noodles with oyster sauce, and Sichuan dry-fried string beans.
Ms. Carol Chen-Lin, the faculty adviser for the Chinese Club, said that planning such a large celebration required an early start. In December, the cabinet members of the Chinese Club visited local restaurants for taste tests. Ms. Chen-Lin explained that this year, rather than supplying all the food on their own, the hosting clubs decided to “ask the restaurant to provide a few hundred dumplings.” In addition, the hosting clubs made 500 dumplings themselves to feed the large number of attendees. “This way,” Ms. Chen-Lin said, “each student can have five or six dumplings.”
The Lunar Banquet has a history of being very well received on campus, and this year was no different. Jay Zhou ‘21, “It was really cool being able to sit down at a table with my friends and eat some decent Chinese food. One of the biggest traditions of Chinese New Year is to gather with family, but because of distance obviously it is hard for boarders to do this. So, to me, eating with my friends is almost like my second family.”
