Celebrating diversity with Chinese holiday

The Chinese are celebrating the beginning of a year of plenty.

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

IN A CELEBRATION OF
cultural variety, some 360
people gathered Sunday evening at Youngstown State University for a dinner and entertainment program to mark the Chinese New Year.

“It’s part of our thrust around diversity. The global economy requires that we provide our students with exposure to a wide range of cultures and languages and races and religions,” said Dr. David Sweet, YSU president.

“We’ve been fortunate to recruit on our faculty a number of excellent faculty with Chinese backgrounds. They have been very interested and supportive of celebrations of this type,” Sweet said.

“Diversity is one of the strengths of this community. ... It also enriches us as residents here because it allows us to understand and appreciate the much larger world — the cultures that many of us might not be exposed to had we not had the opportunity to interact with those that are drawn here because of YSU,” said Mayor Jay Williams.

“YSU values diversity. YSU embraces the cultural differences,” said Dr. Ou Hu, president of the Chinese Association of the Greater Youngstown Area, which sponsored the event. Hu, who was born in China, is also an assistant professor of economics at YSU, which co-sponsored the Chinese New Year celebration.

Hu said he hopes those who attended Sunday’s event “will become more appreciative of Chinese cultures, and I hope all of us can become more open-minded to diversity — to differences among us. All of us on the Earth — we’re all equal, but definitely we’re not the same.”

The Year of the Rat, which begins the 12-year cycle of years named for animals in the Chinese lunar calendar, officially begins Thursday. The dinner, a traditional Chinese New Year’s eve feast, featured a generous buffet that included fish, dumplings, shrimp lo mein, beef and Chinese greens. Fish is obligatory for the Chinese New Year event because it signifies abundance, Hu explained

“It’s a year of plenty. It’s a year of abundance. It’s a year of surplus,” Hu said of the Year of the Rat. “It has special meaning to us under the current economic conditions,” he quipped.

The event, held annually in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys for more than 30 years, returned to YSU this year after having been held in New Castle for the past two years.

The entertainment began with a lion dance designed to induce blessings and drive away evil spirits, with costumed characters parading through the audience to the stage of YSU’s Kilcawley Center Chestnut Room.

Students who enrolled last semester in YSU’s Chinese language class sang in Chinese. YSU began offering Chinese language classes last fall. “I’m looking forward to our students going there, and their students coming here,” Sweet said, noting that he and other YSU officials visited China last year.

Also included in the entertainment were Chinese martial arts, Mongolian folk dance presentations and a traditional Chinese costume show. Also featured were two Chinese string instruments, the multistringed, harplike guzheng, and the two-stringed violalike erhu.

In recognition of cultural diversity, the program offered not only traditional Chinese entertainment, but also the singing of the Negro spiritual “Go Tell It On The Mountain” and dance performances, including the bolero, cha cha, waltz and tango. “We want to embrace American cultures, too,” Hu explained.

In another cultural observance, the university was host in the same room to the annual African Marketplace on Saturday, which also reflected the university’s “commitment to diversity,” Sweet noted.