With the Moon festival just around the corner, the second Chinese corner of fall 2015 semester was naturally presented as a celebration of the traditional Chinese festival. Chinese instructor Xiaorui Du hosted the event, which took place on the evening of Sep. 23 in the Chinese classroom of CIH. He first gave a talk on the celebration of the festival in China and its fabled origin concerning the fairy Chang’s and her heroic archer man husband Hou Yi.

“The festival, like many fall festivals in the world,” said Mr. Du, “is one that celebrates the harvest and serves as an occasion for family reunion.”

He then took students questions about the festival. Anna Griffin, a PC student of Chinese 101 who is also known in Chinese as 龚安娜 (Gōng ānnà), asked if it is possible for the Chinese to travel home gather together to celebrate the day in a single day. The answer, according to Mr. Du, was that the Moon Festival is either a three-day public holiday or an 8-day one when its lunar date (the fifteenth day of the eighth month) happens to be close to China’s National Day (Oct. 1). Mr. Du’s presentation concluded with a singalong of a quasi-theme song for the festival — “The Moon Represents My Heart”, a song made famous by Teresa Teng in the 1970s and has been popular in the Chinese-speaking world ever since.
Dr. Taiwei Wang, who is the teacher of the two Chinese 101 class at PC, brought a “jam session” to the evening by writing a famous Chinese poem on the board titled “Jing Ye Si”, a poem about nostalgia that is learned and recited by almost every pupil in China, with Mr. Zhenlong Liu portraying the scene using a marker!

The attendants to the event found an equally talented duo in Caleb McGill and Natalie Cook who helped wrap up the joyful evening by reciting the poem in English and acting out the event in the poem respectively.