2009-01-27

Happy Chinese New Year!




Happy Chinese New Year to everyone! The new year's eve was last Sunday and I DIDN'T celebrate it at all. Well, I actually called my folks in Taiwan, webcamed with them for a while and it was fun! My little bro even played a piece entitled "high mountain, running river"* on his Chinese zither for Trav and I. My little sis showed off her new frog clay artifact. Oh, they're so grown-up now. I can't help but feel time really flies. 
So Trav and I were invited by Cathy to a Chinese new year's celebration on BYU campus on Monday. The party actually took place in a student lounge as you can see in the pic. I didn't get a chance to take pics of food since they were fully blocked by the crowed and they disappeared way too fast! The feast was in a form of potluck, contributed by some of the attendees and mostly featured Asian/Taiwanese dishes. I brought sushi since we have a huge bag of sushi rice in our food storage and it's just a pretty economic dish for us to make. Well, my sushi turned out ok yet the execution looked a bit sloppy. I was so happy to taste the Taiwanese winter melon drink again in a long time and Trav loved it too. Finally I know where to get the winter melon brick, haha! Somebody also prepared 山粉圓 (which I don't know how to translate) and I was very grateful to see this unique homeland delicacy. 
After finishing eating, here came the entertainment. Chinese calligraphy was the first thing up and people came forth to try their skills. Trav actually tried a bit and wrote a couple of kanji. The character he's holding in the pic means love and I wrote it under his request. Now the drawing is posted on our fridge door:p Since there were so many returned missionaries from Taiwan, almost everyone could write a thing or two in Chinese and that truly amazed me. After all, BYU is a highly international-populated campus and the center of returned missionary students. I was impressed by the fact that almost all of the people in the party know what and where is my hometown, Keelung. What a wonderful feeling! Another thing stunned me is that the high quality of the ESL program at BYU. I was compelled to enroll in the graduate ESL program at BGSU about 4 years ago and it was not the most pleasant experience in my life. I often felt a sense of wasting time and didn't think the courses had a tremendous positive impact on my English learning. In short, I thought ESL program is merely an "appendix" of the body, unnecessary thing. But the ESL program here seems to be on a different level. I've talked to some ESL students here, including Cathy, and their oral is much better compared to how I was 4 years ago. They are not even grad students. They are talkative, expressive boldly with very little Chinese accent. I think BYU is truly a nice environment to take on English learning and meeting friendly people. 
Ok, the red apron thing was asked by Trav too. You can tell how HAPPY I was when I had the thing on. Anyway, I guess it was Chinese New Year after all and it wouldn't hurt to wear something festive...  
 
*A translation of the piece given by my little bro


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