Chinese Language School of Connecticut's Annual Chinese New Year Festival

CLSC's 9th Annual Chinese New Year Festival made the front pages of all area papers for the 9th year in a row...huge thanks to Anita Lai, Dana Lupton, Terri Kung, Samantha Connell and the intrepid Chinese New Year Volunteer Committee for their stupendous efforts again this year!

From www.greenwichcitizen.com.

Photo: Julie Ruth / Greenwich Citizen

Greenwich resident Emanuel Lai, 8, gets to stay up really late one night each year: Chinese New Year's Eve. How late? "Till he passes out," said his mother Anita Lai, laughing. "Traditionally you let children stay up late that night because it's a way children wish longevity for their parents."

The Chinese New Year, also called Asian New Year, will be celebrated in Greenwich, as it is around the world, with plenty of ancient customs and family-centered dinners of dumplings and noodles, fish and other traditional dishes.

Cynthia Chang, a Greenwich resident who is Chinese but grew up in Taiwan, said the Chinese New Year celebrates multi-generational families and is a time when people pay respect to their elders and ancestors.

In China, people will pick up and travel for the Chinese New Year to the graves of their ancestors to pay their respects and thank them for what they have done for the current generations, said Chang.

It is also time to start fresh, and Chinese families in town will observe many customs that represent a new beginning. "For the New Year, you don't want your old clothes with you; you want new clothes," Lai explained. "We'll first clean the house in the morning to sweep out old spirits, and, when we're ready, we'll dress ourselves in new clothes. If you wear something red, that's even better, because it means very good luck in Chinese culture."

Though the Chinese New Year falls on Feb. 3 this year, the celebration officially began last Sunday for more than 30 Greenwich families with a festival in Stamford sponsored by the Greenwich-based Chinese Language School of Connecticut (CLSC), a non-profit school that teaches Mandarin Chinese as a second language along with lessons about Chinese culture.

The festival, which doubles as a fundraiser for CLCS, also drew children and parents around Westchester and Fairfield County. Some are Chinese and want their children to learn or retain the language and culture. Others have adopted children and want them to stay connected with their Chinese heritage, and still others simply want their children to learn about Chinese culture.

The Chinese Language School of Connecticut is relatively new; it has only offered the festival since the school opened in 2002, when parent Susan Serven and other area parents co-founded the school. But it has fast become the center of a vibrant and diverse community in Greenwich that wants its children to know and appreciate Chinese culture and language.

Greenwich resident Mary Murphy, who spent much of her childhood in Thailand, already had strong ties to Asian culture before she and her husband adopted daughter Robin, 5, from Southeast Asia. She enrolled her in the school because she feels it is very important for Robin to learn Mandarin. "It's her biological heritage and it will also be a huge advantage for her to speak Mandarin. It's a beautiful language," Murphy said.

English-born Anita Lai, who chaired the festival, felt it was important to teach her son, whose father is Chinese, about Asian culture, so he studies Mandarin and Chinese culture on Sundays year-round. "I didn't want Emanuel to lose that beautiful culture and those rich traditions: the art, singing styles, the instruments, the calligraphy, the beautiful characters, the traditions for everything," Lai said.

CLSC's New Year celebration this year featured the ancient Chinese dragon and lion dances, a musical performance by the Chinese Musical Ensemble, a martial arts demonstration, Chinese arts and crafts along with traditional Chinese New Year dishes, such as long noodles -- which are eaten uncut -- to symbolize a long life. "Almost every dish has a symbolic meaning or name that sounds like a Chinese character for fortune, happiness longevity and prosperity," explained Lai. "There're very traditional foods, like dumplings, which promise wealth and prosperity, fish prepared whole, special vegetables, jello with fruit, Hong Kong-style egg tarts -- you could go on and on about what they stand for."

For months CLCS children prepared to perform the Chinese dragon dance, a highlight of the festivities. The dragon, an emblem of the Chinese emperors, appears on Chinese New Year to wish everyone peace, prosperity and good luck. Another highlight came when several performers in a large multi-colored lion costume pranced around to the sound of drums, to ward off evil spirits. According to tradition, children, many in Mandarin garb, fed the lion red envelopes with money. "The lion's coming and he's hungry. He's getting rid of all of bad stuff that happened and bringing in the new year, and you give him the traditional red envelopes to thank him for doing his job," Lai explained.

Last week the Second Congregational Church also held a Chinese New Year celebration, which 100 peoople attended. The church also houses classrooms for the CLSC in its preschool building. "It's great; we get to teach the pre-schoolers about Chinese culture," said Chang.

Though the New Year will be a family-centered celebration, it will be observed differently by Greenwich residents. "We like to go down into Chinatown in the city and really get an authentic Chinese meal," Murphy said. "It's a lot of fun; you have banquet-style eating, with the family all sitting in a circle."

Lai will be cooking for family in her home, while Chang will follow a tradition that her family began in Taiwan. "We always have a group of family and close friends with us. We'll select a restaurant on the West side in Manhattan and have a big new year's dinner," she said.

After family dinner celebrations, the elders in the family traditionally give the children good luck money: red envelopes with crisp dollar bills. The amount in the envelope? It varies by family, but one thing, Chang says, is for sure: the amount will not contain a four, which is bad luck. Best to slip an amount in that has an eight in the total: it's the Chinese lucky number.

NOTE: The Chinese Language School of Connecticut will hold an open house for interested families on Sunday, April 17. Registration opens on Sunday, May 1.

For more details, visit www.chineselanguageschool.org. You can also contact the school by phone at 866-301-4906 or email: info@chineselanguageschool.org.

CLSC holds classes on Sundays at Eastern Middle School, 51 Hendrie Avenue, in Riverside, and on weekdays at the Second Congregational Church, Room 19, 139 E. Putnam Ave,, Greenwich, CT 06830.


Photo: Julie Ruth / Greenwich Citizen

Chinese Immigrants Tell Stories of Angel Island

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_14224527

With reflection and tears, Angel Island turns 100
By Joe Rodriguez
jrodriguez@mercurynews.com

Malin Tom is an "emotional man," which explains why he kept his journey through Angel Island mostly to himself for 60 years.

"I did not want to cry in front of people," says Tom, now 81 and living in Santa Clara. "It is a sad story. I was so scared and poor. I was ashamed, and Chinese don't talk about their shame."

But he could not resist a granddaughter's plea a few years ago. Would he talk to her classmates about passing through the "Ellis Island of the West"?

"My granddaughter gave me courage."

And when Tom finally spoke it was as if a dam holding back immigrant tears had cracked, replenishing the soil of American history with bittersweet truth.

On Thursday, a ceremony in San Francisco

will commemorate — 100 years to the date — the opening of Angel Island's immigration station. The government will swear in 100 new American citizens. Some of the nation's top immigration officials will speak, as well as people who actually went through the island in San Francisco Bay, including poet Nellie Wong and her sister from Sunnyvale, Lai Webster.

The speakers won't sugarcoat the island's checkered past. Angel Island was different from its welcoming counterpart in New York Harbor.

About 500,000 immigrants passed through the island from 1910 to 1940. Of these, 300,000 were detained, a third of them Chinese. While most were ultimately allowed in, many, like Tom, waited months in a torturous limbo while their
backgrounds were investigated.

"Angel Island was really there to keep people out, not to welcome them," says Judy Yung, a University of California-Santa Cruz professor emeritus of American studies and author of two books on the subject. "We need to remember that. How can we use the lesson of Angel Island to live up to our ideal as a nation of immigrants?"

By the late 19th century, the easy gold in California was gone, an economic recession had settled in across the country and a new wave of immigrants from Asia and southern Europe stirred up a nativist backlash. Congress looked for scapegoats.

Even today Tom asks, "Why did they home in on the Chinese?"

He was 12 years old in 1939 and living with his mother in a poor village in Canton province. His father, Yip Way Tom, had sneaked through Angel Island in 1916 as "Jack Chew," the supposed son of a Chinese-American family. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, laborers could only immigrate if they were the children or grandchildren of U.S.-born, Chinese-Americans.

"The Chinese figured out a intricate system right away," Yung says.

American-born Chinese who could sponsor relatives often sold their immigration slots to underground brokers, who sold them in Hong Kong to desperate immigrants like the Toms. Sometimes, undocumented Chinese here created entirely new identities on paper, especially after thousands of birth records were destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

The Chinese men who came to Angel Island with these false identities were known as "paper sons."

At 4 feet, 81/2 inches tall, young Tom boarded a ship in Hong Kong with a new identity, May Kwong Chew, son of Jack Chew, and "coaching" notes about the Chew family. He had to study notes between bouts with seasickness because he would be grilled by interrogators on Angel Island bent on ferreting out paper sons and daughters.

"After three weeks on a ship," Tom says, "the next three months were even worse."

Tom remembers going through three or four interrogations: Where was the water well in your village? How many steps did your front porch have? When did your uncle in America die? What company did he work for? Did he have birthmarks, and where?

Then he, like the other detainees, waited as immigration agents checked out his answers. Tom waited three months, about average, but some detainees were forced to remain on the island up to two years.

Nothing frightened him more than the whispers of suicides. Yung says some immigrants who flunked the questioning probably killed themselves on the island, but there is no official proof.

"They would have been too ashamed to go home and face their families and villages," said Yung, whose own father was a paper son and adopted the surname "Yung."

She estimates that 4 percent of Chinese were deported from the island.

Immigrants channeled their hopes and desolation into poetry, which they etched on the walls of their prison barracks. Tom read some of these, but "they made me feel even more sad."

To help pass the time, he played games with other Chinese boys in the recreation yard and picked up a few words of playground English. Because of the strict segregation, he never met boys from other nations, though he could see them during their allotted time in the yard.

Mostly though, he mulled over the interrogation questions during the day, complained about "terrible mush" and other western food, and cried silently under his blanket at night.

"I didn't want to make noise for the others," he says.

After three months, he was released and traveled to San Diego, where his father delivered produce to restaurants. On a much better diet, Tom sprouted to nearly 6 foot tall and played basketball in high school. He mastered English and kept his Chinese.

When he and his father returned to China in 1947, they learned Tom's brother and sister had died during World War II, probably from disease. Tom married, but with the communists taking over, he and his new bride moved to the United States in 1949 and sailed through immigration as Mr. and Mrs. Chew.

He might have remained a Chew were it not for the "Chinese Confession Program," a sort of amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the early 1960s, so long as they weren't communists or criminals. After three decades in the shadows, he became Malin Tom again, and a U.S. citizen. More than 18,000 Chinese paper sons and paper daughters also confessed and were allowed to stay.

He raised a family, and owned a nursery in Silicon Valley. And he never talked to anyone in detail about Angel Island.

"Not even to me," says his wife, Jean.

Too much shame.

In 2001, Tom returned to the island after 61 years with his adult children and grandchildren, who had begged him to go. He says the hardest part was visiting a restored dormitory, where he spent so many tearful nights, remembering the sound of doors being locked behind him.

"I cried again," Tom says. "I'm still an emotional guy."

Contact Joe Rodriguez at 408-920-5767.


A look back through Angel Island history

An immigration station opens on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay on Jan. 21, 1910 to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
As immigrants from Asia, Russia and Mexico arrive, the station is dubbed the Ellis Island of the West, but its detainees are segregated by race, ethnicity and gender.
About 500,000 immigrants pass through over the next 30 years, the majority of them Asians.
While Europeans arriving at Ellis Island passed through in two to three hours, Chinese immigrants at Angel Island endure interrogations that often lasted two weeks to six months, with a few forced to stay up to two years.
On Nov. 5, 1940 the last group of 200 immigrants on the island — 150 of them Chinese — are transferred to San Francisco. Congress repeals the exclusion act in 1943.
Today, visitors to Angel Island can visit a museum, restored dormitory and read the poems carved into the immigration station's walls. Guided tours are $4 for adults and $3 for children. For schedules and directions, go towww.aiisf.org or call 415-435-3392.
Source: Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

CLSC Alumni Student Wins Intel Scholarship

CLSC graduate, current Boston University student and Stamford, CT native, Wes Uy was the winner of the third season of WGBH's Design Squad on PBS and the $10,000 scholarship provided by the Intel Foundation.

The finale episode is currently available in full on
http://pbskids.org/designsquad/season3/index.html

Wes's cast page is http://pbskids.org/designsquad/season3/cast/03-wes.html.

The Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series Design Squad is high-energy, high-drama reality TV that lets kids show off their smarts as they design and build working
solutions for real-world clients-people who are hungry for clever ideas from a new
generation of innovators. From creating remote-controlled flying football targets
for Hasbro to dry land dog sleds for the Jamaica Dog Sled Team, the action
culminates in the final episode when the top two scorers battle for the Grand Prize:
a $10,000 college scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

Way to go, Wes!!

Five Things the U.S. Can Learn From China

From the November 23, 2009 issue of Time Magazine and Time.com.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938671,00.html

"One day this summer, Sean Maloney, an executive vice president at Intel, was bouncing from one appointment to another in northeastern China, speeding along in a van traversing newly built highways.

He gazed out at one of the world's biggest construction projects: a network of high-speed train lines — covering 10,000 miles (16,000 km) nationwide — that China is building. As far as the eye could see, there sat vast concrete support struts, one after another, exactly 246 ft. (75 m) apart. Each was full of steel cables and weighed about 800 tons.

"We used to build stuff too," Maloney mused, unprompted. "But now it's NIMBY [not in my backyard] every time you try to do something. Here,'' he joked, "it's more like IMBY. There's stuff happening here, everywhere and always."

For full text and photos: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938671,00.html

Time Magazine: Immersion Mandarin

From November 23, 2009 issue of Time; Yinghua Academy creates immersion experience.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1938815,00.html

CLSC Teacher Claire Huang Featured

CLSC Teacher Claire Huang was recently featured in a Families with Children from China magazine article on girls adopted from China, learning Chinese.

If you'd like to form a private tutoring group in your area, please contact the Chinese Language School of Connecticut at info@ChineseLanguageSchool.org or visit them at www.ChineseLanguageSchool.org.