Boston's Chinatown is home to the third-largest Chinese community in the U.S., and Sunday is their biggest celebration of the year. The sounds of drums will fill the air as crowds of people gather in the street for Lunar New Year and the ringing in of the Year of the Rabbit.
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"Lunar New Year is one of the biggest holidays in many Asian cultures, especially East Asia and Southeast Asia," said Sophia Chen, communications and development manager for the Pao Arts Center, which works to promote Asian American and Pacific Islander culture in the face of gentrification in Boston.
"It really celebrates reunion, renewal and celebration; setting new goals; really resetting, reconnecting with people," she said. "It's a really enormous time of celebration. People travel across the world, across countries, to be with families during this holiday."
This year’s celebration, on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 99 Albany St., is a special one, she said: For the first time, traditions from different parts of East Asia will be included in the Chinatown celebration: A lion dance workshops with Nüwa Athletic Club, red envelope folding with artist Lily Xie, rabbit puppet-making with the Harvard Asian American Brotherhood, a lantern-making workshop and calligraphy and Dasik cookie stamping (on clay, as opposed to cookies) workshops with The Korean Cultural Society of Boston.
“Dasik cookies are a traditional cookie that [are] eaten during the Korean celebration of Lunar New Year,” Chen said. “There are really beautiful molds that are used to make these cookies. The Korean Cultural Society of Boston is using clay, just the act of making the stamps and practicing that the craft is what we’ll be hosting.”
Art will be at the center of many of the activities available to families during the celebration. The Pao Arts Center is ready, decorated with art made by children who frequent the Red Oak Program through its parent organization, the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center.
“These are all made by children, 5 to 13 years of age,” Chen said, walking along the display: Wheels made of colorful woven yarn, clay statues and a large paper dragon with nods to different countries’ flags.
The goal, Chen said, is “allowing kids to experiment with motor skills and ideas and putting it on a piece of paper to be displayed, showcasing that the work is really valuable no matter what age, they are artists and we value their contributions. So that is really the purpose of this exhibit, is to showcase that and let their imagination really flow free.”
The Pao Center coordinated with other local organizations, like Chinatown Main Streets, to host celebrations on the same day. Celebrants can walk to Boylston Street in Chinatown, where Main Streets will host a cultural village and a parage.
“Imagine sort of a really fun version of a haunted house,” Chen said. “Not a scary version, but like a fun, art-filled, you know, you can walk through the path of arts and crafts. Once you're done with one, you can do another. … We just work really well together to make sure that the celebration is as big as possible and we're sharing each other's events. So that's something that we really cherish.”
This celebration comes after a shooting in a dance hall in Monterey Park, California, just after a Lunar New Year celebration. The Pao Arts Center and Chinese American Citizens Alliance are among the groups hosting a vigil for the 11 people killed and nine injured there — to be held Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Chinatown gate on Beach Street.
“This is hard to talk about, but something that we've certainly been thinking about really hard,” Chen said. “We need spaces for people to process and share feelings around this in order to heal, which makes it even more important to celebrate culture.
“We cannot set a precedent where we hide ourselves,” Chen said. “We cannot set a precedent where we erase ourselves and make ourselves scared to be who we are. So that's why we really want to just encourage people to celebrate Asian culture and attend the Lunar New Year celebrations in Chinatown.”
