The Lunar New Year, an East and Southeast Asian holiday, was celebrated by University of Kentucky students reflecting on the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Held on Friday, Feb. 20 and hosted by the UK Chinese Club, Asian American Association and Asian Women’s Alliance, the event featured five scavenger-hunt stations to earn a red envelope filled with candy, symbolizing luck for the coming year. 

Lunar New Year celebrates the start of the year based on moon cycles, and is associated with family, luck and festivities. This year, the Lunar Year fell on Feb. 17, and the celebration will last until the next full moon. 

The stations included dumpling-making, Chinese board games, crafting Chunlian, which are paper doorway decorations and a Chinese ensemble performance led by Donna Kwan, a UK professor of ethnomusicology, and director of the ensemble Zhicheng Xiao. 

Kwan, usually a professor of Korean music, split the semester with Xiao to teach Chinese ensembles. The ensemble performed at Lunar New Year was learnt in five weeks, with only two players having prior experience and with enrollment in the course being the highest Kwan saw in semesters. 

Grace Yi, president of the Chinese Club and a junior sociology and history major, said Kwan decided to take on the Chinese ensemble because a lot of Chinese instruments donated to UK through the Office of China Initiatives got shut down. 

Yi said the Chinese Club and similar efforts, such as the 859 Night Market, an Asian American festivity in Lexington meant to simulate the wet markets of East Asia, have been impacted by anti-DEI compliance. 

The Chinese Club initially tried to host their own Night Market, but it was too large a project, and instead they brought smaller events like Lunar New Year to UK as a way to foster community on campus.

“Having an event like this, especially at the University of Kentucky, I think is great because it gives comfort,” Yi said. “It gives this one day to an immigrant community or a USC community that it is okay to be yourself, and it’s okay to share your culture.”

Given national political stances on immigration and diversity, Yi said, it’s nice to have these moments. 

“It also gives to the entire campus a chance to access other cultures, to access tolerance, to understand, maybe better, the actions they’re doing and put into context a lot of the hate that’s been going on in the nation toward people that they might not necessarily know or have contact with,” Yi said. 

The take-home message, Yi said, is Lunar New Year is about togetherness, family and community. 

Cylvia Baskin, a junior information communication technology major, learned Chinese through an ROTC program and said respectfully learning about the culture of others is a way to help yourself. 

“I don’t feel like because it’s not a culture I really grew up in, I’m that culture, like invested in it, but I can appreciate other countries and the awareness of it,” Baskin said. “I feel like learning about different cultures can broaden your perspective as a person, and then, also, help with your own self-growth.” 

For Donovan Washington, a freshman integrated strategic communication major, it was his first time attending Lunar New Year. 

“I think it’s very important to have events like these in UK because, not only is everybody getting recognized for their culture or the events they have, it’s also important for the diversity of the college as well,” Washington said. “And without that, like I said, there would be missing information of the whole world, and keeping everybody in the same place.”