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Lunar New Year Celebration (Feb 12, 2024)
The Department of East Asian Languages & Culture (EALC) celebrated the Lunar New Year together! We welcome students to hang out, and talk with people from the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese corridors.
The festival is a day when families gather together, so we also prepared food for students to enjoy.
Chinese New Year is one of the most important festival in Chinese community. We do certain activities, such as clean the house, wear new clothes, recevie and give red envelops and eat reunion dinner. In reunion dinner, we eat certain food to wish for luckiness, safety and happiness and of course, money for the following year! 
Here’s a small challenge for the students! They have to guess what food we eat during Chinese New Year. Once they get it right, they’ll receive a red envelope as a present!
One of the iconic activity is to hang up spring couplets or dou fang for good luck! Dou fang is this square sheet! What makes this activity important is it has meaning to hang them.
The most common word we write on them is 春，满，平安 and 财。 We hang them in an upright position, or, most of the people hang them up side down. Because the pronunciation of “upside down” is same as “has arrived”. As a result, if you have 财, which means money or wealth, it literally means the money has arrived! 
(pictures by Chinese Corridor, 2/12/2024; post by JuiYu Liao)