Introduction to Chinese Culture Cultural History Arts Festivals and Rituals

The Chins (from Sacramento, California) pose with extended family during a reunion in Guangdong Province, 2009.

Photo by and courtesy of Steve Wong

A dragon trip the light fantastic toe group takes a break every bit they process downward North Los Angeles Street during the local Chinese community' New year's celebration, Los Angeles, ca. 1902.

The U.Due south. Wushu Academy dragon dance team performs during the half-time show for a Washington Wizards game at the Verizon Center, Washington, D.C., 2014.

Photo by and courtesy of Christopher Pei

Chinese communities have been nowadays in the United States for over 150 years, and Chinese culture runs deep here—such as in the foods we eat, the holidays nosotros celebrate, the sports nosotros play, and in the onetime urban Chinatowns and newer indigenous suburbs across the country.

In 2014, at that place are more than four meg people of Chinese ancestry in the United States. This number includes people of mixed ancestry, those whose relatives emigrated from Prc several generations ago, and recent immigrants, as well equally people from families who came to the United States afterwards earlier settlement in other countries such as Southeast Asia, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Near reside in California or New York, but they as well alive in other areas, including historical concentrations in the Mississippi Delta region and fast-growing new populations in Texas.

The China programme provided an opportunity for reunion amid those sustaining traditional culture in People's republic of china, too as in the diaspora. It was a gathering of erstwhile and new friends, an experience in which people could explore connections and continuities through culture and fine art making. Local artists participated every mean solar day of the Festival—engaging with the primary artists from China in demonstrations, workshops, and performances.

On June 29, the plan presented Diaspora 24-hour interval to celebrate the global fluidity of Chinese culture—from the cuisine that tin can exist found in nigh every corner of the earth to the music emerging from the underground. Through food demonstrations, spoken word performances, and fifty-fifty a look at Washington, D.C.'s own Chinatown, Diaspora Day activities demonstrated how culture thrives through dynamic, diverse, and often transformative interactions.

Local Festival Participants

Among the local individuals and organizations who participated in the China program both on Diaspora Day and throughout the other nine days:

The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center is a national resource for discovering the result and complexity of the Asian Pacific American experience through collaboration, exhibitions, programs, and digital initiatives.

1882 Foundation is a nonpartisan national network involved in promoting education virtually the history and legacy of the Chinese exclusion laws in the United States.

Asian American LEAD provides educational and leadership preparation to Asian American youth in the D.C. metro expanse.

Busboys and Poets is a restaurant, bookstore, and community gathering space that actively works to cultivate creativity, cultural connections, and social alter through its several locations in the D.C. metro area.

BicycleSPACE is a bike store located near Mt. Vernon Square that organizes events such as repair workshops, yoga nights, and group rides.

Confucius Institute at George Stonemason University, a partnership with the Beijing Linguistic communication and Cultural University and the Office of Chinese Language Council International of the Chinese Ministry of Education, offers educational programs about Chinese language and culture.

East Rise Lion Dance Troupe is based in Maryland and practices Hok San-style lion dancing

The Newseum is an interactive museum of news and journalism that provides a forum for educational programs materials addressing the v freedoms of the First Amendment.

Ling Tang is a dancer, choreographer, and educator who trained at the Hubei Song and Dance Ensemble Institute and now teaches dance classes at the China Establish and the Washington Performing Arts Society.

U.South. Wushu Academy promotes and teaches wushu and tai chi in the United States in lodge to cultivate graphic symbol and train competitive athletes.

John Shun-Chieh Wang is a master calligrapher and seal engraver based in Potomac, Maryland.

The Metro DC Area Go Clubs promote get/weiqi through classes, games, and demonstrations.

Wings Over Washington Kite Social club is dedicated to flight, making, and educating the public about kites. On June 28, they volition lead flying demonstrations and share a display of kites from around the world.

The Wong People is a D.C.-based kung fu organization that performs and teaches dragon/lion dance, tai chi, and kung fu.

Xuejuan Trip the light fantastic Ensemble is a Virginia-based performing dance troupe dedicated to Chinese folk trip the light fantastic and educational activity.

Cedric Yeh is the Segmentation of Armed services History deputy chair and a curator at the National Museum of American History.

Related Resources

Asian Pacific Americans: Local Lives, Global Ties was a Smithsonian Folklife Festival programme in 2010 that brought together people from diverse communities to highlight the breadth of traditions practiced by APA cultures. Acquire more

Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center provides vision, leadership, and support for Asian and Pacific Islander American initiatives for the Smithsonian and works to amend reverberate their contributions to the American experience, world culture, and the understanding of our planet and the natural world. Learn more than

A Grain of Sand , the beginning Asian American album e'er produced (released in 1973 and featuring Charlie Mentum, Nobuko Miyamoto, and Chris Iijima) is role of the Smithsonian Folkways catalog. Learn more

Several Chinese Americans have been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts as National Heritage Fellows for their artistic excellence and support to sustaining such traditions as muk'yu, erhu, and Beijing opera. Read more than about the NEA National Heritage Fellowships. Acquire more

Selected Readings

Anderson, Crystal S. 2013. Beyond the Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Coe, Andrew. 2009. Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Nutrient in the United States. New York: Oxford Academy Printing.

Hom, Marlon K. 1987. Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Printing.

Hsu, Madeline Y. 2000. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration betwixt the United States and South Communist china, 1882-1943. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Lai, Him Marking, Genny Lim, Judy Yung. 1980. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. Seattle: University of Washington.

Lee, Jennifer 8. 2009. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the Globe of Chinese Nutrient. New York: Twelve.

Lee, Jonathan H.Ten. and Kathleen M. Nadeau. 2014. Asian American Identities and Practices: Folkloric Expressions in Everyday Life. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.

Lin, Jan. 1998. Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Alter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pritzker, Sonya. 2014. Living Translation: Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine. New York: Berghahn Books.

Tsui, Bonnie. 2009. American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods. New York: Complimentary Printing.

Westerman, William. 1996. Fly to Liberty: The Fine art of the Golden Venture Refugees. New York: Museum of Chinese in the Americas.

Wong, Deborah. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge.

Wu, Emily S. 2013. Traditional Chinese Medicine in the The states: In Search of Spiritual Meaning and Ultimate Health. Lanham, Doctor.: Lexington Books.

Yung, Bell and Eleanor S. Yung. 2014. Uncle Ng Comes to America: Chinese Narrative Songs of Immigration and Honey. Hong Kong: MCCM Creations.

Zheng, Su. 2010. Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Zhou, Min. 2009. Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community Transformation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Gallery

Smithsonian staff members describe how their families and communities sustain and transform Chinese civilisation.

This is my parents' eatery around 1974, a veritable haze of crimson. It comes from a postcard they had fabricated for publicity. My parents, like countless other new Chinese immigrants, turned to the eating house business organisation to make a living when they immigrated in the late '60s. They joined a Chinese eating house boom. New immigration laws in 1965 opened up America for an eye-opening assortment of new Chinese dishes and tastes.

Of grade I didn't know any of this. I was just a child. Somewhere only off the corner to the right is a pantry where I would sometimes sneak into and fall comatose to the clinking of silverware and the murmurs of patrons. For me information technology was just home.

—Cedric Yeh
Deputy Chair, Division of Armed forces History, Smithsonian National Museum of American History

My parents go on to be my source of Chinese-ness. They were born in the British colony of N Borneo, now Malaysia, and they would not set up foot in the People's Republic of China until much afterwards in life. However, they subscribed to a sense of Chinese-ness rooted in a mythical version of China, a cultural ethos able to define and identify Chinese-ness around the globe. It held power, a sense of comfort and inescapability, a mixture of improvisation and tradition.

—Konrad Ng
Director, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center
Raised mostly in Canada

This past June 15, I called my dad to wish him a happy Father's Day, in keeping with the American tradition of celebrating fathers on the third Lord's day of June. Growing up with my family unit, we would always get out to a favorite eating house to gloat the occasion.

However, since my Dad is Taiwanese, he gets a double commemoration each year because Father's Day is celebrated on Baronial 8 in Taiwan. In Mandarin Chinese, the pronunciation of both the number 8 and the calendar month of Baronial is bā. This pronunciation is very like to the character 爸 (bà), which ways "Pa" or "begetter." The Taiwanese, therefore, sometimes refer to August eight as Bābā Holiday (爸爸節 or 父親節).

My family, who lives in the Philippines, has kept this Taiwanese tradition. Since I alive in Washington, D.C., I'll have to settle for a phone call with my dad on August 8 and hearing almost all the great food I missed!

—Cecille Chen
Royalty Managing director, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Born and raised in Manila, Philippines

When I am at my weakest land, I dare non disobey my mother's advice. It doesn't matter how I take grown to tell her about books, recipes, or languages that I take discovered and acquired elsewhere. It doesn't matter what new palates I developed on my own. When I need to become rid of a bad coughing, I faithfully stick to the remedy I learned from my mother: Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa past the spoonful and evidently, hot water.

—Joan Hua
People's republic of china Folklife Festival program assistant, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Built-in in Kansas, grew upwardly in Taiwan and Montana

Food is central in celebrating civilization. My mother fabricated salty and sweet doong dumplings (Toishanese dialect for 粽子, or zongzi) each May for the "Double 5" (fifth day of the fifth lunar month) Festival. They magically appeared when we came home from school or piece of work—set up to eat cold, warmed by microwave, or sweetened with maple syrup.

After my mother passed away in 1994, I asked my sister-in-constabulary to teach the states how to make doong. Prep time took a whole week in which I soaked, washed, and boiled the bamboo leaves and prepared the other ingredients. I invited extended family members to come up make their ain doongs. The trickiest part was tying up the bundles with string so that information technology would pull off smoothly. Boiling the tightly wrapped doong took several more hours.

Here I am making doong. I may effort it once again after I retire this June!

—Wendy Lim
Editor/Projection Coordinator, Smithsonian Office of Visitor Services
Born in Hong Kong, raised in Chinatown, Washington, D.C., and Maryland

Although I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Expanse, I didn't grow up drinking the kind of soy milk you would discover at a Berkeley co-op. Instead it was Vitasoy, the potable make that's equally ubiquitous in Hong Kong equally Coca-Cola is in the The states. I've come up to larn that a number of food items I found in my kitchen as a kid are really artifacts from my parents' own childhoods in their homeland—from Vitasoy drinks to Haw Flakes to Fruitips candy.

These snacks, ordinary and unassuming in Hong Kong, were ways for my family unit to maintain a connectedness to a place they left backside. During a contempo trip to Hong Kong, I constitute myself gawking over this Vitasoy bottle, among many that were filled with sweet soy milk bathing in a warm tub of h2o in a 7-11. Though in an unfamiliar neighborhood in a land I hardly knew, once I took a sip, information technology tasted like I was home.

—Adriel Luis
Curator, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Eye

When I first left San Francisco for college in 1988, I had the old, clunky rice cooker on the left, which I accept taken with me as I've moved around the The states. Arcata, California, to San Francisco (again), then off to Urbana, Illinois, and finally to Washington, D.C.

Concluding year the rice cooker stopped working, and I had to replace it with the i on the correct. I suppose it is part of my Chinese "pack rat" roots that I cannot bear to part with the onetime ane, merely I am addicted of information technology. As with many of the animals I study, there has been a change in form from the older, larger "dinosaur" to a sleeker, smaller (but non necessarily better) ane.

Also different? The rice. When I was growing up, I ate white, long grain. It was a staple of my life. Unfortunately, for diverse wellness reasons (blood saccharide issues) in the last few years I have had to switch to brown and in smaller quantities.

—Christopher L. Mah
Research Collaborator, Invertebrate Zoology
Raised in San Francisco, California

The greeting on this doorway reads "恭賀新禧" in seal script. Information technology is a traditional greeting for the Lunar New year, which many diaspora Chinese all the same observe regardless of religious affiliation. This item brandish, forth with many other decorations, was put up past my church, the Chinese Christian Church of Greater Washington, D.C., in late Jan 2014. Every year I am reminded throughout the holiday of the syncretic nature of Chinese culture. Although nosotros no longer venerate the gods of our ancestors, we still notice religious meaning in these traditions and enjoy looking forward to an auspicious year with our community.

—Jessica Man
Intern, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Middle
Born in Takoma Park, Maryland, grew upwardly in Gaithersburg, Maryland

I grew up in Italy and moved to the Usa about xx-ii years ago. I had never heard about dragon boating until four years ago, when a friend took me to the Potomac race. Every bit I was looking for a water sport, dragon boating seemed platonic. One of the all-time parts of the experience has been the society itself—very inclusive in terms of gender, ethnicities, and concrete conditioning. In addition, every bit I never practiced a competitive sport before in my life, it was a pleasant surprise to find the teamwork.

—Pino Monaco
Acquaintance Director of Plan Evaluation, Smithsonian Heart for Learning and Digital Admission

My grandparents were minimalists out of necessity. Their wedding consisted of exchanging some hard candies, since sweets were scarce during wartime. And then as immigrants to America, many of their actions— patching erstwhile clothing, saving leftovers— were interpreted as stinginess.

Nevertheless, later on I realized how these things were but tradition.  During economic hardships in China, they prepared meals using homegrown ingredients. They taught me how to grow tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and cilantro, as well as produce not in American grocery stores: winter gourd, bok choy, and chives. It never occurred to them that by maintaining a vegetable garden, they were eating organic, getting their daily do, and being environmentally friendly; it was just something learned from their youth in China.

Even now, as a student who travels as well frequently to continue a garden, I always have at to the lowest degree a scallion plant growing in my kitchen – all it takes is a cup filled with water.

—Danielle Wu
Katzenberger Art History Intern, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Built-in in New Brunswick, New Jersey, raised in St. Charles, Missouri

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Source: https://festival.si.edu/2014/china/diaspora/smithsonian

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