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East Asians celebrate Lunar New Year to mark the beginning of a new year on the Lunar calendar. Fermilab’s Asian/Pacific Association hosted a celebration on Jan. 27 in honor of Lunar New Year, the year of the rabbit in the Chinese zodiac. Despite a blizzard outside, approximately 50 lab community members and families enjoyed the food, decorations, and fun activities in Building 327.
The event started with a multicultural lucky food sampling, followed by a dumpling making demonstration, Mahjong tournament and poker card playing. Asian Pacific-themed Jeopardy highlighted cultural uniqueness.
A crowd favorite was watching and tasting the dumplings as they were made in real-time. Many thanks to Genfa Wu, Yun He and Yi Xie from the FAPA leadership team for bringing materials and setting up the dumpling demonstration station, and Meiqin Xiao from the main injector department for showing how to wrap the dumplings. “A delicious way to begin the new year, dumplings were great, I will be searching for the recipe,” said Jason Crnkovic from the external beamlines department. An impressive display of Mahjong tiles drew a large crowd. Thanks to Yun He and Zunping Liu from the target systems department for giving eager participants tutorials on how to play Mahjong and poker cards.
The food items included dumplings, spring rolls, sweets such as rosogollas and kaju katlis, sticky rice cakes, samosas, black-eyed peas and cabbage, lentil soup, long noodles, oranges and grapes. Thank you to all the volunteers for bringing the delicious spread. There was a lot of laughter and enjoyment when a Jeopardy game about Asian culture, landmarks and celebrities was played. Chocolates were awarded to the winners of the game. Many thanks to Meredith Lee and Sudeshna Ganguly from the target systems department for hosting the Jeopardy game. In her first FAPA event, Baisakhi Mitra, a graduate student at the University of Mississippi, commented, “I really appreciated how much effort was put into creating such a versatile Jeopardy questionnaire. So many fun activities to start a new year!”.
Among the attendees and volunteers was accelerator directorate employee Roshanda Spillers, who commented, “I enjoyed myself. I’m looking forward to more interactions with FAPA.” Thank you to everyone who participated in planning and attended this event. We would like to thank FAPA’s executive sponsor, Amber Kenney, for advocating and supporting this event, and Fermilab’s diversity and inclusion specialist, Anahi Ruiz Beltran for co-hosting. Thanks to the conference office for approving this event, and the site access office for allowing family members access on-site. Finally, we would like to thank all our friends and allies for their continued support.
As we celebrate the Lunar New Year, we wish you happiness, success and prosperity.
See the Fermilab FAPA SharePoint page for more photos (login with services account required).