Lunarfest—New Haven’s Chinese New Year celebration—offers both consolation and a reminder of what cultural displays cannot translate.
Emy Zheng sat center stage in the Peabody Museum’s skylit gallery, her fingers leaping over the guzheng’s 21 strings, plucking in tune with the ensemble behind her. Music evoking dancing snakes and racing horses—the old and new zodiacs of the Lunar New Year—filled the sun-soaked room. After the last notes faded, Zheng admitted a quiet truth to herself.
“I’ve lived in China all my life,” she said in Mandarin. “So when suddenly there’s a New Year when my family and friends aren’t around, I really miss them.”
In China, Zheng, a high school junior, would’ve celebrated Lunar New Year during a nine-day national holiday, reuniting with relatives and making dumplings alongside her family. But since moving to Hamden on her own for high school, she doesn’t even get the day off. This February, she celebrated the holiday at New Haven’s own Lunar New Year celebration, Lunarfest.
Started in 2012 by the Yale-China Association, Lunarfest is Connecticut’s best-attended Lunar New Year celebration. Each year, thousands come in from across the state for a festival with lion dancing on Whitney Avenue, a zodiac scavenger hunt, the Lunarfest Artist Market, and workshops across the city. This year, Zheng participated by playing the guzheng—a Chinese zither—at a New Haven Chinese Cultural Cooperative (NHCCC) concert at the Peabody. In the midst of a new year spent mostly alone, she found the audience’s enthusiastic response to her performance heartening.
“When people have a mind of discovering other cultures, sharing Chinese culture with them becomes very attractive for me,” she said.
As an international student who grew up in mainland China and attended high school in the United States, I felt a similar sense of recognition at Lunarfest. During the parade, when I heard an a cappella rendition of Dang Ni Lao Le (“When You Are Old”), a song I had first heard as a middle schooler watching TV in Shenzhen, I almost cried. I had not realized those feelings of nostalgia were there.
Although earnest, many performances seemed clumsily done: notes out of tune, a few swords and sticks dropped, handkerchiefs spun too far and luckily caught. Zheng also felt that engagement for other activities—such as a crafts workshop she helped run—was surface-level: “There’s a big challenge in moving beyond only superficial representations of our activities.”
While attendees and organizers praise Lunarfest as an opportunity for cultural visibility, many I spoke with felt that the event barely scratched the surface of Lunar New Year’s rich traditions. Among the crowd’s consoling cheers for each mistake, questions lingered: Is the event an attempt at genuine celebration, or just a performance of culture? To an audience of thousands, including many onlookers unfamiliar with Lunar New Year, could Lunarfest last beyond the flashes of red and gold?
***
When Yale-China started Lunarfest, Nancy Yao, the organization’s former president, was most focused on how the event could raise the organization’s “profile on campus.” Yao, with Annie Lin, the former director of Arts Programming at Yale-China, pitched the event as an opportunity for people who usually “don’t interact with China or Chinese culture” to see it in their own city.
“And I just knew it would be fun. Because who doesn’t like arts and crafts, Lunar New Year, a parade, good food?” asked Yao. “Those are easy. Those are low-hanging fruits.”
Lin grew up in Morro Bay, California, a predominantly white town, and came to Yale for college, where she was exposed to a larger Asian community. After graduating, she joined Yale-China, which first took her to mainland China and Hong Kong, then back to New Haven. Returning to America, Lin began to recognize how invisible her culture had felt during her childhood.
“There was this longing,” Lin said. “I didn’t know that something so ingrained in my blood and my body, something that my parents never felt seen for, could get recognized in this way.”
She was surprised at the size of the crowds that turned up for Lunarfest in its early years, even in sub-zero temperatures. “And you don’t have to go to Manhattan for that, or up to Boston,” Lin said of large-scale Lunar New Year celebrations. “It can be right here.”
“I didn’t know that something that was so ingrained in my blood and my body, something that my parents never felt seen for, could get recognized in this way.”
But Lunarfest’s visibility feels short-lived. When the parade concludes each year, the crowd quickly disperses back into the city. The lion dancers pile into white trucks, packing in their costumes to drive back to New York. Before noon, Whitney Avenue returns to normal. Nothing remains but the lanterns against a gray sky and the occasional stray confetti.
Zheng was moved by the audience’s appreciation of her performance. But once the music faded and she had answered a few questions, she felt distant from them again.
“It’s not quite like they are closer to us,” Zheng said. Her impression of the bridge built seemed much more one-way; while it was touching to see her Chinese culture on display, being seen didn’t quite translate into being known.
Camille Chang ’26, a Yale-China fellow who helped run a calligraphy workshop at Lunarfest, felt that the event’s wide reach came with certain trade-offs. “There’s not as much culturally specific knowledge that you can put out there,” she said, adding that many “sacrifices” had to be made. Chang’s maternal side of the family was originally from Fujian, a coastal province in southern China. She felt that she couldn’t put a “Fujianese spin” on Lunarfest, just as other fellows couldn’t tilt the event towards their own traditions.
“It’s the idea of the mythical Asian American identity,” Chang added, “You have to create this event for New Haven, and create a China that is kind of imagined.”
Emy Zheng, right, performing the guzheng with the NHCCC.
***
Mengxi Ying, who played the erhu with the NHCCC at Lunarfest, said three kids—a Japanese girl and two white boys—came up to her after the concert, eager to learn about the instrument. She held their hands on the bow as they tried playing their first melodies.
Growing up in China, Ying’s parents had made her play the erhu, a Chinese two-stringed fiddle, against her will. She tolerated it until middle school, but quit immediately when she got permission. After moving to the United States eighteen years ago and hearing erhu music again in recordings, Ying fell back in love with the instrument. “There’s just so much nostalgia,” Ying said. “Memories about my childhood, about how this song was playing on TV.”
In China, Ying attended concerts with musicians in tuxes and dresses, elevated on a big stage. At Lunarfest, performers sat only six feet away from the audience. “Like in a village, when there’s a bonfire, dancing, and people are just standing around, and maybe they can join later, too,” she said.
“If only when I was a child, erhu was introduced to me in this way,” Ying added, “I would practice voluntarily.”
Lin, Yale-China’s former arts programming director, hopes that participants might feel inspired as Ying did. “That could be the reason they’re going to end up being someone who appreciates and wants to study abroad, right?” Lin said. “These events are growth spaces, they’re learning spaces.”
***
Zheng has been in the United States for almost two years. Her friend group remains mostly Chinese, and she still finds it easier to joke and express herself in Mandarin. At school, she notices moments of brief connection, but everyday differences—food, humor, and even dating norms—often remind her of the gulf between her Chinese culture and the culture she has moved into.
Despite her doubts about how much a single day of cultural exchange can bridge divides, Zheng still thinks Lunarfest is a crucial step towards mutual understanding. “If we can help them appreciate Chinese music and think that it is beautiful, that’s already very good,” she said.
Today, the small moments of connection after each performance sustain Zheng’s efforts. She recalls questions about her guzheng and an audience member coming up to say, “Your music reminded me of my hometown’s river.”
Trading the atmosphere of Lunar New Year in Beijing for Lunarfest’s flashes of red and gold, Zheng doesn’t consider her choice to study in the U.S. a sacrifice—just a change. “I recognize that if I were in China, I couldn’t bring this kind of music abroad,” she said. “So I feel quite happy. I don’t regret that I’m not at home.”
Jingchu Sophia Zhang is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.
Photos by Daniel Havlat.