Lunar New Year Celebration
The Summit Library Chinese Club is hosting its annual Lunar New Year Celebration on Sunday, January 22, 2023, from 2:00 – 4:30 p.m. at the Summit Library. Experience a variety of Asian cuisines, participate in traditional Chinese painting and other visual arts, and watch traditional Chinese dances and music performed by local artists. The Lunar New Year, or Chinese New Year, is celebrated on the first new moon that appears between January 21 and February 20. This upcoming lunar year is the year of the Rabbit.
Visitors will also be able to view the Lunar New Year Art Show gallery, featuring original visual art pieces by young artists in Summit and surrounding areas. Submissions for the Art Show are currently open and will close on February 11, 2023.
“When my children were young, they went to the library all the time,” says Ni Liu, member of the Summit Free Public Library Foundation and organizer of the Summit Library Chinese Club. “Mrs. Wheeless, a librarian and the best storyteller I have known, would tell many interesting stories along with beautiful music accompanied to them on her story telling program.” Mrs. Wheeless asked Liu to create a Chinese New Year’s celebration at the Library, which ended up being a great success, and was continued in the subsequent years. “From then on, more moms from the local community joined me to volunteer for the New Year Celebration,” says Liu, “and the scale of the celebration has been growing bigger and bigger, and the event has become an epic in Summit.”
The Summit Library Chinese Club is a volunteer-led organization that works with the Summit Library hand in hand to organize Chinese/Asian culture-related events in the community. They lead many other programs in partnership with the Summit Library, such as their Chinese Corner, a Chinese Immersion program held on the 2nd and 4th Sundays of every month during the school year. The Chinese Club is continuously adding new programs, such as NeuLingo, a Mandarin language learning course for Grades 1-5, held on Thursdays from January 12 through February 9, 2023.
The Lunar New Year Celebration is free and all are welcome. To register for the Lunar New Year Celebration, visit the Summit Library website at summitlibrary.org. To register for the Lunar New Year Art Show, visit the Summit Library Chinese Club website at 75chineseclub.com.
