[January 27, 2014]

International Students at NCKU Celebrate the Coming Chinese New Year

More than 200 international students gather at the Chinese Language Center (CLC) of National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), southern Taiwan, during the lunch time today for a spring gala, celebrating the coming Chinese New Year.

As the year of the Horse coming around the corner, the foreign students at CLC make dumplings and write red couplets to experience the preparation for the coming Spring Festival, which falls on Jan 31 this year.

"The center has fostered cultural understanding through this fun and educational event," according to NCKU CLC Director Rong-Fu Wu who added that a spring couplet is a pair of lines of poetry expressing happy and hopeful thoughts for the coming year.

He said, "We have arranged Chinesedumpling making, Chinese calligraphy writing for international students to understand and appreciate the celebration of Chinese New Year and at the same time offer opportunities for them to practice the language."

Ruppert Christine from Germany appreciates the red couplets as an important decoration during Chinese Lunar New Year. Holding up the Chinese characters she wrote with brush, Ruppert said that she finds the double meanings of Spring and Blessing when the character is posted upside down quite interesting.

"Getting chance to write calligraphy is fun," said Harmony Shou-Ann Lu from the United Sates who wrote her couplet to express her wishes for a powerful Horse year.

Harmony said that she grew up in the US and she never celebrated the Chinese New Year before even though her father is a Taiwanese. She comes to NCKU to study Chinese partly because she'd like to find her roots in Taiwan and understand the culture and the people here as well.

"Making dumpling is a lot of fun," added Ruppert who tried dumplings before when she was in Germany with her friends from Taiwan. "I'd like to try some more later."

An Italian student Mauro Trapani who appreciates Asian culture a lot and chooses Taiwan as the starting place for his studying Mandarin Chinese said, "People in Taiwan are so friendly and the food is so great that I may stay longer if my studying improves as I expected."

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