Paly community celebrates Chinese New Year customs

Every Chinese New Year’s Eve, junior Cynthia Dong sits with her friends and family as they make dumplings together, symbolizing a good start to the new year. While many enjoy this holiday for di reasons, Dong said the best part of it is getting back in touch with friends.

Determined by the lunar calendar, the Chinese New Year occurs in January or February and lasts for around 15 days. With its numerous traditions, it is celebrated by many each year.

Mandarin teacher Joe Zhou said there is a legend about Nian, a monster that came to a village every year to eat people. To scare the monster away, the villagers put red-colored paper on their doors, hung red lanterns and set o recrackers. Today, all of these are Chinese New Year traditions and celebrate the victory of the villagers.

Zhou said, for him, the festival celebrates family values.

“Everybody has to go home for the festival no matter where you are,” Zhou said. “I have a family in China, and on New Year’s Eve — I cannot go back because I have to teach here — but when they serve the food, they leave an empty chair there with the food on the table.”

Junior Jonathan Liu said Chinese New Year is one of the best times to spend time with family.

“We always get everyone together,” Liu said. “We would always have three yue-bing (mooncakes), and we’d share those.”

Dong said it’s a Chinese tradition to put coins inside dumplings because it symbolizes money. However, her family does not think this is sanitary, so they use a substitute for the coins.

“What’s special about the dumplings during New Year’s is we will often put some sugar or candies inside one speci c dumpling, and the person who eats the speci c dumpling will be the luckiest among all of us,” Dong said.

“Sometimes, I eat almost all of them to

Freshman Yoray Chen said her family usually has hot pot and red bean cake the night before, and they also make dumplings from scratch.

“We’ll make over a hundred dumplings, and we eat them over Lunar New Year and the days following,” Chen said. Zhou said he and his family eat symbolic foods because of Chinese homophones, words that sound the same but have di erent meanings. For example, he said Yu means sh as well as surplus, so eating sh symbolizes fortune and surplus food to eat in the coming year.

“(With) nian gao, for example, nian means sticky, gao means cake,” Zhou said. “Sticky rice cake that everybody has to eat. Why? Because Nian (phonetically) also means “year” besides “sticky.” ... Gao means going up high. Nian gao means every year you go up, up, up. at means you’re successful as a family.”

Similarly, Zhou said Chinese people usually write a big character, fú, on red paper, but when they put the character on the wall, they do it upside down.

“Upside down means dau in Chinese. Fú means happiness,” Zhou said. “When you put it upside down, it sounds like fú dou le. Fú dou le means the happiness arrived. You can see it has a double meaning, Chinese people seem to like to play that kind of

Brianna Zhou Sports Editor

In Silicon Valley, one of the country’s leading technological innovation hubs, many students like senior Kyle Park said that they have felt pressure from a young age, both from the school district and their parents, to follow a STEM-focused pathway.

To Park, president of Paly’s Student Institute of the Arts, living in this area has limited his exposure to some creative elds.

“I realized that things existed out there using the application of art,” Park said. “I feel like the problem is that Palo Alto is so STEM focused, I didn’t really have an opportunity to see that there were more creative elds out there.”

Senior Alisha Bernatzki, who applied to music programs including e Chinese University of Hong Kong music program and the singer-songwriter program at New York University, said living in an environment where everyone’s main focus is STEM careers has caused her to want to move to a di erent area after high school.

“It does de nitely make me want to move and pursue my career outside of (Silicon Valley), but I would do that regardless unless I actually wanted to study something like computer science,” Bernatzki said.

In regards to the arts and humanities courses o ered at Paly, English teacher Lucy

Chinese people celebrate for fteen days after New Year’s Eve. At the end of the fteen days, there is the Yuan Xiao festival, which indicates the New Year’s celebration has come to an end.

“ e Yuan Xiao festival is also called the lantern festival,” Zhou said. “Everybody has to put their red lanterns out by the door on the street. e kids hold the red lanterns (and run) around. People eat Yuan Xiao, the sticky rice ball dumpling (where the) inside is sweet. It’s another fun festival with lots of reworks that night.” e culture displayed in the festival is so rich, with di erent colors and di erent activities,” Zhou said. “People are very happy.”

Zhou said the Chinese New Year is a fun traditional Chinese festival with many activities.

Filppu said she thinks Paly o ers a good variety for all students.

“I think there is plenty of room at Paly for students to take humanities courses to their heart’s content if that’s what they choose to do,” Filppu said.

Park and Bernatzki also said they think Paly has done a decent job in attempting to bring more creative opportunities to students. However, Bernatzki said there are de nitely areas to improve and possible courses and programs that could be implemented for a richer education.

“ e American school system can provide more in general for students, but Paly has done a good job in supporting their students,” Bernatzki said. “It could be cool if we had a song-writing program or had a music theory program on top of the AP Music eory class.”

Park said implementing more lanes for Visual and Performing Arts courses would also allow students who are serious about pursuing arts and music to be surrounded by like-minded students with similar interests.

“Increasing the amount of lanes for creative courses would be better,” Park said. “I think some kids are just trying to ll their VAPA credits, and with more lanes, you won’t get stuck in a class with kids who are just going to screw around and are only taking the class to ful ll credits.”

When I open my fridge, a sea of expired food items greet me. A lone kosher pickle in a tall glass jar. A clear bag full of pine nuts on a red plastic tin of gochujang. A squirt bottle full of mayonnaise way past the “use by” date.

But I never bat an eye at the expiration dates printed on the sides of these containers. In fact, I rarely even check them. However, many fear the aftermath of consuming an expired food item, ed of the foodborne illness they might acquire, too lazy to care about the detrimental impact they are making on the environment.

According to Feeding America, the U.S. wastes some 119 billion pounds of food, which equates to $408 billion, annually. Residential food waste makes up 39% of all food waste, which means on average, American households throw out around 295 pounds of food each year. cant amount of food waste in households is caused by throwing away food that has passed its cial expiration date, but is still safe to eat.

Contrary to popular belief, expiration dates are not always an indicator of safety and should not determine the shelf life of many products. For example, if you see mold growing on cream, don’t use it. But if the cream’s expiration date has passed, and there is no visible spoilage, you’re most likely good to go.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, expiration dates only aim to help consumers and retailers decide when a food item is at its peak quality. At the surface, food waste is caused by the population’s lack of education surrounding expiration dates and the environment. However, food waste is an even larger problem at or before the Most expiration dates are set conservatively by manufacturers to account for transportation, storage and handling, which leads to even more food waste.

Furthermore, many grocery stores only sell produce that’s up to a certain aesthetic standard. Cosmetic imperfections — such as weird shapes, odd colors or blemishes on a peel you don’t even eat — deem certain produce inedible and ugly.

But this discarded produce is just as delicious as awless fruits and vegetables you might nd at the egregiously expensive Whole Foods.

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has launched multiple e orts to decrease food waste, many markets still reject ugly food items. Extreme anti-food waste activists, called “freegans,” reject consumerism and scavenge for perfectly edible food items in dumpsters behind these markets. ough this is an radical example, there are many other simple yet e ective practices you can take to reduce food waste in your home and community. To make a di erence at the retail level, purchase food from Mis ts Market or Imperfect Foods. ese companies form relationships with manufacturers and rescue aesthetically “ugly” produce and food approaching its “use by” dates.

Or, just use the old sni test, which according to the USDA should determine spoilage in a food item. I’m pretty darn sure those week-old leftovers sitting in the fridge are perfectly edible, so don’t worry about contracting a rare foodborne illness. You’re going to be OK.

But Park also said taking these creative classes at Paly has caused him to feel judged by his peers, as he said many students and adults in the community see arts classes as not as challenging or ambitious as many math or science classes.

“While there are quite a few art courses that are o ered at Paly, I think there’s a stigma around taking them, especially because Palo Alto as an academic environment is so STEM-focused,” Park said. “All the kids are gunning to take the highest level science or math AP courses, and if a kid decides to take a regular non-weighted art course because they’re interested in it, then it’s perceived as slacking o instead of pursuing their interests.”

Because of this stigma at Paly, Park said he was driven to search for creative oppor tunities on his own outside of school to escape these judgments.

“I pursued a lot of my creative endeavors outside of school, not because I didn’t have the option to, but because I didn’t want people judging me,” Park said. “It’s sort of like a subtle pressure.”

Consequently, Park said the pressure to pursue STEM pathways prevented his exposure to such creative elds earlier on in his academic career at Paly.

“I think I would’ve been able to pursue these interests earlier if I had the con dence to do it, and because of external pressures, I didn’t,” Park said. “Because (majoring in product design) was a super recent decision, I didn’t have the time or skills to create a good portfolio. Had I realized that I wanted to do this earlier, it would’ve been easier to set myself up for opportunities in the future.”