Our family celebrated the Chinese New Year in two ways. We attended a cultural festival in downtown Co Springs. There were traditional Chinese dance performances as well as a variety of martial arts demonstrations. There were also Chinese food booths and items to buy that we saw in China two months ago – including the exact Panda tie that we bought for Ron.
Interesting to us was the crowd. Many participants were Caucasians holding the hand of their adopted Chinese daughters. John was the only obvious Chinese adopted boy among the whole bunch. We figured his odds were 40 to 1. Not bad for living in CO.
In the evening, we joined the Chinese Church for their celebration, which was dinner with a program. The room was beautifully decorated with balloons and red paper lanterns.
We had a wonderful time and met a number of other adoptive parents. Although John was clearly the youngest, several of the families had adopted boys. We exchanged contact info. with some of them so hopefully we can for grow John’s circle of Chinese friends.
A real treat for the evening was hearing a famous opera singer from China sing for us, Professor Lily Zhang. She has a wonderful testimony of how she began a relationship with God when she came to CO Springs as a visiting scholar at a University here. She was baptized in the Chinese Church the first year it was in existence and therefore has emotional ties to it that run deep. It was fun to watch John clap hardily after the singer's first song.
But what John liked best about the whole evening was the balloons.
He played with a large bunch of them that were tied together and placed on the stage for decorations. Actually he picked them up and walked them over to the woman who was the famous singer before the program began! In addition, before I could intervene, he stole a balloon from two of the children that were sitting near us.
Not being shy at all, he approached a five year old Chinese girl at the table next to ours. Reaching out, he touched her decorative red shoes and her red skirt without even saying hello! (Of course, he doesn’t talk yet so physically touching her was his alternative strategy). Fortunately, her mother was very understanding.
One tradition that the Chinese Church continued during the New Year’s celebration was giving out red envelopes (called Hong Bao in Chinese) to all the children present. The envelopes contain money and these had a special blessing written on them in Chinese. We will be keeping this safe for John’s scrapbook. It was also meaningful that they took donations for several orphanages in China so that those children could also receive a traditional red envelope with money in it.
Happy Chinese New Year from the Besonen's.
