[Music]
My name is Fe Tom, and we're at the Mission Garden in Tucson
at the base of “A” mountain.
We're celebrating the Lunar New Year
with the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center in the Mission Garden.
The Chinese New Year
based on the Moon, the Lunar New Year.
So that's what's called Lunar New Year, and
it goes from a new moon to the full moon.
And this whole occasion is just to get people
to understand how to be healthy and wealthy and
and how to promote the growing of their crops
and be prosperous doing that.
So as you know, Chinese-American we celebrate Thanksgiving,
We celebrate Christmas,
we celebrate New Year's and then we celebrate Chinese New Year.
By the time you get to Chinese New Year, it's like,
you know, a little bit worn out from the other,
but it's still something that we practice.
I think there's probably just as many cultures
and celebrate the Lunar New Year as they do
the Solar New Year.
[Music]
We as Chinese came here
in about the 1880s
with the building
of the railroad and
some people stayed and then they started to farm in this area.
They would take these vegetables that they they grew
and sell it to the people that were in this area.
(Nancy) Mission Gardens is an agricultural history museum.
What we have done
is gathered the seeds from the early Chinese families
that reflect the vegetables that they would have grown.
So a lot of these came from
China and have been handed down through the generations
of the Chinese families here.
[Music]
So my great great grandfather came over
to work in Mexico, in the farms in Mexico
when they had the Exclusion Act, that the Chinese weren't
allowed in Arizona,
but so Mexico kind of picked up on that and they had
a lot of the Chinese
go down into Mexico to do the farming for them down there.
I used to with my grandmother, we would grow the bok choy
and then we'd actually blanch it and then hang it up
on the clothesline with clothes pins and let it dry.
And the bok choy would keep for years preserved.
And it makes a wonderful soup
(Nancy) Almost every Chinese family that had a grocery story
or even a restaurant or a laundry if they had
a little patch of land available in their backyard,
they would grow vegetables.
My grandmother grew vegetables and we had the different kinds
of fruit trees of things that were originally from China
[Music]
(Speaker) You will not be able to do this in one sitting.
It takes them two weeks, just as it's been the damn thing.
Well, because it's Chinese New Year or it's Lunar New Year
one of the there's a couple of fruits that a lot of people
use and will have available, and that's the pomelo,
which is a large grapefruit
and that kind of signifies family unity.
And they have oranges, tangerines and those
kind of represent wealth.
They're kind of like gold in their round.
So I, you know, all these things that are associated
with Lunar New Year typically are pretty
auspicious kinds of symbols and representations.
[Music]
(Fe) We had a little loquat tree that we planted
in the Chinese garden today with the Liu family
to honor our ancestors.
You honor, you know, those people that have passed.
But you also honor your future.
You know, a family that when you're gone,
you still able to produce and have some fruit for them.
[Drumming]
So there's the lion dance that's coming pretty soon.
[Drumming]
In Cantonese, it's
gung hay fat choy, people say the same thing back to you.
And usually you hold your hand like like this.
So you're both wishing each other health and wealth.
[Drumming Ends]
[Applause]