Celebrating Chinese New Year with food

Senior Samantha Ho purchased fried rice, milk tea boba and sesame balls on Jan. 24. Students could add spices and soy sauce for flavor.

Irene Zheng, Website Editor

To celebrate Lunar New Year, Chinese Honor Society (CHS) sold food at their annual luncheon. Students and teachers crowded into Room 1621 to pick up their food on Jan. 23, 24 and 27.

Fried rice, pan-fried buns and sesame balls were offered all three days, along with strawberry, mango and milk tea with tapioca. Depending on the day, customers could also choose curry chicken, spicy chicken and sweet and sour chicken as a main dish.

“We wanted something easy to grab, easy to clean up and something people would be willing to try,” senior and assistant Tyler Robinson said.

Since the start of the second semester, the officers have been planning the luncheon. As an assistant, Robinson helped set the prices of the food and drinks.

“We didn’t want to make it too expensive to where people didn’t want to buy it, nor too little to where we didn’t make any profit,” Robinson said.

Every day of the luncheon, students were offered the opportunity to get a $1 discount off a main dish for correctly answering five trivia questions about why Lunar New Year is celebrated and its cultural importance.

“[Trivia] has always been a thing that we’ve done at our events,” sophomore and advisor Ellen Dai said. “It goes along with our club’s culture because we like to give back. We enjoy it when people win prizes because we want to make them feel happy.”

After learning about the luncheon from friends, junior Grace Pravinkumar bought sweet and sour chicken on the last day of the event.

“The food passed my expectations and was very filling,” Pravinkumar said. “It was all Chinese food that I already knew of, but I did learn why fish is eaten on Lunar New Year from the trivia questions.”

With around 300 sales in main dishes and 150 in boba sales, Dai said the amount of people that came who weren’t Chinese surprised her.

“I was super proud because that’s a sign that we’re letting everyone know that you don’t have to be Chinese to come by and enjoy Chinese New Year,” Dai said.