Richmond Hill rings in Chinese New Year with multicultural celebration
The show was filled with well-known Chinese songs, classic operas, artistic dances, and some jaw-dropping martial arts performances by award-winning athletes.
Yorkregion.com
Feb. 6, 2019
Sheila Wang

It is in Richmond Hill where east meets west.

Hundreds of theatregoers gathered for a festive night at the first Chinese New Year Celebration on Feb. 2 at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts.

A dazzling array of performances featuring traditional and modern Chinese culture drew rounds of applause and cheers from an audience of various cultural backgrounds.

The two-hour celebration to ring in the Year of the Pig was organized through a joint effort of the Toronto Chinese Ai Yue (TCAY) Philharmonic Arts and the Richmond Hill Concert Band.

“This is a multicultural event for everybody in Richmond Hill and an educational thing too,” said Joan Sax, fundraising director of the Richmond Hill Concert Band.

Sax met Yvonne Jin, organizer of TCAY for the first time two years ago at the town’s Cultural Summit and they have been organizing events together ever since.

Jin, a Chinese software engineer from Shanghai, immigrated with her husband to Canada in 1997. With a deep passion for Chinese music and a strong desire to bring it to Canada, Jin founded the chorus TCAY -- a registered non-profit cultural and arts organization -- eight years ago in Richmond Hill.

“We are both the type of people that wanted to create art events and have a passion about music. And even though we’re from very different cultures, we have the same goals; the caring for people for education,” Sax said.

Hosted in Mandarin, Cantonese and English by Coun. Castro Liu and Jenny Wang, a member of TCAY Philharmonic Arts, the show was filled with well-known Chinese songs, classic operas, artistic dances, and some jaw-dropping martial arts performances by award-winning athletes.

Following a chorus of O Canada to live music, a gold dragon and two sparkling lions emerged from the audience and made their way to the stage to spread good luck to their Canadian spectators.

The traditional Chinese dragon and lion dance ended with Richmond Hill Mayor Dave Barrow feeding a lion a lettuce which means great fortune in Chinese culture as lettuce sounds like the Chinese word for "making money."

As if there hadn’t been enough surprises, the Richmond Hill Concert Band pushed the celebration to another climax at the end by performing a series of classic Chinese music that is widely-known in China, but rarely heard elsewhere.

A Chinese God of Fortune wrapped up the show by handing each spectator a red envelope, which represents good luck in the new year. Traditionally, Chinese people give out red envelopes with money inside during the Chinese New Year as a way to deliver the best wishes to friends and families.

Coun. Greg Beros and Coun. Carmine Perrelli also handed out red envelopes as attendees walked in to the theatre.

The Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, is the most important holiday observed in Chinese culture and many other Asian countries. It has been celebrated for more than 4,000 years.

The Chinese New Year falls on Feb. 5 this year, according to the lunar calendar. It is also the beginning of a 15-day-long revelry in China, where families gather to ring out the old and ring in the new.

Chinese has become the largest ethnic group in Richmond Hill, as close to one third of its population identified as Chinese in 2016. The population of other visible minorities has also increased significantly over time.

“This is a multiculturalism grassroots story. And the lovely part was that it was set in place because of the planning by the town for this to happen. They created the environment so that groups can partner and multiculturalism can thrive,” Sax said.

The town’s cultural summit that brought Sax and Jin together is an annual meeting in Richmond Hill launched in 2014, aimed at bringing artists, arts organizations, and culture lovers together to learn about what is happening in Richmond Hill culturally, said Stephanie Graham, Richmond Hill’s cultural services co-ordinator.

The cultural summit is held in March every year, and it is slated for March 26 this year.

Through the universal language of music, Sax and Jin, who each led a team of talented artists of different cultural backgrounds have worked together on a slew of community events such as a Christmas event, Lantern Festival, and Senior Festival since then.

Last year, they decided to bring the first Chinese New Year Celebration to Richmond Hill.

The town’s cultural summit is one of the recommendations from the Richmond Hill cultural plan created in 2011, Graham said.

“The vision of the cultural plan is basically that we want culture to be part of all facets of town’s planning and decision-making where diversity, gender and age are reflected in all aspects of cultural expressions,” Graham said.

She said Richmond Hill will continue to help promote cultural events and celebrate diversity.