Students gathered in the Mauck Solarium to celebrate the Lunar New Year last week.
Megan Li | Collegian

 

Students celebrated Lunar New Year with a potluck of Asian food in Mauck Solarium last week.

Sophomore Jihye Kim, who coordinated the event, said she wanted it to be an opportunity for community and fellowship rather than a focus on food alone. 

“I really hope that people get to meet other people that they haven’t had as much of a chance to talk to and become friends,” Kim said.

Campus celebrations for Lunar New Year and the fall Harvest “Chuseok” Festival started as a gathering of friends who wanted to make and eat Asian food together, according to Kim.

“My freshman year first semester, my roommate happened to be Chinese, and we found a bunch of different Asians,” Kim said. “So we got together to make Asian food to remind ourselves of home. Then we brought our non-Asian friends along to share with them our culture, and it just kind of grew from there.”

Sophomore Kate Sumarli, one of the cooks for the Lunar New Year event, was part of the first food gathering in the fall semester of her freshman year. 

“It was just kind of spontaneous, and then it eventually built up to this,” Sumarli said. 

The number of attendees grew from about four to six people to 40 or more last semester, according to Kim. 

“Over time, since the college is so tiny, we met a lot of different people interested in Asian food and culture,” Kim said.

Sophomore Turner Callaghan was one of those people. 

“I was there when we first started doing it,” Callaghan said. “We just started bringing food for each other, I suppose: inviting friends, giving some to people that came by. I like making food with my friends — that’s about it.”

Callaghan said a dish he usually makes with his friends to bring to the potluck is a Japanese dessert called hanami dango. Other dishes made by various student cooks include dumplings, banh mi or Vietnamese sandwiches, yakisoba or Japanese stir-fried noodles, tteok mandu gguk or Korean rice cake soup, and yakbap or Korean sweet rice. 

“These people do a good job cooking,” Sumarli said. “It’s always fun cooking. The cooks spend a lot of time making authentic dishes, and I think it really shows when all these people come and flock to this event.”

Kim said enjoying Asian cuisine with friends is important to her. 

“I grew up in Mali, West Africa,” Kim said. “I’m Korean-American, but I wasn’t really around a lot of other Koreans and I couldn’t eat a lot of Korean food just because of where we lived and the resources we had access to. So when I came to America, I was really excited to be around Americans, but also around other people who appreciated Asian food.”

In order to prepare for the event, Kim sent out a sign-up email to gauge the amount of cooks and attendees, who are usually charged $10 toward purchases for the event. She then went to the H Mart in Detroit with a group of friends to buy ingredients.

Kim said this year had better quality food than the earliest gatherings, where members were eating instant ramen. 

“Overall, this was probably our best one,” Kim said. “In the past, we had a lot of logistical or administrative issues. Some people were cooking while other people were eating. Sometimes, some of the food wasn’t ready yet, but this time we got a lot of food, a lot of really high quality food, and we were able to all bring it basically on time.”

Sumarli said she loves the consistent joy of gathering with friends for good food. 

“It’s always the same,” Sumarli said. “It’s always excellent. I encourage people to come if they like the food and even make stuff if they want.”

Kim said she loves the close community these events bring to fruition.

“It makes me really happy to see people get together and enjoy their time, enjoy the food, meet other people,” Kim said. “It’s really nice being around people who have a similar background — having grown up in Africa, I didn’t really have that chance. Just being able to hang out with all kinds of people and having those kinds of opportunities. I just really like how other people enjoy it. It makes me happy to see that.”