A Great Way to Celebrate the Lunar New Year

A Great Way to Celebrate the Lunar New Year

There’s no other way to say it: last weekend was a great time to be Asian American.

I spent Saturday night at a local Lunar New Year celebration sponsored by the US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce Southwest, and it felt like a family gathering – only much more diverse. The event honored area businesses and people who promoted diversity and inclusion (and I was thrilled to be one of the honorees), so it was quite a multi-hued audience.

On the same night as our Lunar New Year event, “The Farewell” – a lovely film about a Chinese family’s decision to keep their mother’s cancer diagnosis a secret from her – took home Best Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards (the indie version of the Oscars), and Zhao Shuzhen, who played the grandmother, won best supporting female. 

And then, of course, on Sunday night, the South Korean film “Parasite” won the Best Picture Oscar, the first non-English-language film to do so, and Bong Joon Ho took home Best Director.

 Those three events – a local Asian American Chamber event celebrating diversity in the workplace and two events dedicated to celebrating cinema – may not seem like they have much to do with each other, but they do. 

The Chamber event I attended celebrated the strides local businesses have made in creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace – one that truly reflects the changing face of America. The Hollywood events celebrated an industry that attempts to hold up a mirror to society, but in so doing, actually helps to shape it.

The stories we tell – in visual art, in movies, on TV, in literature – feed our aspirations and our empathy. They show us that we’re more alike than we are different. And when our stories represent more than just a narrow band of the human experience, we’re collectively more able to envision and accept a wider, more diverse – and ultimately, more accurate – version of the world we call home.

“The Farewell” – the story of a Chinese-American family struggling to say goodbye to their beloved matriarch back home – and “Parasite” – about a poor South Korean family striving to improve their station in life – portray universal themes that could be told – with minor changes – in any language, in any setting.

The more we see those stories, the better. Racism, xenophobia, and nationalism are still powerful forces across the globe, and they serve only to separate us and pit us against “the other.”

We’re all part of the solution, though. Last weekend, I saw the evidence that – whether you were at a local event in Texas or at a globally televised event in Hollywood – we have the capacity for change.