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Lunar New Year Festival

Decent Essays

Lunar Festival at Discovery Green The experience I chose for my first cultural experience this semester was the Lunar New Year Festival at Discovery Green this past weekend. I chose this event initially because I was expecting the event to inhabit a prominent Asian population and cultural traditions. However, as I share my experience, I will explain why I ended up having to do a comparison of the Houston Lunar New Year Festival, and the type of celebration that would be taking place in the one-fifth of the rest of the world in Asian cultures on the other side of the world. I chose this particular experience by first searching upcoming events at Discovery Green. This is an organization that was founded in 2008, and since opening …show more content…

It was given this title because seven time winner of best DJ in Houston by the Houston Press, DJ Sun was sent back to Qingxi China to retrace his ancestral roots. His producer videotaped the whole journey, and when DJ Sun returned he wrote music to go with the video of his journey, which was the main event at the festival. DJ Sun was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands before he settled in Houston in his teens. DJ Sun has made many influential friends since his settle in Houston in 1993. One of those friends is the Asian Society Texas Center. It was this group who decided to fund DJ Sun’s trip back to China to trace his ancestral roots of the Chinese part of his heritage. I had the pleasure of interviewing DJ Sun to ask him a few questions about his journey. When I asked him what he expected when he began the trip, he gave me a humble answer. “He hoped to embark on a spiritual journey to see where he came from, and hopefully meet some of his distant relatives.” Next, I asked him if he could tell me if he noticed any similarities and differences among American culture and Chinese culture. He told me that the Chinese culture were much more collective in their daily practices than the average daily American people. It was common to see many family owned businesses with the whole family working to hold it together in one way or another. As for similarities, he told me one example that was dishearten in his tone of voice. When he was in the city, some people were hoping to make money from his journey, and the places he was allowed to visit. DJ Sun told me that at the end of the day, all cultures are opportunist in their own way not just American culture. On a more positive note, he told me once he left the city to the more rural areas, life around China was more traditional. He meet an old poor bee keeper in the country that enjoyed what his journey was about and offered to be his guide for the remainder of the trip.

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