Making Tong Yun and Birdwatching in Chinatown: a Dongzhi 冬節 Celebration
Image: 謝兆龍
Has the Community Been Fed? is a workshop series centered on hospitality as a mode of public engagement between artists and their communities. Throughout the month of December, artists will host film screenings, workshops, and artist talks that traverse diverse points of research and interest, which will culminate with food and conversation. The aim of this workshop series is to engage the public through events while opening channels for exchange through food, outside the mediated boundaries of artist and public.
Has the Community Been Fed? is presented by Noor Bhangu, an emerging curator and scholar based between Winnipeg, Treaty 1 and Toronto/Tkaronto, whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. Bhangu was the curator-in-residence at Latitude 53 from July-September 2019, and will return to curate an exhibition in early 2020.
Members of aiya啊呀! would like to invite you to gather and reflect with us to celebrate Dongzhi 冬節 (the Winter Solstice). This will be a shared experience of making and eating sweet and savoury dumplings, and sharing conversation. Aiya Collective members will share field notes from a birdwatching experience in Chinatown. All are welcome.
Dongzhi is one of the traditional Chinese festivals and also one of the 24 solar terms. The festival is both a time of darkness and hope. The shortest day and darkest day of the year, every day will get longer and lighter from here. As the last festival of the year, some believe that it marks a turning point.
Traditions vary by region. In some of our families, we eat tang yuan (Mandarin) or tong yun (Cantonese) to celebrate Dongzhi, in some of our families we eat dumplings, wontons and mutton. Some of us grew up celebrating this festival at home, some of us learned about it later in life, some of us do not celebrate this tradition. Tong yun are round glutinous rice balls filled with sweet sesame or red bean paste, served in a ginger broth, which symbolize family togetherness, unity and reunion. Tong yun sounds like tyun yun in cantonese (tuan yuan in mandarin) which means to have a reunion 團圓.
We wonder...is there healing in celebrating traditional festivals, in practicing rituals more commonly practiced in the privacy of diasporic household units in a semi-public space, and inviting others in? What happens when we invite collective learning about how to practice these rituals? Will this bring us towards “more political and inclusive futures”?
We wonder…what happens when we look at Chinatown (a space/place/idea Aiya Collective has been preoccupied with for some time) through the eyes of its winged and feathered inhabitants? What questions, themes, thoughts does birdwatching in Chinatown bring up for us?
The December 19 workshop will be convened by aiya啊呀! member Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon.
aiya啊呀! is an intergenerational and multi-disciplinary group of Asian diasporic identifying artists, Chinatown community members, academics, and organizers who together are making work that uses arts and culture to address the displacement, cultural erasure, gentrification, racial and economic oppression that is now happening in amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton’s Chinatown. We come together to dream and make new futures for our community.