Hao Mama 好妈妈

This Sunday, the 14th, is the first day of the Year of the Tiger, and the Bay Area is a great place to celebrate. Lunar New Year celebrations big and small can be found all over. We usually love the pan-Asian New Year Festival at the Oakland Museum, which is the right mix of performances, food, and crafts for kids of all ages. But unfortunately the museum is undergoing renovation this year so they won’t be holding the event.

On Monday, February 15 (President’s Day), the Bay Area Discovery Museum will hold their annual Chinese New Year Celebration with lion dances, and arts and crafts projects. It is generally crowded but fun. More info is here.

And of course the largest parade outside of Asia is held in San Francisco at the end of the two -week New Year holiday, this year on Saturday February 27 at 5:15 pm. More information is here.

On a smaller scale in the East Bay, I noticed during a recent visit that Ranch 99/Pacific East shopping center in Richmond will have a lion dance performance on Saturday February 20.

In the spirit of the season, here’s a song our whole family memorized after a pre-school new year performance last year:
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It’s now been exactly a year since I first started Hao Mama, and while I haven’t had time to post to it as much as I would have liked, I want to thank each and every one of you (all five!) who have read the site, posted comments, and offered your support. I’m hoping 2010 will find me more time and energy to focus here. In the meantime, I wish each of you a new year filled with peace and joy. 新年快乐！

Below are some suggestions of holiday gifts for the little linguists in your lives. I have mentioned most of these products elsewhere on this site but they are worth pointing out again because each of them has been well-used and loved by my own kids. Happy Shopping!

What young child doesn’t love playing with magnets on the fridge? Why not have them learn some Chinese while they are at it?

Kingka, a matching game that teaches young learners to recognize Chinese characters and learn the meaning. There are various ways to play it depending on the age and fluency of your children, and the sturdy character cards themselves are a great resource.

A beautiful book that creatively introduces a few characters through a fun story.

A gentle CD of songs and counting rhymes designed to teach the basic sounds of Chinese to very young children. One of my kids’ favorite CDs.

A beautiful soothing collection of lullabies that puts both my kids to sleep every night. My little one now sings “You You Zha” (the name of the first song) to signal she is ready for bed.

There is something about the drawings of Elmer that babies just love.

A few readings from around the web that may be of interest:

- “Child’s play in China” a British journalist and father writes about the different attitudes toward play he sees in his children and their Chinese classmates

On a related note, an American teacher in Beijing writes about a generation of only children in China being educated without much training in leadership or team work.

And on the topic of play (about which I feel strongly), here is an excellent public radio program on “the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization and reflection”:

(If you can’t hear this, click here.)

This last one is not directly China related, though I have found that my children learn Chinese, like other subjects, best through playing, creating, singing, and imagining in the language, not through memorization or sitting still in a classroom and being taught. This program presents a powerful argument for why that is so.

- NPR reporter Scott Simon writes a beautiful essay in the Wall Street Journal reflecting on Thanksgiving with his Jewish-French-Irish-Chinese family including two adopted Chinese daughters:

Our Chinese children sit at the Passover table and scrounge for Easter eggs. They wear “South Side Irish” green scarves around their necks on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s all in the family.

My wife came home one day from our daughters’ Chinese culture class to announce there would be no class next week. “Because of the Jewish holidays,” she explained, straight-faced. Only in America. Our girls speak French, like their mother. My wife and I join our girls to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in Mandarin. We’ve learned that families mixed by marriage or adoption don’t shrink or starve a heritage. They nourish it with newcomers.

Happy Thanksgiving. 感恩节快乐！

The Moon Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) is coming up on October 3. The festival, one of the biggest annual holidays in China, celebrates the legend of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess, and is celebrated by gazing at the full moon, carrying lanterns, and eating mooncakes – round, dense, sweet pastries that resemble hockey pucks. The legend is explained on this website, as is the tradition of eating mooncakes. Wikipedia has more information and an expat mom living in Taiwan writes about the holiday here.

This animation very briefly tells the story of Chang’e and Hou Yi:

For those of you in the Bay Area who couldn’t make the festivities in Chinatown last weekend, here’s a short video:

Happy Moon Festival!

While there is no shortage of Chinese children’s songs honoring Mama, songs about Baba are harder to find. In honor of Father’s Day, here is one, Baba Hao 爸爸好 (“Baba’s good Baba’s good, does a lot but says little… Baba’s good, Baba’s good, earns a lot but spends little.”)

You can also learn the Chinese characters for Father’s Day in this video lesson:
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Today is Duan Wu Jie (端午节), or Dragon Boat Festival, my favorite of the major Chinese holidays. It commemorates the beautiful, if not cheerful, story of the great poet Qu Yuan, who threw himself in the Mi Luo river in protest against the government. In order to try to save his body from being eaten by fish, people went out in boats and threw sticky rice cakes wrapped in leaves into the river. To honor Qu Yuan on this day, people around the world hold dragon boat races and eat zongzi, sticky rice dumplings.

The full history of the day, and a biography of Qu Yuan, are on Wikipedia. Crayola has posted craft projects related to dragon boats, and this book,Awakening the Dragon: The Dragon Boat Festival, explains the holiday to kids. Here’s a recipe for zongzi.

Grace Lin‘s picture books have beautiful and lively illustrations that children love. Her book One Is a Drummer was one of L’s favorites and it almost single-handedly taught him how to count. The books are in English but introduce Chinese culture and especially food in a very inviting way. On the China Sprout blog, Xiaoning interviews Grace about her work and her transition to writing longer novels for older kids.

In honor of the day, here are the lyrics of the song 我的好妈妈 (My Good Mama). Happy Mother’s Day to all the hao mamas out there.

我的好妈妈
下班回到家
劳动了一天， 多么辛苦呀
妈妈妈妈快坐下
妈妈妈妈快坐下
请喝一杯茶
让我亲亲你吧
我的好妈妈
我的好妈妈

wo de hao mama
xia ban hui dao jia
laodong le yi tian, duome xinku ya
mama mama kuai zuo xia
mama mama kuai zuo xia
qing he yi bei cha
rang qo qin qin ni ba
wo de hao mama
wo de hao mama

My good mama
After work, come home
Working all day, so tired
Mama Mama quick sit down
Mama Mama quick sit down
Please drink some tea
Let me give you a kiss
Let me give you a kiss
My good mama
My good mama

If you are trying to get your kids excited about Chinese culture and language, of course now is the best time of year to do it. Lion dancers, fireworks, red envelopes, dumplings, drums, dancing, demons… They all make Chinese New Year a pretty enticing time for little ones.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is plenty to do, including the pan-Asian cultural festival at the Oakland Museum which is packed full with kung fu performers, drummers, lion and dragon dancers, arts and crafts activities, food and more. San Francisco holds the biggest Chinese new year parade in the country, on Lantern Festival, at the end of the two week holiday (February 7 this year). The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco will also have a special family event on February 1. On the other coast, outside Boston, the Peabody Essex Museum will hold Chinese New Year activities on January 30-31. ChildBook, an online store selling books and other cultural products, has compiled a list of Chinese New Year activities around the country, so you can find some fun closer to home.

Two books we like that introduce traditions of Chinese New Year, in English, are Dragon Dance: A Chinese New Year Lift-the-Flap Book and D Is for Dragon Dance.

Here is a YouTube video of a Lion Dance that was a favorite in our house after last year’s new year’s festivities:
恭喜发财

万事如意！