On the last Friday of winter break at 12:20 pm, the Chinese Club and Chinese Honor Society meeting was held in Ms. Song’s classroom. Because of the particularity of the event, Ms. Song, the advisor of the Chinese community and NCHS, decided to hold the meeting on the same day. The activities of this meeting were making dumplings and writing calligraphy. The chairman of NCHS mentioned that Chinese traditional culture includes eating dumplings when the New Year is approaching, so they proposed letting everyone try to make dumplings by themselves to experience the traditional culture of different countries.

During the activity, everyone starting learning how to make dumplings; everyone was a novice and made dumplings with strange shapes, “The dumpling-making activity was worth it for me, as it’s interesting in that we can experience a new culture effectively and innovatively while still having fun and being together. And knowing that we’ll get to take home these delicious foods also, if not especially, motivates us to learn more about this fascinating culture!” Elena Chen said.

At GP, there are also many immigrant students. There are many native Chinese speakers in NCHS who like this activity very much and provided help to other students, “I have had previous experiences in the making of dumplings as I came from a crossed-cultured background. My grandma would generally give out instructions like, for example, preparing the dough by mixing flour with warm water; splitting the dough into small chunks and rolling them out until it’s in a thin circular condition; and last but certainly not least, one would want to seal the stuffings inside before boiling them in hot water.” Elena Chen also said: “I feel the beauty of cultural diversity through this activity, and one most luminant difference of all was that the peoples of China—and most of Eastern Asia—would generally prefer to boil flour foods in hot water, while over here—and most of the west—we would generally prefer to bake instead of boiling these types of foods, e.g. cakes, pancakes…”

At the end of the meeting, the officers of the Chinese community and NCHS began to count the number of dumplings, a total of 32. The students began to take pictures of their dumplings and expressed that they would take them home to try the taste of the dumplings they made.