I almost let today pass me by. That's the thing about building a life an ocean away from the traditions that shaped you; the calendar moves, the world keeps going, and the day can dissolve into an ordinary Tuesday. But this Lunar New Year, I couldn't look away. Because entering my daughter's elementary school, drums of joy and excitement reverberated through the walls.
Red everywhere. Lanterns adorning the hallways. Children photographed this morning in traditional attire, beaming in the colors of prosperity and fortune that their grandparents' grandparents once wore. Next, a lion dance. And watching all of this, I felt something I've been trying to name for years in my work as a bilingual educator: the particular joy that comes with being seen and known. Joy, I've come to believe, is not the same as celebration. It is a shared orientation toward the world, a way of knowing you are held by something larger than yourself. When communities gather around traditions that carry their histories, they are saying: this is who we are, this is what we value, this is how we understand our place in the world.
We talk a lot in education about what schools should teach. We talk far less about the lives of kids that schools carry. What I mean is that every family that walks through a school's doors carries with them a living archive, ways of knowing and being and celebrating that stretch back generations and forward into futures we can't yet imagine. When schools make room for that, children don't just learn about their cultures, they learn through them. They locate themselves in a story longer than their own lifetime. And that sense of rootedness, of joyful and effortless belonging, becomes the very soil on which they grow.
On this Lunar New Year, I'm holding onto that image of red-draped hallways and children dressed in the colors of their heritage. And I'm asking myself: how do we build communities of learning where joy is not incidental but central, where every child has a tradition worth celebrating, and where the wisdom carried by families and elders finds its rightful place inside our schools?
新年快樂
萬事如意
恭喜發財
馬到成功
