The 2003 Chinese New Year’s celebration – Year of the Goat – will be Saturday, Feb. 8, from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m., at the Lower Storz Pavilion of NHS Clarkson Hospital. Advanced tickets are $6 adult, $4 student, $2 for children under 12. Tickets purchased at the door will be $1 more.
This year’s celebration
This year’s festivities will begin with a welcome by Steve Scartello, a representative from the Office of Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey. An anticipated crowd of several hundred guests will feast on delicious cuisine supplied by the Grand Fortune restaurant and the Dragon Cafe. Entrees will include imperial sauce spare ribs, Chinese broccoli with sausage, beef stew, sauted tripe, duck with Beijing sauce, Buddhist delight, fried crispy fish, and crispy pork with garlic sauce.
During the dinner, there will be a variety of live performances including a clarinet solo by Yifan Wu; a performance on the traditional Chinese string instrument, the erhu, by Jianghong Sun; a vocal solo, “My Home is at Beijing,” by Shao’ai Jiang; a flute solo performance by teen-ager Claudio K. Huang; and a performance by the children from the Omaha Chinese School.
Following dinner, speeches and entertainment, guests will be able to participate in social dancing, a karaoke room and a video room, which will offer a playing of the annual Spring Festival celebration in Beijing. Baby sitters will be present and children will have their own play space throughout the evening.
Understanding Chinese astrology
Chinese astrology is based on a 12-year cycle as opposed to the 12-month cycle of western astrology. It has its origins in the legend that Buddha called together all the animals in creation, but only 12 of them showed up, and those that did were each given a year in the order of their arrival. Just as Western astrology presupposes that your character is influenced primarily by the astrological sign that the sun was in at the moment of your birth, so Chinese astrology decrees that your character is influenced by the animal sign governing the year in which you were born.
The date of the Chinese New Year varies from year to year, and it generally occurs during the second half of January or the first half of February. Individuals born during this time of the year must consult a Chinese astrologer or date book to find the Chinese year of their birth. Those who were born in the first half of January, adopt the sign of the previous year.
The Year of the Goat
The Year of the Goat gives rise to peaceful, sweet-natured people who tend to be well-mannered and artistic. Those born under this sign are kind-hearted and persevering when a cause motivates them. However a Goat can also be intrusive, irresponsible and inclined towards melancholy. The years of Goat include 1907, 1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015 and 2027.
The other years in Chinese astrology are named for the rat, buffalo, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
Ticket information
Tickets may be purchased from any of the following sources:
- UNMC — Lin Tang: LTC 12710, 559-9303; Huanyu Dou: SWH 4069, 559-4035; Jingwen Hou, ECI 4011, 559-4654; Zenggang Pan, WH 3071, 559-7921; Jinrong Wang, ALBH 4030, 559-8659.
- UNO — Xin Hu, PKI245, 554-2074
- Creighton University –Yuanyuan Zhang and Yongjun Liu, 280-5922
- Omaha Chinese School, located at Millard Public Library — John Chen, 618-7863
- Asian Omaha Market — 307 N. 114th St., 697-1666.
For more information, contact Zenggang Pan at zpan@unmc.edu or 320-7437.
Astrology information taken from Web site www.byzant.com/astrology/chinese.