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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 14, 2018)
Wednesday, February 14, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon 9 Welcoming the Year of the Dog By Jodi Schneider McNamee Correspondent The Chinese New Year, also called Spring Festival, has more than 4,000 years of history. It is the grandest and most important annual event for Chinese people. For thousands of years, the Chinese lunar calendar has been based on a 12-year repeating cycle that inte- grates 11 real animals and one mythical one (a dragon). And on February 16, 2018, we will be entering the Year of the Dog, the 11th ani- mal in the Chinese Zodiac. Each sign is associated with one of five elements: metal, water, wood, fire and earth. In 2018, the Dog is paired with earth, making it the year of the Brown Earth Dog. Last Saturday, Sisters High School (SHS) Chinese teacher David Perkins and four Chinese exchange educators, Dan Dan, Eva Zhang, Laura Zhang and Diana Liu, celebrated the Chinese New Year together at The University of Oregon Confucius Institute for Global China Studies. “We all left for Portland last Friday excited about the Chinese New Year gathering celebration,” Perkins told The Nugget. Eva Zhang and Laura Zhang are exchange interns working on their master’s degrees in education, and are helping teach Chinese at SHS. They also travel to Sisters Middle School to teach fifth-graders. Diana Liu is in her second year teaching Chinese full- time at Sisters Elementary School. And Dan Dan, who resides in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region in China, is in her first year teaching at SHS. The Chinese Zodiac, known as Sheng Xiao, is based on the 12-year cycle, each year in that cycle related to an animal sign. These signs are the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Your zodiac animal is depen- dent on the year in which you were born, and people born in a given year are said to have personality traits associated with that year’s animal sign. You can use a zodiac online calculator to search for your Chinese Zodiac animal sign. The dog is associated with exuberance, kindness, good fortune, harmony and humanitarianism. And ideal- ism overshadowing material- ism. Being one of the tradi- tional festivals, it is the time for whole families to reunite, which is similar to Christmas Day for us. Perkins is a tiger, and this Nugget correspondent hap- pens to be a horse. Laura Zhang noted, “This year, the Year of the Dog will be a very friendly and active year, especially for those who are born in the Year of the Dog.” Legend has it that the order of the zodiac animals was determined by the order in which each finished a swimming contest, called the Great Race, across a wide river. While the dog was a strong swimmer, he also liked to play and frolic with the other animals; thus, he came in next to last, followed only by the pig. (The rat came in first.) Sisters’ Chinese teachers are planning to celebrate their new year in Chinese class Friday, February 16. Teaching kids of all ages about celebrations around the world broadens their minds and increases their cultural awareness. “We will be doing things like Chinese paper cut- outs and Chinese calligra- phy,” Perkins said. “And we also may have Chinese dumplings.” The art of paper-cutting in China may date back to the second century C.E. 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