Under the golden and red arches of Boston’s Chinatown gate, thumping drums and crashing cymbals announced the city’s annual Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival.
The Sept. 23 festival featured lion dances, food vendors and street stalls. Rows of tables bustled with activity as hands exchanged flowering plants and gleaming handcrafted treasures. Beneath the gate, throngs of applause surrounded the rhythmic stomps and rustling of the Eternals Lion Dance group, filling the festival with sound. For over a decade, the celebration has promoted Chinese culture and brought the community closer together, the festival’s organizers said.
Born and raised in Boston, Debbie Ho is the executive director of Chinatown Main Street (CMS), one of the twenty non-profit Main Street organizations in the city. By working with residents, business owners and educational workshops, Ho said CMS, along with the other Main Street organizations, provides meaningful services for the public.
“Our mission is to beautify the district, recruit new businesses, preserve and strengthen existing businesses and draw people into the district, maintaining safety and promoting cleanliness in the community,” Ho said.
Though the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival has only existed for 12 years, CMS’s history stretches much further back to 1917, not long after Boston established Chinatown. Ho said she believes people generally have a great grasp of Chinatown and its culture. Recently, she said, organized events like the Mid-Autumn Festival have strengthened that understanding and have increased important Chinatown foot traffic.
Kyle Huinh, a high school student from Worcester, came with the Eternals dance group to perform. He said they prepare their routines days in advance and have performed in festivals like this one many times.
“Performances like these are to support the culture and support the people,” Huinh said. “Lion dances, we do for good luck, to cherish wealth.”
Huinh said that the performers train both choreography and musical accompaniment. He said common instruments for lion dance performances are traditional Chinese drums and gongs. Both accompanied Huinh’s team at the Mid-Autumn Festival.
“Usually in the lion [costume], it’s just the adrenaline,” Huinh said. “You want to support your team, and when you’re in the band, it’s more relaxing.”
The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of many that CMS organizes. Melania Yee, a senior at the Boston Latin School, performs for a dragon dance group whose team was featured this fall.
“The other Lion teams really showed out, as well as the other clubs and vendors,” Yee said. “Boston’s Chinatown is pretty small, so it was really great to see more people coming together.”
The tight-knit community Yee mentioned was reflected in the festival’s reach: only a single city block. Its compactness, however, did not detract from a prominent spirit that emanated throughout.
Despite its size, Ho said the event’s multi-stage organization process still has roadblocks, including CMS’s strength and budget. With only one full-time employee, she said, the organization relies primarily on volunteers and donations to further its mission of showcasing an often unrecognized culture.
Yee, who is half Chinese, admitted little exposure to Chinese culture growing up, but noted that lion dance performances stuck with her. As a result, she said, the past year and a half on her lion dance team has been a meaningful full circle experience.
“[Mid-Autumn Festivals] are really important, not just for the local Chinese community here, but for Boston in general,” Yee said. “A lot of people don’t understand the culture beyond just surface-level products that are trending, so it’s really good to see these events so that people understand more of the culture and can appreciate it.”
