Vietnamese Festival to Ring in Year of Buffalo

A unicorn--its gigantic head and satin tail nearly hiding the two young men inside--lay sleeping on the pavement outside a martial-arts school in Westminster one recent afternoon.

Drum beats suddenly split the air, accelerating in a crescendo, and the mythological beast awoke, fluttered its eyelids, rose from the ground and began to dance.

The courtyard quickly filled with color and motion as the student dancers guided the unicorn’s red, blue, yellow and green body through fierce twists and turns, dives and skyward thrusts.

“The legend in my country is that the lan --the unicorn--sleeps all year, and it wakes up at the beginning of the New Year,” explained Pham Tat Dac, 25, of Santa Ana, a student at the unicorn-dance practice session.

“It represents happiness and peace, and brings good luck,” added Tran Minh The, 35, of Westminster, president of the Orange County-based Union of Vietnamese Student Assns. of Southern California, which is sponsoring a lunar New Year Tet festival Saturday and next Sunday in Santa Ana that will feature the unicorn’s dance.

“In organizing the festival, we have several objectives,” said Dang Ngo Ngoc Uyen, 30, of Cypress, vice-chairman of the committee planning the event.

“We want to create an atmosphere from the old times in Vietnam,” Uyen said, adding:

“We try to create an opportunity for the Vietnamese to get together, to talk, to enjoy Vietnamese food and music. We want to make it like a showroom for American people, too. We’d like very much for Americans to come and taste our food, and see how we play music and dance.”

Organizers expect the festival, which will welcome the beginning of the Year of the Buffalo, to draw between 30,000 and 40,000 visitors. The event--held annually in Orange County for the past several years--drew more than 30,000 people last year.

While the festival at Centennial Regional Park, 3000 W. Edinger Ave., offers the general public a showcase of Vietnam’s traditional culture, most celebrants are expected to come from Orange County’s 65,000-strong Vietnamese refugee community.

“Tet is no doubt the most important holiday for the Vietnamese,” Huynh Dinh Te , an associate professor of education at Cal State Long Beach, wrote in an essay about the traditional holiday. Te continued:

“Tet is celebrated to welcome the New Year, which is hoped and believed to bring a new and happy chapter in the life of everyone. It is the celebration of the return of spring, considered as the time of rebirth of nature.”

On the eve of Tet, families share a dinner feast and then gather around small home altars to honor their ancestors, Te said in an interview, adding: “It’s something like Christmas Eve.”

After arising on the day of Tet, parents give children red envelopes containing money, Te said. The color red symbolizes good luck.

“Usually, on the first morning of the year,” Te said, “the children will give wishes of longevity and prosperity to their parents, and the parents will tell them, ‘Now you are 1 year older, so be wiser!’ And then they give out the money. There’s no set rule--anything from $1 up.”

Tet is celebrated by all Vietnamese: Buddhist, Confucianist, Catholic or Protestant, Te added.

“While celebrating the New Year, they also think of their ancestors,” he said. “Buddhist people, for example, go to Buddhist temples. This is not only in Vietnam, but also in America. And of course the Christian people go to church.”

During worship services “the type of thing they might say is that Tet is the renewal of hope, and a time to think of fellow countrymen --those in America and those left behind,” Te said.

Festival on Weekend

New Year’s Day by the Chinese lunar calendar--which Vietnamese also follow to determine the date of Tet--falls on Feb. 20 this year, but because that is a work day, organizers scheduled their two-day festival for the weekend.

The event will begin at 10 a.m. Saturday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and the national anthems of the United States and South Vietnam, followed by a traditional ceremonial procession.

“The first part of the procession ceremony is to thank Heaven and Earth, and then comes the honoring of our ancestors, and last, remembering the heroes and heroines who died for the Vietnamese,” explained Bui Tu Khanh, 27, of Santa Ana, organizing committee vice-chairman.

Vietnamese refugees of all faiths can find meaning in this ceremony, which reflects customs carried on in most homes, organizers said.

“Every family has an altar at home, where they worship their ancestors and God or Buddha, or Jesus Christ,” Uyen said.

Most Vietnamese parents “want their children to maintain our culture,” said The, the student association leader.

“The Tet festival is a good occasion to maintain our cultural understanding of our ancestors. . . . Almost all the old Vietnamese are homesick. I think they like to go to the Tet festival to meet their relatives and friends and other Vietnamese, to share memories of Vietnam,” The added.

For Vietnamese refugees in Southern California, Tet provides the year’s best opportunity “to celebrate something that reminds them of their heritage,” Te said. “While they want to adjust and get assimilated to American society, they still want to keep some customs of the old days.”

‘Fun and Nostalgia’

“For the older people, it’s a mixture of fun and nostalgia. Tet is the time of year when people think of members of their families, present and dead,” he said.

“The older they are, the more memories they have--I think the nostalgia would be greater. For the young children--who may or may not have any experience of Tet in Vietnam--those who have never experienced Tet learn something new. Those who have, can remember and enjoy the New Year.”

Visits to friends and relatives are an important Tet activity, and families stock up on special foods to serve their guests.

“The most important ones would be candied fruits and rice cakes,” Te said. “These are a must for the family and the people who come to visit.”

Daily admission to the festival is 50 cents, with children under 12 allowed at no charge. Musical stage shows are scheduled several times each day, in addition to the unicorn dance, firecrackers, food and game booths, martial arts exhibitions and a Vietnamese chess tournament.

Nguyen Quoc Anh, 22, of Westminster, chairman of the festival organizing committee, who was 13 when he left Vietnam in 1975, said that celebrating Tet enables him to relive treasured childhood memories.

“In Vietnam, we went to Tet markets, where people sell flowers, fruit and a lot of things for the New Year,” Anh said. “I remember, it was very happy in those times.”