Students of all ages, ranging from kindergarten to senior year of high school, walked around the festival grounds at Hourglass Park, watching performances and visiting the booths hosted by the classes at HuaXia Chinese School, Feb. 5. One of these booths belonged to the Westview Youth Care Club (YCC), a multibranch club that works to provide impoverished towns in China with more funds for education.

Every year, YCC hosts a booth at HuaXia’s Chinese New Year festival, selling various goods like Cuban lamb skewers and other snacks for the students to buy, as well as prizes that they could win from spinning their prize wheel.

Although COVID-19 caused the festival to scale down, with many classes choosing not to host a booth this year, YCC was still able to run their booth.

“In previous years, [our booth] has been more popular because there’s more people coming around, and we’re the only booth that sells lamb skewers, so it’s usually more popular than the other booths,” Westview YCCPresident Kaiwei Shi (12) said.

Shi and club member Jason Ye (12) volunteered for the festival, as they do every year, to help run the stand.

“We both attended the HuaXia from kindergarten, [and] the festival is the peak point of Chinese school,” Ye said. “ “You walk around the park with your friends, and you go around seeing what kind of [booths] there are and what different foods you can try. It’s been a tradition [to run a booth at the festival] every year, and we just want to keep it going.”

Both Ye and Shi were excited to bring the same enjoyment that they felt when they were students at HuaXia to the kids this year.

“It brings back a lot of memories,” Shi said. “They have performances from the students at the school, so some students will sing traditional Chinese songs and others will do martial arts performances or instrument performances.”

Both Shi and Ye also participated in several of the performances when they attended HuaXia, with Shi singing the song Xiao Ping Guo (Little Apple) one year, and Ye taking part in the Golden Dragon martial arts performance multiple times.

In addition to continuing the tradition, YCC also hosted the booth to help raise money for small towns in China.

“We send money over to these small villages where the kids don’t have as much of an education opportunity as we do in the States,” Shi said. “So we fundraise money for them to have better education opportunities there.” Although the club participates in multiple events each year to raise funds, the booth they run at the HuaXia Chinese New Year festival brings in the most money

Ye said that  club members’ own family stories inspired their choice to support this cause.

“Our parents grew up as immigrants in the States,” Ye said. “They didn’t have lots of money, and so we want to bring [education] to other kids in China so they have the opportunity to have a better future.”