[中文版本]
At the invitation of the Washington Lantern Festival temple fair, the Zai Dao website organized a “Lantern Riddles and New Year Cultural Interactive Games Booth” at the event. Lantern riddles are one of the most representative traditional customs of the Yuanxiao Festival and also one of the most beloved cultural games among the public. For this event, the Zai Dao students carefully designed and decorated a lantern-riddle booth themed around festive lanterns, creating a style that was both celebratory and elegant.
The riddles centered on the Year of the Horse zodiac, Chinese idioms, and traditional Chinese festival culture. The students also creatively used picture-based clues, emojis, and other playful forms of presentation, making the riddles vivid and engaging while still full of cultural meaning. The wide variety of riddles attracted many visitors to join in, allowing people to experience the charm of Chinese culture and feel the joyful holiday atmosphere through the fun of solving them.
At the interactive booth, the Zai Dao students brought to the fair one of the most traditional Yuanxiao Festival customs—prize-winning lantern riddle guessing—and also organized lively cultural quiz activities. Through cultural trivia, interactive games, and similar formats, participants of different ages and cultural backgrounds were all able to easily learn about Chinese New Year customs and cultural stories. The booth also prepared exquisite small prizes to encourage even more audience participation, and the atmosphere on site was warm, energetic, and friendly.
Whether they were children, parents, or guests from many different sectors of society, everyone joined in with eagerness and interacted warmly with the students. Distinguished guests such as Maryland State Senator April Delaney, Minister Tang Zhiwen of the Chinese Embassy in the United States, Maryland Secretary of State Susan Lee, and Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich also visited the booth and experienced this activity, immersed in traditional culture, alongside the students.
In addition to the cultural interactive booth, the Zai Dao students also brought specialty drinks such as mango pomelo sago and bingfen, holding a fundraising sale. The sale was no easy task: the students not only actively promoted the drinks, but even took the initiative to deliver them directly to customers with enthusiasm. To attract buyers, they even came up with the idea of going around from place to place to “drum up business,” staying busy in the happiest way possible, with youthful energy visible everywhere at the fair.
Although their busy work meant they missed the stage performances at the temple fair, at the end of the event, Teacher Hu Hong specially brought the students an “exclusive magic show.” Amid waves of laughter and exclamations of amazement, the Zai Dao students’ Lantern Festival activities came to a joyful and successful close.
In the process of contributing to cultural activities at the Lantern Festival fair, the Zai Dao students not only gained happiness but also deepened their understanding and memory of traditional Chinese culture through firsthand participation.
The Zai Dao website was independently founded in 2021 by Chinese American youth in the United States and has now operated for five years. As a bilingual Chinese-English cultural platform, Zai Dao has always been committed to encouraging Chinese American teenagers to write in Chinese and to promoting the preservation and spread of Chinese culture. In recent years, Zai Dao has not only organized its “Spring Festival Visits to Chinese American Elders” campaign for five consecutive years, but has also launched and hosted the “Washington Chinese Cultural Festival Youth Essay Competition” for three straight years, earning broad recognition and positive responses from all sectors of the community. Upholding the mission of “using writing to carry the Way (Dao), using writing to bring friends together, using the written word to pass on culture, and using words to connect the world,” the Zai Dao website is working to build a bridge connecting youth and culture, and connecting the community with the wider world.
