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This is a bit off-topic for CN Reviews, but relates to how Silicon Valley celebrates Chinese New Year. Last night, we attended a Chinese New Year gala hosted by Yew Chung International School (YCIS) Silicon Valley. My older son who is now six goes to the Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) to take Chinese lessons. (My son used to attend pre-school and Kindergarten full time at YCIS before we moved him to our local public school. This was a tough decision because we really liked YCIS. But I pay a ton of property tax to live in the #1 or #2 ranked K-8 district in the state, so I felt we had to save some money on private school tuition.)

Yew Chung is a foundation that now has campuses in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Qingdao and Hong Kong. The Yew Chung Silicon Valley campus is about 7 or 8 years old and has had its ups and downs in recent years. But I was so proud of what the school and the YCIS-SV Parents Organization accomplished this year with this Chinese New Year gala. One parent from China told me it “gave them a good feeling of completeness” to celebrate Chinese New Year. He had been missing this before he had kids, and the school helped bring Chinese New Year to him here in Silicon Valley

Lion dance team from a local Kung Fu group

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Martial Arts performance

YCIS-SV Pre-Kindergarten-1 Welcoming the New Year with Great Health

Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Gong Xi!

My 6-year old son is one of the 2 boys making the announcement at the microphone. He is wearing the Chinese outfit that fellow blogger Min and I purchased when I was in Beijing this January. He was a bit shy and silly in his announcement!

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Yew Chung Afterschool Program (YALP) Fan Dance

YALP has all kinds of electives that the kids can take. The program is from 3 pm to 6 pm so working parents can pick up their kids after work. The girls have lots of fun electives like this Fan Dance class!

YCIS-SV First Grade class performing “The Mice Family”

These are my older son’s former classmates. We miss them!

YALP Talent Show - Chinese YoYo

Another elective is called Chinese YoYo. I don’t get it because I didn’t really see anything that looked like an Western YoYo. And the Google But it was a very elegant dance by the girls in YALP.

Here is my wife and younger son at the gala. We both had to work hard to keep him entertained! He enjoyed all the dancing and music, but started getting restless!

YCIS-SV Parents Organization (YCIS-PO) volunteers

So these were the 6-9 people who gave up 3 months of their life to organize this event! There was an incredible attention to detail and it was a great event. This is a huge turnaround from 2-3 years ago when there was a massive problem with teaching staff turnover and low morale. These parents are some of the ones who made the turnaround happen!

Live Auction begins

The Auctioneer is a parent, Enoch Choi, who did a great job coaxing money out of the parents pockets for hand crafted products and other awards. People can get out of hand in these kinds of auction situations, which can help theg school raise more money. People like to win and to be recognized for their generosity. On the other hand, I think Chinese people in general also have a value of being frugal, or even cheap! So I was interested to see how this would play out at the auction. We ended up leaving early because my toddler had to get to sleep! But not before willing a gift basket of toys and books, and 3DVD set of Doraemon!

What we won - a 3 DVD set of Doraemon

Right now, we plan to send our #2 son to YCIS as well for pre-school and maybe Kindergarten as well. So we will have many more of these galas to drop some more cash in the school’s bank account! But I think bilingual education here in Silicon Valley is a worthy cause, and I’m thankful for all these parent volunteers who have continued to move this forward!

UPDATE:   some additional photos of the event here.