Princeton University Art Museum and Richardson Auditorium
Take the family on a journey to Asia, without leaving Princeton. Join us for the second annual Festival of Music and Art: Asian Adventures. Conductor Rossen Milanov leads the PSO Family Concert, featuring kid-friendly musical selections, at Richardson Auditorium at 2:30 pm. Between 10:30 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., explore the Museum’s Asian art collection, take part in a scavenger hunt, and make your own dragon kite. Concert tickets are $10 and can be ordered in advance by calling (609) 497-0020 or visiting princetonsymphony.org. Activities at the Museum are free of charge.
To new families as well as old families awaiting new matchups – you will be receiving them in mid-September. We will be recruiting most of our new mentors from the freshman class, and we don’t even get to meet them until September 14. So obviously the timing is not great, it’s very rushed due to proximity to Moon Festival on September 22… while I’m pretty sure we’ll recruit enough mentors in time for Moon Festival, I am not sure how soon I can get the matches out.
You may be wondering why I scheduled it like this – seems silly and impractical. Well, I was angling for Moon Festival to be one week later, to not only make timing work out better but to coincide with the actual Moon Festival. Alas, when we started scouting out locations way back in March, our location of choice was already fully booked for that weekend and the three weekends after! Six months in advance! Too popular. So one week early was the best we could do. Apologies that it didn’t work out perfectly… I have no doubt Moon Festival will still be great! It will just be a mad frenzied rush for me to get enough mentors and match them up as quickly as possible…
Moon Festival registration will be open for the next 10 days – until Tuesday, September 4. Register here!
We haven’t hammered out all the details yet (we need to do that when we get back on campus, September 10) but it will be both similar to and different from Carnival last spring, approximately 2-8PM on Saturday, September 22.
I’m getting ready to place our wholesale mooncake order for Moon Festival (reminder – it’s Saturday, September 22). Some parents have asked me how to shop for mooncake, so to make things easier and more convenient for you the parents, I have decided to open up ordering to CAPS families as well. If you put in a personal order now, just pay and pick up on campus during Moon Festival.
I know we have a lot of dancers, so I thought this would be of interest!! (from jooktime.com)
Gap has just unveiled their fall campaign for 2012, Shine, which features emerging artists and musicians wearing the company’s “Icon Redefined” collection. Sporting The Fitted Boyfriend Shirt is Yuan Yuan Tan, a principal dancer for the San Francisco Ballet.
These individuals will be showcased during an eight-week content series on Gap’s social media channels, while the ads themselves will appear in September issues of national magazines and be displayed outdoors in major key cities.
She was featured in Vogue magazine in April 2003 and was named a “Hero of Asia” in the Asian edition of Time magazine in October 2004. (from sfballet.org)
Since she knows I run this program, my friend highly suggested I check out this documentary about Chinese transracial adoptions, called “Somewhere Between.” There are a few limited screenings over the next few months, with one in NYC on August 24. I won’t be free that day, but it looks worth checking out for anyone who can! She and the girls will be available for questions, too!
Blurb: This film follows the lives of four teenaged girls adopted from China and now living in the United States. In profiling Chinese adoptees in contemporary America, Linda Goldstein Knowlton has created a deeply moving documentary illustrating that even the most specific of experiences can be universally relatable.
After my last post about Liang Zhu, there was some interest in the sheet music. I realized that it’s actually quite an advanced piece, I would say it requires at least 5 years of pretty serious piano study to attempt this piece. So I went back through my music and found two more pieces that I loved playing, one that is much easier (I think I learned this after 2-3 years of piano), and one that is slightly easier but considerably shorter.
I will be uploading all MP3’s and sheet music to this dropbox folder! Liang Zhu is in there, as are the two songs I am discussing in this post. Disclaimer: copyright, I don’t own any of the sheet music or the MP3’s, yada yada… Apologies also for my poor scanning quality!
One of the ideas we are entertaining for the Moon Festival celebration coming up in September is to have the kids break up into groups and perform skits of various Chinese myths and stories.
One of the most famous is the legend of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, often abbreviated as Liang Zhu, and it is considered the Chinese Romeo & Juliet. “Liang zhu” means “butterfly” in Chinese, so the English translation is “Butterfly lovers.”
Long story short: Zhu is a brilliant young girl and pretends to be a man in order to attend school, where she and her classmate Liang fall deeply in love. When she finally reveals her true identity as a woman, they prepare to get married, but her parents have already arranged her engagement to another man. Liang dies of a broken heart, and Zhu commits suicide. The two are reincarnated as a pair of butterflies (hence “liang zhu”).
Due to the nature of the ending, I preliminarily decided against the inclusion of this in the Moon Festival skits. However, I wanted to post about it because not only is it a famous legend, but in 1959 it was adapted into a violin concerto that is now extremely famous both in and outside of China. This is easily one of my favorite works of music. I used to play both piano and flute, so I learned the piano solo arrangement as well as the flute part in the original orchestral arrangement.
This is a breathtakingly beautiful piece, listening to it instantly brings all kinds of emotions for me, this is one of the pieces I grew up listening to (and playing!). Please share this with your children, especially if they play instruments!
I would be happy to send an MP3 to whoever would like to download the song to listen to. I can also scrounge up the piano arrangement if anyone would like a scan! (It is intermediate/advanced skill level though, so someone playing for 1-2 years probably shouldn’t attempt it, will get discouraged :P)
Email me or drop a comment if interested in MP3 or sheet music!
I have some really exciting news about my husband (shh, he doesn’t know yet) Godfrey Gao. He has been cast as Magnus Bane in the upcoming blockbuster movie adaption of the best-selling book “City of Bones,” first in the “Mortal Instruments” series – a very popular children/YA book series, maybe some CAPS kids read these?
Check out the official announcement here, it’s quite funny.
There are so many reasons I am excited for this. First and foremost – duh, I love Godfrey Gao. I mean, just look at him! A quick introduction: he’s 27, Taiwanese, raised in Canada, and hailed as the “first Asian male supermodel” following a lucrative deal with Louis Vuitton. He has dabbled in acting, with various parts in Taiwanese dramas.
The second reason I am so happy about this – and this is something you would THINK we could take for granted, but no – secondly, I’m really excited that they cast an Asian actor. News just broke that the blond, blue-eyed Liam Hemsworth (of Hunger Games fame) has been cast as Middle-Eastern legend Ali Baba in Arabian Nights. Really?! Reminds me of Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia. The character of Magnus Bane is only briefly mentioned as having Asian features (and being half Indonesian), so it would have been easy for the casting directors to just cast someone Caucasian and call it a day. That they cast a full Asian is impressive.
As always, feel free to contact me with any comments, questions, or concerns at caps@princeton.edu OR ecai@princeton.edu! However, I may take a few days to respond to your emails… my summer has been kind of hectic between working full-time, evening MCAT classes, and a recent move.
PS: Don’t forget to check out the recent blog posts! Thanks and happy summer! 🙂
