Almost-freezing temperatures, heavy rain and snow didn’t keep many students and families in Salt Lake City’s Vietnamese community from attending the annual outdoor Moon Festival at Sugar House Park on Saturday.
The festival, hosted by the Vietnamese American Student Association at the U, is celebrated around mid-September and has been an annual event for the past 20 years.
Traditional Moon Festivals have been celebrated in several Southeast Asian countries for as many as 3,000 years. The festival observes the fall harvest and the time of the year when the moon is the brightest.
Despite the gloomy weather, students decided to continue with the festival. Students gathered space heaters and altered the program of events to make the festival work.
Club members estimate around 400 people attended the event. Considering the conditions, the turnout was better than expected.
Families in attendance were confined to a small, covered area, where they huddled together around the heaters eating traditional Vietnamese dishes like sweet sticky rice, noodles and moon cakes.
Although the stage was wet, students were able to perform a short fashion show during a brief stop in the rain. Also, VASA officers competed in a moon cake-eating contest. Moon cakes, which are sweeter and heavier than typical pastries, are tradition at moon festivals.
“The Moon Festival is a holiday set up to give back to the kids,” said VASA member Mike Stevenson, adding that many parents in the community work and the moon festival is a way for parents to give back to kids by spending time with them.
To end the festival, children eat moon cakes and walk around the park’s lake with colorful paper lanterns.
The purpose of the festival is to build relationships between younger students and the local Vietnamese community, said Sue Tran, a junior majoring in biology and art history and president of the club.
“A lot of students in the group were born here and don’t speak Vietnamese,” she said. “Many in the older generations are concerned we will lose our language — by doing this (event) we can make them understand we are trying to bridge this gap.”
Jarad ReddekoppChemistry major Trang Nguyen warms her hands on a space heater during this years Moon Festival at Sugar House Park.