Pitt Asian Student Alliance hosts annual cultural fair

Student dancers wearing sparkling gold pieces of fabric wrapped around their upper body with… Student dancers wearing sparkling gold pieces of fabric wrapped around their upper body with pants decorated with little balls of fabric danced to a wide array of musical genres Saturday.

The dancers from Zisha, Pitt’s Asian fusion dance team, performed to Bollywood, folk, hip-hop and jazz numbers in the O’Hara Student Center during the Asian Student Alliance Cultural Fair. About 200 students attended the event, during which student groups performed music, danced and served free food from noon to 2:30 p.m.

Stone Zhang, ASA business manager, said the event is an opportunity to showcase Asian culture and expose students to the different Asian nationalities represented on Pitt’s campus.

The Filipino Students Association, Chinese American Students Association, Vietnamese Student Association, Indian Sub-Continent Association and Korean Culture Association all provided food and entertainment related to their individual cultures.

“Each organization has some sort of performance in their own culture, their own language or something traditionally culturally relevant,” Zhang said.

The event’s two emcees, James Muller, the current ASA web master and next year’s ASA president, and KCA president Jen Yim introduced the first act.

KSA members kicked off the event by introducing students to the hanbok, a traditional Korean dress made of brightly colored multilayered fabric pieces.

The dress part wraps around women just below their chest and drapes outward as it drops below the waist. The dress includes a small long-sleeved jacket that is tied with a ribbon.

KSA members dressed one of their peers in the hanbok as Yim narrated. She pointed out what the various pieces of the dress are called in Korean and explained how lighter versions are worn during the summer.

After the KSA members dressed a young man and woman in traditional Korean clothing, they moved on to perform a traditional Korean wedding with a few modifications.

Instead of using a live duck or goose, the members used a pillow to illustrate the present a groom typically presents to his bride’s parents. But Yim said traditional ceremonies use the live animal.

“In life, geese only have one mate,” Yim said. “It’s a sign of fidelity for the groom to give to the mother of the bride.”

Steel City Bhangra, an Indian dance troupe, performed a traditional Punjabi dance with long wooden sticks and saaps, large wooden instruments that the four dancers used to make a clacking sound on the beat.

Sid Pandit, one of the Bhangra performers, said that “saap” translates to “snake” in English.

“The clap is to scare away snakes,” Pandit said. “Farmers brought them from the fields to dances as props.”

Solo acts were also featured at the ASA Cultural Fair.

Weiqi Li, a sophomore international student from China, performed “Dreaming of Home and Mother,” a melody by American songwriter John P. Ordway that Li combined with a traditional Chinese poem.

Throughout the rest of the event, students ate food provided by the different organizations. Some students ate samosas, a stuffed deep-fried pastry, with chopsticks while others enjoyed che thai, a sweet Vietnamese soup served cold and made with milk lychee, jack fruit, Jello, longnan, pineapple and coconut.

“All of the [organizations]worked really hard to make this event possible,” Yim said. “I think it went well.”