In the Chinese zodiac calendar 12 animals — such as tigers, rabbits, horses and dogs — represent years in a repeating cycle. However, one common animal is missing from the calendar — the cat.
Joy Yang, president of Oregon State University’s Taiwanese Student Association, said that a traditional story explaining the cat’s absence is that the animals in the zodiac were racing to earn their places in the calendar when the animals came to a river. Cat and rat, she said, convinced ox to let them ride across the river on its back. When they were nearly across the river, rat shoved cat into the water and jumped across, coming in first in the race, earning a place as the first year in the calendar, while causing cat to miss out on inclusion in the calendar. Yang said this story explains why cats continue to hate rats today.
Students like Yang had chances to share stories about their culture Sunday as part of the International Students of OSU’s annual Spring Festival, in which 16 international student groups served food and performed for students and their families attending the university’s Moms Weekend. The theme of this year’s festival was “Stories our Mamas told us.”
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The event included everything from African drummers and mock samurai battles to traditional dance.
Yang, a doctoral student in horticulture, said the Taiwanese Student Association’s booth is popular each year because they serve bubble tea to the visitors.
“They may be attracted to our bubble tea, but we get a chance to share with them,” she said.
Yang said that the bubble tea must be fresh, so the organization’s students and their friends began making the tea at 7:30 a.m. They made 15 gallons of the drink, a milk tea with balls of tapioca in it, but Yang said that they run out of the tea every year.
Kelly Grasty, an ISOSU program coordinator who was the event’s director, said the 16 student groups that are affiliated in ISOSU put on their own cultural nights throughout the year, but the Spring Festival is the event the organizations all come together to host.
“This is the big one where we are all together,” said Grasty, a senior in sociology who is originally from Chile.
She said the event is a way to rise above stereotypes and show the things that unify people despite cultural differences.
“It’s a way to bring the community together to show people what is out there,” she said.