Happy New Year! We’re talking about the year 4703 on the Lunar Calendar, starting with its first day not on January 1 but January 29. The West Windsor branch of the Mercer County Library system, thanks to funding from the Friends of the West Windsor Library, is hosting a New Year’s Eve celebration on Saturday, January 28, from 2 to 4 p.m. The Chinese New Year Festival is open to the public, free of charge, and celebrants of all ages are invited to come ring in the Year of the Dog.##M:[more]##
Three years ago S. Faith Yim, youth services librarian, initiated a series of programs called “Building Bridges to Our Cultural Heritage.” It included everything from a celebration of the Wright Brothers and the history of flight to an observation of the space shuttle program to a dinosaur display and talk by a Native American expert. “We wanted to expand into a bigger arena and a celebration of the Chinese New Year was a natural choice,” she explains.
Last year marked the inaugural ceremony. This year’s ceremony features many cultural highlights, including the Lion Dance performed by the Princeton Chinese School indoors and out, weather permitting. Performers with the Princeton Chinese School will also use large yo-yos for an acrobatic and unusual dance demonstration. The Plainsboro Chinese School Waist Drum Corps, led by Lisa Ying, will perform a Yao Gu dance, while other representatives of the school will demonstrate calligraphy and fingerpainting. West Windsor mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh will return to demonstrate Tai Chi.
The crowds will get a hands-on demonstration of the art of origami, Japanese paper folding, with the opportunity to make their own paper dog faces. It will be, after all, the Year of the Dog, a year characterized by loyalty and tenacity.
Another hands-on activity is the Two Armies Game, a game similar to chess, based on a book called “The Art of War,” written by Sun-tzu in the 6th century BC. Refreshments will include dumplings and traditional pastries filled with a sweet bean paste.
“It’s an afternoon of enrichment but also just a lot of fun for families to be able to taste the food, play games, and watch the performances,” promises Yim.
The “S” in S. Faith Yim stands for Setsuko. Her father immigrated from Japan in 1918, went back to Japan, married her mother, and then in 1925 brought his bride back to settle in southern Alberta, Canada, where one of his brothers was a farmer.
Yim’s father worked on the farm, growing wheat, and did some carpentry as well. Her parents had a baby boy, stillborn, eight years before Yim was born “so when I turned out to be a girl they treated me as a boy.” She acknowledges that as an only child, she was well-treated by both her parents. During World War II she had her first taste of prejudice, not as a direct recipient of such behavior, but because her family took in a Japanese family that had been driven out of their home in British Columbia. The family lived with Yim’s family for almost a year when she was eight years old so it made quite an impression. “I felt guilty that I had not been interned,” she recalls.
Yim graduated from Raymond High School in south Alberta, a place that opened her eyes to intellectual challenge and the idea that there were many exciting things out in the world to learn. “Before that I had gone to a one-room schoolhouse for eight years so I had always felt like I was missing something. I loved high school.” She decided to go to the University of Washington in Seattle to study fine arts. “Very impractical, my father declared,” she laughs. But it turned out to be very practical in a different way, because it was at this school where she met her husband, W. Michael Yim, who had come to the United States from Korea as a student, first at the Montana School of Mines to study metallurgy, then to continue graduate work in Seattle. He was a graduate student and she was a freshman when they met.
In 1962 the family, now including two children, moved to West Windsor and her husband took a job at what is now Sarnoff. They lived on Village Road West. “When we first came to West Windsor it was a homogeneous farming town. The makeup of the community was so different. There were hardly any Asians. It’s been amazing to see the boom in the population and the growth in diversity. It’s an amazingly rich place to live in terms of the culture.”
In 1964 the Yims moved to Princeton. Two more children came along and all four earned illustrious degrees. Helene studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and did graduate studies at NYU and Columbia. Mark graduated from Princeton University in 1983, earned an MBA at Chicago, and owns his own hedge fund. David graduated from Middlebury in 1985, got his MBA from University of Minnesota, and is a bond portfolio manager in Greenwich. Leila graduated from Yale in 1986 and also earned an MBA from Stanford University.
While Yim had earned her M.S. in library science while she was pregnant with her second child, she found herself torn between wanting to work and the demands of raising four children. So while she held the occasional job as a substitute teacher she did not become a librarian until 1986, the year her youngest graduated from college. She was assigned to work at the Hickory Corner and Washington branches of the Mercer system.
Then in 1987 she was assigned to the West Windsor and Lawrenceville branches, and as the populations of the towns began to grow, she had to choose between the two. “I’m glad I chose West Windsor because it was a growth community. It’s always good to be in a growth area.”
Last year Yim was instrumental in adding the Diwali program and a new Native American program to the library’s Cultural Heritage series. “The ethnic communities respond positively and so does the rest of the community. It’s enriching and exciting for everyone.” She is is hoping for a large crowd to enjoy the Chinese New Year Festival. “The children are eager to participate in the programs and there’s a lot of community support so I feel compelled to offer rich programs in return. I hope to keep adding new programs.” — Euna Kwon Brossman
Chinese New Year, West Windsor Library, North Post Road. 609-799-0462. Saturday, January 28. 2 p.m.
