Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown

摘要

Ever since their arrival in California in mid-19th century, Chinese immigrants have been celebrating Chinese New Year, and it has become the most recognizable cultural symbol for the Chinese in America. The annual Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco has become a major metropolitan event and a chief tourist attraction, attended by thousands of spectators of all stripes and covered by television. Because of its popularity, Chiou-ling Yeh argues in her book Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown that the Chinese New Year parade has over the years been used for various political and commercial purposes - whether fundraising for community hospitals or anti-Japanese war in the 1940s.