All posts by Shelly Hacco

Asian American, culture, Family, L.A. Life, Uncategorized

Spending Mid-Autumn Festival Without My Family

By Sarah Ta

My family is not the celebratory type, so most holidays end up passing without so much as an acknowledgement. However, Mid-Autumn Festival is one that we always celebrate. Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional Chinese holiday that occurs on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month. During ancient China, it was a day to celebrate the autumn harvest and to worship the moon, but over the years, it has shifted to become more of a day to spend time with family. Traditions today include eating mooncake with family, relaxing together under the stars, and admiring the full moon. Many people believe that the moon is brightest on this particular night, which is why admiring the moon remains a significant tradition.

For the past eighteen years of my life, I’ve always celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival with my family. Our way of celebrating is just sitting together after dinner and eating mooncake. As simple as it is, it gives us a chance to relax and enjoy each other’s presence. However, this will be the first year that I will be spending it away from them. Since Mid-Autumn Festival lands on Wednesday October 4th this year, I won’t be able to go home. Spending time with my family was something I took for granted, but I now finally realize that I should’ve appreciated it more.

To help lessen some of the homesickness, my friends and I are planning to head over to Chinatown’s Mid-Autumn Moon Festival on October 7th to celebrate. Even though the festival is a few days after Mid-Autumn Festival, I’m sure that it will still be a lot of fun. I’m really touched that my friends suggested this, since none of them come from an Asian background. I can’t wait to show them how fun Chinese festivals can be.

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New Experience, USC

Senior Year: A Bucket List

By Kurt Ibaraki

This is it. This is my last semester at USC. These past three years have gone by so fast. I remember how excited I was when I first got on campus. My parents helped settle me into my new dorm room and after a couple of hours of reorganizing my room, they left me to start my new life at USC. The first couple of weeks were not easy, but slowly, USC became my second home. USC has so much to offer and I wish that I had more time. However, there are still a couple of months left for me. As a result, I have compiled a small bucket list of things that I want to do before I leave.

First, I would love to study in every library here at USC. I have only been to Leavey, Doheny, and the VKC library in my three years here. More often than not, I have spent countless hours studying at Leavey, but with so many other libraries available, a change of pace would be nice.

Second, I want to enter every building. Being a Neuroscience major, I often find myself in SGM, THH, and ZHS. While there are so many buildings here, I have probably only been in half of them. I would love to see the insides of the buildings in which business and engineering majors spend the most time.

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USC

Traditions of Football Season

By Greg Lennon

One of the centerpieces of any USC student’s college experience is that surreal part of the Fall semester that is football season.  New students quickly learn to respect and worship the history and tradition surrounding the illustrious Trojan football program.   For over a century, the school has built a pigskin culture based on excellence, tradition, and the glory that is game day.

For many, the pregame tailgates are almost as important as the game itself.  Whether you’re a hardcore alum who arrives on campus at 5:00am to set up the perfect tailgate, or just a casual fan, the pregame is a vital component to the Trojan game day experience.  Walking onto campus on any game day, no matter the opponent, you will find almost every inch of SC decked out in Cardinal and Gold.  When the time comes, the Trojan faithful head south to the Coliseum, pouring out of campus, and making sure to kick the trusty game day flag poles for good luck.

On the way, vendors sell essentials like bottled water, bootleg merchandise, and victory dogs (bacon wrapped hot dogs), the fuel of any tailgater.  Passing religious orators and ticket scalpers, the crowd makes its way into the coliseum, bottlenecked into the student section.  For most games, the student section feels like a pressure cooker; stacked like sardines into cramped seats, all the while the sun beating down.  And yet watching football from the student section can be one of the most surreal experiences; the entirety of the crowd moving and reacting as one while the two teams wage war on the field below.  Between chanting the SoCal spell-out, fighting on in unison with the song girls, or dancing to any number of the traditional cheers, the student section keeps things rowdy all game long.

For many so-called fans, halftime is a chance to escape the heat of the coliseum and return home to watch the remainder of the game from the comfort of air conditioning.  For the more faithful fans, the second half is a time to watch the team inflict its finishing blows to the visitor (or vice versa), as well as hope to catch a 4th quarter t-shirt launched into the crowd.  For the Trojan Faithful, game day is a borderline religious experience, and no matter the score, we never lose a tailgate.

Featured image from Wikimedia Commons

Greg is a junior majoring in International Relations, with an emphasis in International Politics in Security Studies. As a member of USC’s NROTC program, he will graduate as an officer in the US Navy, where he will serve for several years. Born and raised in Northern California, Greg enjoys running, hiking, and swimming on the weekends.