Re: Everything You Need To Know About Attending The San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade 02/13/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
Parade participants, please don't turn our parade into a political message. There is a lesson in political backlash to be learned from the last half time show during the NFL playoffs with Bad Bunny and the America-hating Americans winning medals at the Winter Olympics. Let this Year of the Fire Horse parade be a celebration of our cultural heritage and not a celebration of extreme woke left wing politics because we don't want tourists to boycott our Chinatown because of your delusional oppression that you learned from your ivy school college degrees.
[www.sfchronicle.com]
S.F.’s Chinese New Year Parade began as a bold experiment. See how it’s evolved through the decades
By Ko Lyn Cheang, Staff WriterFeb 13, 2026
It was the year of the Ox when the first public Chinese New Year celebration lit up the streets of San Francisco in 1853. Five years earlier, tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants had started arriving in California — “Gold Mountain” as it was known in Chinese — for the Gold Rush and had brought their traditions and culture with them.
“Today is the Chinese New Year, and the Celestials are making a grand holiday of the occasion,” a Feb. 8, 1853 article in the San Francisco newspaper Daily Alta California stated. “Fire crackers of all sorts are being exploded. Sacramento and Dupont Streets are lively with the moving multitude of Celestials rigged out in their finest toggery. They make a custom of paying visits and receiving calls on this day, as we do on the first of January, except that both sexes visit.”
Celestials was a common term used by American newspapers to refer to Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, a nod to the Chinese belief that the emperor ruled with a mandate from heaven.
Before San Francisco’s annual Chinese New Year Parade became the storied spectacle and economic engine it is today, drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees and an estimated three million broadcast viewers, it was a scrappy celebration led by immigrants determined to keep their traditions alive.
Even before San Francisco Chinatown’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce began hosting the Chinese New Year Parade in 1953, local Chinatown organizations held processions and festivals to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The Cathay Band and marchers holding anti-Communist signs walk through San Francisco on Feb. 12, 1951.
That year, Henry Kwock Wong, the newly elected director of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, pitched the idea to the business group.
The lunar holiday is not traditionally celebrated with parades in China or other parts of the Chinese diaspora. The idea of a parade was borrowed from American traditions with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and military cavalcades as cultural cornerstones.
Wong’s son, Wesley R. Wong, wrote in a book about his father that his dad wanted to “elevate the image of Chinatown and its residents by opening San Francisco Chinatown and its New Year Festival to non-Chinese tourists.”
In “Mr. Chinatown: The Legacy of H.K. Wong,” the younger Wong wrote that his dad dreamed of a parade that could “rival Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” dispel stereotypes about Chinese people and show “McCarthy advocates that Chinatown was not a bastion of Chinese communists, but rather a community of loyal Chinese Americans.”
Wong and his friend Paul Louie approached Chinatown locals to donate time, money and resources to support the event, Wong said in a 1978 oral history.
Wong said the two men convinced an electrician to hook up lighting, carpenters to build the stage, a man who worked in radio to set up a public address system, friends to provide more than a dozen convertibles and Chinese musicians to play. Wong, then a hardware business owner, donated nails.
Corporal Joe Wong, a blind Chinese American Korean War veteran, served as the first parade grand marshal. A local woman, dubbed “Miss Firecracker,” presided as the parade’s queen, dressed in strings of firecrackers. Drummers, gong players, lion dancers and musicians from the Sixth Army band, Cathay band and St. Mary’s drum Corps performed.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s front-page coverage of the parade the following day — Feb. 16, 1953 — stated that 100,000 people attended, packing Grant Avenue shoulder-to-shoulder.
The first year that non-Chinese outsiders were invited to the New Year celebration was 1953 when 140,000 showed up.
“It was one of the biggest and gayest celebrations ever staged in the Chinese community here — the largest Chinese center outside the Orient,” the newspaper stated.
Three years later, the parade was broadcast on national television as a one-time special.
It attracted the attention of Bank of America, which became the first major corporate sponsor in the late ’50s, said Wayne Hu, 81, a second-generation parade director who helmed the event from 1986 to 2010.
By the late ’70s, the parade drew upward of 300,000 spectators, according to San Francisco Chronicle reports from the time.
“The parade in some ways became a metaphor for the growth of our overall community,” said Gordon Chin, the founding executive director of San Francisco’s Chinatown Community Development Center, as Chinese American populations have in the past century grown beyond historic Chinatown.
The parade often welcomed diverse groups. In 1979, the newly founded San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, now known as the SF Pride Band, made one of its first parade appearances in the Chinatown festival.
As the parade grew, David Lei, 77, who became parade director in 1977 and was involved until 2006, said he began importing Chinese artifacts to showcase, including an elaborate marriage procession and puppets of the Eight Immortals, figures in Chinese mythology.
By 1987, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce was struggling to financially support the parade and the accompanying Miss Chinatown USA pageant, Hu said.
Hu worked with KTVU for the channel to televise the parade for the first time. It became an annual broadcast. KTVU hired professional parade consultants to adapt the show for a television audience. By popular demand, the organizers started setting up ticketed bleacher seats.
“Our goal was that this is a community parade,” Hu said.
With new corporate sponsorships, the parade’s budget jumped from five figures to six figures, Hu said.
Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, said the parade gives the Chinese American community political visibility.
“When you have a parade of this scale and size, you’re not invisible,” Yeung said. “It creates a platform for us to have a conversation not only about what’s beautiful and wonderful about our community, but also what we need to move this community toward greater participation and equality in America.”
Perhaps no person used the parade as a platform for political advocacy better than the late Rose Pak, a Chinatown activist who led the growth of Asian American political power in the city.
Her annual tradition was to command the microphone from the grandstand and offer political commentary as politicians passed with their entourage.
In 2012, she called out to the police officers contingent: “Next year, I expect to see more Asian faces up here!”
She issued warnings and poked fun at leaders, including then-District 3 Supervisor David Chiu.
“I haven’t made up my mind whether I’m going to run in District 3 yet, so don’t be too relaxed,” she said to Chiu.
Yeung said the upcoming parade on March 7, to celebrate the Year of the Fire Horse, is particularly meaningful as immigrant communities continue to face threats from the federal government.
“The parade creates relationships with each other, within the community,” he said. “So when it comes time to take a stand, we know who’s with us. That’s what joy and love and celebration does.”
[www.sfchronicle.com]
S.F.’s Chinese New Year Parade began as a bold experiment. See how it’s evolved through the decades
By Ko Lyn Cheang, Staff WriterFeb 13, 2026
It was the year of the Ox when the first public Chinese New Year celebration lit up the streets of San Francisco in 1853. Five years earlier, tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants had started arriving in California — “Gold Mountain” as it was known in Chinese — for the Gold Rush and had brought their traditions and culture with them.
“Today is the Chinese New Year, and the Celestials are making a grand holiday of the occasion,” a Feb. 8, 1853 article in the San Francisco newspaper Daily Alta California stated. “Fire crackers of all sorts are being exploded. Sacramento and Dupont Streets are lively with the moving multitude of Celestials rigged out in their finest toggery. They make a custom of paying visits and receiving calls on this day, as we do on the first of January, except that both sexes visit.”
Celestials was a common term used by American newspapers to refer to Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, a nod to the Chinese belief that the emperor ruled with a mandate from heaven.
Before San Francisco’s annual Chinese New Year Parade became the storied spectacle and economic engine it is today, drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees and an estimated three million broadcast viewers, it was a scrappy celebration led by immigrants determined to keep their traditions alive.
Even before San Francisco Chinatown’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce began hosting the Chinese New Year Parade in 1953, local Chinatown organizations held processions and festivals to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The Cathay Band and marchers holding anti-Communist signs walk through San Francisco on Feb. 12, 1951.
That year, Henry Kwock Wong, the newly elected director of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, pitched the idea to the business group.
The lunar holiday is not traditionally celebrated with parades in China or other parts of the Chinese diaspora. The idea of a parade was borrowed from American traditions with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and military cavalcades as cultural cornerstones.
Wong’s son, Wesley R. Wong, wrote in a book about his father that his dad wanted to “elevate the image of Chinatown and its residents by opening San Francisco Chinatown and its New Year Festival to non-Chinese tourists.”
In “Mr. Chinatown: The Legacy of H.K. Wong,” the younger Wong wrote that his dad dreamed of a parade that could “rival Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” dispel stereotypes about Chinese people and show “McCarthy advocates that Chinatown was not a bastion of Chinese communists, but rather a community of loyal Chinese Americans.”
Wong and his friend Paul Louie approached Chinatown locals to donate time, money and resources to support the event, Wong said in a 1978 oral history.
Wong said the two men convinced an electrician to hook up lighting, carpenters to build the stage, a man who worked in radio to set up a public address system, friends to provide more than a dozen convertibles and Chinese musicians to play. Wong, then a hardware business owner, donated nails.
Corporal Joe Wong, a blind Chinese American Korean War veteran, served as the first parade grand marshal. A local woman, dubbed “Miss Firecracker,” presided as the parade’s queen, dressed in strings of firecrackers. Drummers, gong players, lion dancers and musicians from the Sixth Army band, Cathay band and St. Mary’s drum Corps performed.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s front-page coverage of the parade the following day — Feb. 16, 1953 — stated that 100,000 people attended, packing Grant Avenue shoulder-to-shoulder.
The first year that non-Chinese outsiders were invited to the New Year celebration was 1953 when 140,000 showed up.
“It was one of the biggest and gayest celebrations ever staged in the Chinese community here — the largest Chinese center outside the Orient,” the newspaper stated.
Three years later, the parade was broadcast on national television as a one-time special.
It attracted the attention of Bank of America, which became the first major corporate sponsor in the late ’50s, said Wayne Hu, 81, a second-generation parade director who helmed the event from 1986 to 2010.
By the late ’70s, the parade drew upward of 300,000 spectators, according to San Francisco Chronicle reports from the time.
“The parade in some ways became a metaphor for the growth of our overall community,” said Gordon Chin, the founding executive director of San Francisco’s Chinatown Community Development Center, as Chinese American populations have in the past century grown beyond historic Chinatown.
The parade often welcomed diverse groups. In 1979, the newly founded San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, now known as the SF Pride Band, made one of its first parade appearances in the Chinatown festival.
As the parade grew, David Lei, 77, who became parade director in 1977 and was involved until 2006, said he began importing Chinese artifacts to showcase, including an elaborate marriage procession and puppets of the Eight Immortals, figures in Chinese mythology.
By 1987, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce was struggling to financially support the parade and the accompanying Miss Chinatown USA pageant, Hu said.
Hu worked with KTVU for the channel to televise the parade for the first time. It became an annual broadcast. KTVU hired professional parade consultants to adapt the show for a television audience. By popular demand, the organizers started setting up ticketed bleacher seats.
“Our goal was that this is a community parade,” Hu said.
With new corporate sponsorships, the parade’s budget jumped from five figures to six figures, Hu said.
Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, said the parade gives the Chinese American community political visibility.
“When you have a parade of this scale and size, you’re not invisible,” Yeung said. “It creates a platform for us to have a conversation not only about what’s beautiful and wonderful about our community, but also what we need to move this community toward greater participation and equality in America.”
Perhaps no person used the parade as a platform for political advocacy better than the late Rose Pak, a Chinatown activist who led the growth of Asian American political power in the city.
Her annual tradition was to command the microphone from the grandstand and offer political commentary as politicians passed with their entourage.
In 2012, she called out to the police officers contingent: “Next year, I expect to see more Asian faces up here!”
She issued warnings and poked fun at leaders, including then-District 3 Supervisor David Chiu.
“I haven’t made up my mind whether I’m going to run in District 3 yet, so don’t be too relaxed,” she said to Chiu.
Yeung said the upcoming parade on March 7, to celebrate the Year of the Fire Horse, is particularly meaningful as immigrant communities continue to face threats from the federal government.
“The parade creates relationships with each other, within the community,” he said. “So when it comes time to take a stand, we know who’s with us. That’s what joy and love and celebration does.”
Re: The Secret Lives of Chinese-American Restaurant Workers 02/13/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
Notice how these native Hong Konger do not speak Cantonese with a lazy accent. Please tip your dim sum cart server well because these dim sum push cart restaurants in America could be seeing their last days as the next generation finds this work too difficult.
[youtu.be]
Dim sum cart service is a dying tradition. But at Golden Palace in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, two women are keeping it alive.
Pik Chan and Cheong Yin Ho have worked together for nearly two decades. They weave through packed dining rooms, pushing heavy, metal trolleys laden with stacks of bamboo steamers. Amid the roar of the lunch rush, they communicate without speaking — a glance or a quick hand gesture for chicken feet, beef balls, cheung fun, bean curd rolls — always understanding each other perfectly.
[youtu.be]
Dim sum cart service is a dying tradition. But at Golden Palace in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, two women are keeping it alive.
Pik Chan and Cheong Yin Ho have worked together for nearly two decades. They weave through packed dining rooms, pushing heavy, metal trolleys laden with stacks of bamboo steamers. Amid the roar of the lunch rush, they communicate without speaking — a glance or a quick hand gesture for chicken feet, beef balls, cheung fun, bean curd rolls — always understanding each other perfectly.
Re: What would Affirmative Action do if Harvard started to admit Smart Lampposts at the expense of under-represented Dumb Lampposts? 02/13/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
[timesofindia.indiatimes.com]
The Trump administration has escalated its clash with Harvard University, with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announcing an end to all military programs with the Ivy League school. Hegseth criticized Harvard as “woke” and unfit to train future U.S. military leaders, cutting off fellowships, training, and certificate programs. The move marks a sharp break from decades of academic ties and comes amid growing pressure on elite universities. The Pentagon said it will now review similar partnerships with other institutions.
The Trump administration has escalated its clash with Harvard University, with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announcing an end to all military programs with the Ivy League school. Hegseth criticized Harvard as “woke” and unfit to train future U.S. military leaders, cutting off fellowships, training, and certificate programs. The move marks a sharp break from decades of academic ties and comes amid growing pressure on elite universities. The Pentagon said it will now review similar partnerships with other institutions.
Quote
♭♫
Harvard is an agent for the CCP. University endowments should be taxed to fund public schools.
[www.youtube.com]
A recent investigative report revealed that Harvard University trained Chinese government officials who were complicit in the ongoing genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which could constitute a violation of the United States’ sanctions. But this revelation barely scratches the surface of the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of Harvard and US higher education broadly. Join Hudson for a conversation about how policymakers can insulate America’s universities from Beijing's malign influence.
Re: Circumventing China's Exit Ban 02/13/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
Re: A Glimpse of San Francisco Chinatown 02/13/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
Chinatown is really all San Francisco has left to draw in the tourist dollars to keep the city's mom and pop economy floating and keeping the hotels full when there are no convention events scheduled.
[www.kalw.org]
But this year’s preparations feels different, and part of that is because a field office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE sits just a couple of blocks from the northern border of Chinatown, literally casting a shadow over the nation's oldest Chinatown.
While a telephone call last fall between Mayor Daniel Lurie and President Trump stopped the deployment of National Guard troops and stepped up immigration enforcement in city neighborhoods, there are fears that the situation is temporary.
[www.kalw.org]
But this year’s preparations feels different, and part of that is because a field office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE sits just a couple of blocks from the northern border of Chinatown, literally casting a shadow over the nation's oldest Chinatown.
While a telephone call last fall between Mayor Daniel Lurie and President Trump stopped the deployment of National Guard troops and stepped up immigration enforcement in city neighborhoods, there are fears that the situation is temporary.
Sandy Lam - 沒有你 還是愛你 02/11/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
[youtu.be]
A Glimpse of Milan Chinatown 02/11/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
[youtu.be]
Winter Olympics 2026 Gold Medalist - Alysa Liu 02/11/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
[youtu.be]
[en.wikipedia.org]
Liu was considered the frontrunner female recruitment prospect for China as a part of its "naturalization project" to recruit overseas athletes in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Her father, however, would not be persuaded.[5] In March 2022, it was reported that Liu and her father (who had left China as a political refugee following his participation in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989) had been targeted in November 2021 by spies allegedly under direction of the Chinese government, in an operation to collect private information on Chinese political dissidents living in the United States. One spy posed as a U.S. Olympic Committee official and requested copies of their passports. Her father stated that the scheme was likely designed to "intimidate" him and to "silence" him from "say[ing] anything political or related to human rights violations in China"; he added that he was concerned for his daughter's safety while she was in Beijing but he agreed to let her compete after receiving assurances that the U.S. State Department would take additional precautions to protect her.
[en.wikipedia.org]
Liu was considered the frontrunner female recruitment prospect for China as a part of its "naturalization project" to recruit overseas athletes in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Her father, however, would not be persuaded.[5] In March 2022, it was reported that Liu and her father (who had left China as a political refugee following his participation in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989) had been targeted in November 2021 by spies allegedly under direction of the Chinese government, in an operation to collect private information on Chinese political dissidents living in the United States. One spy posed as a U.S. Olympic Committee official and requested copies of their passports. Her father stated that the scheme was likely designed to "intimidate" him and to "silence" him from "say[ing] anything political or related to human rights violations in China"; he added that he was concerned for his daughter's safety while she was in Beijing but he agreed to let her compete after receiving assurances that the U.S. State Department would take additional precautions to protect her.
Re: Hong Kong Safe Harbor Act Is Back On The Table 02/11/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]
[hongkongfp.com]
A statement by the UK Home Office on Monday said Britain had a historic commitment to Hong Kong: “Adult children of British National (Overseas) status holders who were under 18 at the time of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China will now be eligible to apply for the route independently of their parents. Their partners and children will also be able to move to the UK under the expanded route. It is estimated 26,000 people will arrive in the UK over the next five years.”
A statement by the UK Home Office on Monday said Britain had a historic commitment to Hong Kong: “Adult children of British National (Overseas) status holders who were under 18 at the time of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China will now be eligible to apply for the route independently of their parents. Their partners and children will also be able to move to the UK under the expanded route. It is estimated 26,000 people will arrive in the UK over the next five years.”
Quote
♭♫
Hong Kong BNO passport holders will be able to resettle in the USA instead of Great Britain.
[amp.scmp.com]
Details of ‘safe haven’ programme for Hongkongers in the US are released
Eligibility will be extended to holders of both Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and British National (Overseas) pass ports
Those covered by the deferred removal plan will be eligible to work in the US and can also apply to leave and re-enter the countryQuote
Kobo-Daishi
A true win-win situation.
China's shed of her troublemakers and the Anglophone 5 Eyes nations get a productive work force. ;-0
Kobo, the Cantonese dilettante.
Re: Jimmy Lai To Spend Next Few Months As Winnie The Pooh's BBF
02/10/2026 by ♭♫ [+-]The verdict of Jimmy Lai reveals how the Vatican threw Chinese Catholics under the bus.
[youtu.be]
Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang discusses Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai being sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of sedition and conspiracy on ‘Kudlow.’ #
[youtu.be]
Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang discusses Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai being sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of sedition and conspiracy on ‘Kudlow.’ #
