By Annabel Yang
The Taiwanese American Student Association, or more commonly known as TASA, exists to
preserve and promote the understanding of Taiwanese culture for students all around campus,
and to foster networks among other Taiwanese American students. Every year, we collaborate
with our fellow Taiwanese club, Taiwanese Student Association (TWSA), to execute our biggest
night market event, Taste of Taiwan.
Each year, there is a different theme with varying decorations to match the overall scheme. This year’s
event mimics the Keelung Miaokou Night Market located in Keelung City, Taiwan where
numerous yellow lanterns light up the area while street food is made in front of your eyes and
children can go around playing games to win little prizes. This is how we envisioned our event
and it was put to action.
To advertise our event, we began with a daily countdown to the event releasing little bits of
information about what to expect. In addition, one of the special surprises included the 2048
game coded by a TASA board member which exploded in popularity.
On the day of our event, our audience could enjoy little stations imitating the food and game
stalls and rotate around the stations. Everyone enjoyed the Taiwanese rice noodles, green
beans, and salt and pepper chicken from TK Wu in addition to the mapo tofu and fried rice from
Lucky Kitchen. While people enjoyed the food, they could go around to try out various games,
one of which was the magnetic fish game. Participants had to fish out as many toy marine
animals within a time period; a common activity in many night markets. Performances followed
this session of cuisine and activities were VeryUs, Michigan Lion Dance, Seoul Juice, Female
Gayo, Revolution, rXn, DB3, and East Zodiac displayed their various talents of dancing, singing,
yoyoing, drumming, and more.
Throughout this event, we ran into various challenges, but they were easily solved through
everyone’s collaboration and quick thinking. Our time management skills and event timeline
planning especially helped with this as we had time to plan around our challenges and put our
heads together to find a solution. Having various committees to facilitate planning our event had
a great impact on our problem-solving skills. Our weekly meetings among all committee leaders
greatly benefitted us as a collective through communication because it prevented various
committees from individually struggling, and it allowed us to create such a successful result of
our event.
Our experience with dealing with these various challenges in addition to sustaining the
successes of our event this year will significantly benefit our future endeavors with this event
and more.
