Tregaron Mandarin Students Host Cross-Campus Workshop at Primary School

On Friday, April 3, students in the Tregaron Mandarin Chinese program took a field trip to the Primary School to hold a workshop with their younger peers: creating plum blossoms through a special paint blowing technique.

China’s national flower is the plum blossom, which blooms in the winter and signals the coming of spring. Coincidentally, the word '梅' (plum blossom) sounds the same as '霉' (misfortune) in Mandarin. Chinese people have a strong belief in homophones and similar-sounding words, so '吹梅' (chuī méi – blowing plum blossoms) has a dual meaning. On the one hand, it means blowing open plum blossoms, and on the other, it implies 'blowing away misfortune.’

To create their plum blossoms, students placed droplets of black paint in a corner of a large piece of paper, then used a straw to blow that paint outwards on the rest of the paper to make it look like branches of a tree. They embellished as much as they liked by using brightly colored paint to create the emerging blossoms on the branches. Check out their beautiful creations!