Three men in vintage sports jerseys stomped their way across the stage. The one wearing Cincinnati Bengals A.J. Green — orange spiky hair to match the tiger motif — led the steps. Someone wrapped in Cam Newton’s iconic black-and-baby-blue Carolina Panthers colors followed in his wake. For a while, the crowd clapped along to JID. Then came Kanye West and Ty Dolla Sign’s Grammy-nominated “Carnival.”
Mid-verse, the audio briefly dipped, summoning master of ceremonies Nathan Hyunh to the stage. As he bantered with the breakdancers, Hyunh glanced up at his audience — and gasped.
Performers’ audiences at Saturday’s Asian night market, Temple’s first, generally stretched from the Bell Tower’s base to the windows of Beury Hall. And so many people packed the market itself, on the raised plaza between Mazur and Gladfelter halls, that simply taking a few steps in any one direction required a chorus of apologies, assurances and awkward greetings.
“I was scared when I came up to M.C.,” said Hyunh, who helped plan the night market. “I’m looking at the crowd, and it’s this many people.”
No fewer than 11 of Temple’s student organizations, boasting heritages that spanned the continent, teamed up to produce a stateside counterpart to the dazzling street markets that illuminate Asia’s major metropolises. A handful of local restaurants, Pacific-themed and otherwise, signed on to support the orgs’ effort.
By Saturday morning, Temple Student Government had overlaid its Instagram with a map of the food, games, and performances on offer that evening. Even local step teams and dance troupes angled to get involved.
Each organization used their table on the liberal arts plaza to showcase a different swatch of the continent’s culture and cuisine — usually by selling a region’s signature dish or beverage.
But this was no cash grab: Organizers said they wanted to ensure passersby could sample their cultures on a budget.
According to Andy Wang of the Taiwanese Student Association, his club brought the island’s signature winter lemon tea in part because they knew most students could shell out enough to at least break the TSA even.
“Cost is a huge problem,” said Wang, a statistical science and data analytics major. “We wanted to make something we could afford, and also something that people could afford to buy from us.”
If that meant presenting a few low-cost items instead of infodumping the national menu, so be it.
In some ways, the Night Market explored impossible questions, eternal conundra as much a part of the wayfarers’ life as anything in a suitcase or bedroll: How much of a culture follows us from home and passes between ever-distant generations. How much we leave behind. How much we pull from the world we enter.
Interestingly, some organization leaders really did leave things behind — and not always for worse. Many of the clubs responsible for the Night Market represent nations at geopolitical loggerheads with one another.
For example: Korea, repped by a single unified organization with a single, undivided table, is very much divided — between the Kim regime in the North and a U.S.-backed republic in the South. And mainland China’s government simply does not believe in the existence of such a thing as the Taiwanese nation. Beijing treats the island like an awkwardly-administered province; America and most other countries with diplomatic ties to the People’s Republic follow suit, at least in part.
Unlike other conflicts and other orgs, Andy Wang said disputes in the Pacific haven’t deeply affected clubs on campus. Students, he said, have other problems to worry about.
“People are intelligent here,” Wang said. “We’re educated. That’s the most important thing.”
Wes Anderson’s 2021 film, “The French Dispatch,” ends with the story of a fictional famed police chef in Ennui, France. The chef, known simply as Nescaffier, happens to be an immigrant — displaced, it’s implied, by the Second World War’s Pacific-theater fallout. True acceptance dominates Nescaffier’s appetite to the very end when he poisons himself in a desperate bid to rescue the police commissioner’s son and earn his colleagues’ admiration.
The writer — Roebuck Wright, modeled on the real James Baldwin, among others — peers over the chef’s sickbed as he learns of his desperate play for respect.
“Perhaps, with good luck,” Wright intones, “we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.”
Organizers and attendees at the Night Market ranged from exchange students to lifelong U.S. residents. They expressed cultures covering Canton and Chicago alike. No, really — the guy in the Cam Newton jersey, junior information science and technology major Johnny Tan, had been involved in hip-hop choreography since eighth grade.
Yet they were united in the hope that events like the night market would bring them closer to their heritage — and to the communities they now call home.
“America is a melting pot,” said senior marketing major Wang Junjie of the Chinese Students and Scholars’ Association. “Everybody has to express themselves to get into the society.”
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