By Cameron Wall
On Sunday, Sept. 18, the annual Mid-Autumn Moon Children’s Festival, or the Trung Thu Festival, will take place at the Thomas Jefferson Community Center in Arlington. The family-friendly event is free to the public and embraces Vietnamese culture with traditional games, food, classic and contemporary Vietnamese music and more.
The Trung Thu Festival was originally an agricultural holiday in Vietnam celebrating the conclusion of a bountiful harvest and marking a time for families to spend together in the same vein as Thanksgiving and Halloween in the U.S. The festival has been celebrated in Arlington since 1988.
Arlington’s connection to the Vietnamese community dates back to the early 1980s when refugees left the country following the fall of Saigon in the mid-’70s. Some landed in Clarendon, revitalizing the area with new shops and restaurants. Vietnamese immigrants would travel from neighboring states as far as Tennessee to shop at the Little Saigon district, which helped the local community establish a presence both physically and economically.
The Arlington Cultural Affairs Division will distribute the book Echoes of Little Saigon: Southeast Asian Immigration and the Changing Faces of Arlington, which chronicles the Vietnamese immigrants’ history and impact on Northern Virginia, for free at the festival. Echoes of Little Saigon was written by local writer Kim A. O’Connell and is based on an oral history and photos that date back to the community’s early days in Arlington. “We wanted to unveil this history,” says Arlington Cultural Affairs project leader Aliza Schiff.
The Trung Thu Festival is Sunday, Sept. 18, at the Thomas Jefferson Community Center in Arlington from noon to 4 p.m. Visit the festival’s website for more details.
You can also download Echoes of Little Saigon at the Arlington Arts website for free.
