A Royal Collaboration

Whenever I hear those drums, I know they’re coming - the lions.

With their brilliant red and gold coloring and those blinking eyes, I always tried to get a seat on the inside of the table, away from the aisle, at the Chinese New Year banquets. As a kid, the lions were scary and the drums made the experience even more intense.

The Chinese Lion and Dragon Dances are a symbol of good luck and fortune, traditionally done at the Lunar New Year holiday and other joyous occasions like weddings and birthdays. Typically there are two to three performers - sometimes kids - to one lion costume, and the acrobatics and talent of the dancers is mesmerizing. All these years later watching the Lion Dance no longer evokes feelings of fear, but pride, honor and nostalgia.

On Saturday, February 10th, the LA Kings hosted their first Lunar New Year celebration. Working for the Kings since 2008, I had been hoping for this theme night for a few years and was ecstatic when we added it to the calendar for this season. It happened to fall on New Year’s Day on the Lunar calendar, which gave the evening an extra special feeling.

As a third-generation Chinese American, Chinese New Year, as we call it, is a holiday that my family has always celebrated. We enjoy a New Year’s Eve dinner, as well as a New Year’s Day dinner with family. It’s tradition to bring oranges to the home of your relatives, as oranges are a symbol of luck and prosperity. If your oranges have leaves still attached, even better! We wear new clothes on New Year’s Day, and anyone unmarried receives red envelopes containing money (“lay-tsee”) from married relatives - my favorite part for obvious reasons!

This is a photo of me as a kid, wearing my traditional Chinese dress, undoubtedly on my way to a special event. Nothing says ‘right of passage’ for an Asian kid like that bowl haircut, which we will never, ever discuss again.

When I was younger, Chinese New Year was something I was accustomed to celebrating, but I also felt like not many other people knew what it was. Now, I feel like things have changed - the lunar calendar is more widely acknowledged - and I love that.

This is the Year of the Dragon! There are 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac, and each year is represented by a different animal. It is said that those born in that year represent the characteristics attributed to their animal, and the zodiac repeats every 12 years. I happen to be the Year of the Dog.

As part of the Kings’ Lunar New Year celebration, a Dragon Dance team performed a traditional dance during first intermission. What a treat, drums and all! There was a wishing wall, where fans got to write wishes on special Kings Lunar New Year-branded cards, and Philip Wang, a filmmaker of Wong Fu Productions, dropped the ceremonial puck.

At the pre-game fan festival there was a booth where fans could sign up for the Firecracker Run, an annual event that occurs in Chinatown, as well as a lantern-making station. The lighting of lanterns represents letting go of darkness and one’s past and bringing hope for the new year. Often the lanterns are red, which is a lucky color in Chinese culture. If you’ve seen the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” you know what I’m talking about. The cultural references in that film are spot on!

The Kings Care Foundation sold mystery red envelopes that contained signed player cards and like the other heritage nights, facilitated a player-signed jersey auction. The Kings jersey and merchandise designed for Lunar New Year are GORGEOUS. The logos feature a dragon chasing a pearl, the alternate jersey logo, and in addition to the traditional red and gold, also incorporates jewel tones, which represent the power and royalty that both the dragon the the Kings command. If you can’t already tell, everything associated with the Lunar New Year celebration means something and the design for the merchandise is no different.

I was fortunate enough to get to meet Felicia Liang, the artist behind the merch designs, and she is such a sweet person. She’s an illustrator who does commercial and editorial work, and she also has her own online shop. The Kings marketing team reached out to her via Instagram requesting a collaboration and that’s how the whole process got started. She has designed other merchandise before, but never a jersey or something requiring embroidery, so this was a unique project for her as well.

“I wanted to keep it simple, it’s the Year of the Dragon, such a strong figure, but I also wanted to make it dynamic and use different colors,” explains Liang, who was also born in the Year of the Dragon. “Red and yellow are so important for Lunar New Year, but I wanted to incorporate some other colors to add a modern twist to it. So I took the retro logo and just drew a dragon around it and I think it’s cool because both the Kings and the dragon are a symbol of royalty, so it just makes sense.”

Liang is a second-generation Taiwanese American, so she has fond memories of big family dinners in celebration of the Lunar New Year.

“I’m honored to be part of this inaugural Lunar New Year and I think it’s great that teams like this are platforming ways for us to celebrate our people and our culture,” Liang says.

In addition to the public celebrations, the Kings' HR team distributed red envelopes along with dumplings and egg rolls to the staff last Friday, which was New Year’s Eve. The Asian Youth Center was also hosted at the game, and some of my Kings colleagues and I - all of Asian descent - visited them in their suite. It was a special thing for me because there were at least half a dozen of us who made the visit, but when I first started with the Kings there were maybe two other Asian people on staff and that was it. We’ve come a long way in the last decade-and-a-half, and it’s wonderful to see!

Joe Kang, from group sales, was a big driving force behind the Lunar New Year game festivities and I loved meeting with him over the last few months to talk about possible ideas, and it was really a point of pride to watch things come together on Saturday night. I saw so many people rocking the merch, including the exclusive hat that came with the Lunar New Year ticket pack that we actually sold out of!

I feel like Saturday was a big success, and not just because the Kings shut out the Edmonton Oilers! I am really looking forward to building upon the prosperity (see what I did there?) of our first Lunar New Year theme night, and making next year’s even more incredible. Being a third-generation, sometimes it’s hard for me to feel connected to my Chinese heritage and culture. I understand a lot of the dialect of Cantonese my family speaks, but even my grandparents spoke English well. Celebrating Chinese New Year is one of the ways I do feel connected and I am so grateful that the Kings are embracing this holiday, thereby fusing two things I’m passionate about. Everyone loves a good collab - lions, drum beats and all.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! May the Year of the Dragon bring you love, happiness, health and prosperity!