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03/14/14
Shine On!
Filed under: General, Kids, Culture
Posted by: @ 7:28 am

IMG_052bethany
Kite or Feng Zheng flying is one of the most popular traditional sports in China.
It dates back thousands of years, a lot farther back than badminton or karaoke.

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Along for just the fun of it, the Chinese will fly kites
to honor their ancestors, tying messages of hope to the tails.
 
So
the students at Kunming International Academy decided
to honor the
twenty nine lives that were lost at the March 3rd
Train Station Massacre
by making kites.

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Bethany Birch, an imaginative teacher lead project “Shine On”.
Bethany
figured out how to make the kites, where to get the material and even
orchestrated a kite ceremony with the neighboring Hu Pan Zhe Meng
Elementary school.

Students from both schools wrote messages of love and hope on the kites.

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The kites were beautiful, but due to a lack of feng or wind, were a bit grounded.
So even though the kite building ceremony was a good idea that did fly, in actuality, it didn’t.

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If you look closely, you can see  laundry hanging on the enclosed deck of the top floor apartment behind the town houses.
That’s where I live.
The shiny kites are a lot more fun to look at. Or to use as a hat.

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So what does the Chinese word Feng Zheng for kite mean?
Feng means wind.
To break wind, as in fart, is fàngpì 放 屁.
That is also a Chinese tradition.
 

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