Chinatown’s ‘Moon Festival’ returns in person amid celebration and concerns about Sixers project

A pair of toddlers stayed close to their mother as they stared, transfixed, at the satin animals with open mouths and winking eyes flowing down North 10th Street to a martial drumbeat in a traditional Lion Dance.

The Mid-Autumn Festival was back in Chinatown on Saturday, live and on the street after two years of virtual events, a chance for Asian Americans in the Philadelphia region to reconnect in a boisterous harvest celebration thousands of years old.

And the event also known as the Moon Festival served to rally the community to fight, yet again, for its existence — this time against a proposal to build a new 76ers arena that would abut the southern edge of one of the last authentic Chinatowns left in the United States.

“This is more than a business area, a place to eat and buy things. It’s a cultural center,” said Wei Chen, 30, the civic engagement director of Asian Americans United, the festival sponsor, and an activist group that defeated a plan to build a new Phillies stadium in Chinatown in 2000 and then fought off a proposed casino in 2008.

» READ MORE: Big projects like the Sixers’ arena plan have often threatened Philly’s Chinatown. But the AAPI community always fights for the neighborhood.

The T-shirts on offer at the Asian Americans United booth told the history succinctly in English and Chinese: No arena in Chinatown. Above, the words stadium and casino were crossed out. Early in the afternoon, the group said it had collected 4,500 signatures on a petition opposing the 76ers new home.

At another table, volunteers tied pieces of construction paper around the body of a dragon made from a flexible air duct and a felt head, each with an anti-arena message. Don’t Colonize Chinatown. Keep Our Culture. 76ers Out of Chinatown. 76ers Suck. And so on.

“Why demolish a place with so much history and culture? It’s been here a long time,” said Jacqueline Tan, 16, a Central High School student volunteering at the festival. She passed out construction paper and black felt markers in front of the dragon table.

Bella Li, 16, lives in Chinatown, and she too was soliciting anti-arena messages. “It will be the main attraction, instead of people coming to experience Chinatown and learning our culture and traditions,” Li said.

William Tung, who lives in Kingsessing, recalled that when an arena for the NBA’s Wizards and the NHL’s Capitals was built in downtown Washington’s Chinatown, it was billed as a chance to revitalize the neighborhood. Instead, other businesses replaced the shops and restaurants.

“There’s no community left,” Tung said. “The only thing that would make you realize a Chinatown was there is a zoning rule that says street and business signs have to be written in Chinese characters.”

Debbie Wei, one of the founders of Asian Americans United, said she’s grateful that her children grew up experiencing the Mid-Autumn Festival, which was founded in 1996 by a group of students who were sad that many of their grandparents, who were still living in China, could not celebrate with them, and also that elders in the neighborhood were missing out on a community festival.

Wei, who is 65, immigrated to Philadelphia with her parents, who were busy working hard.

“I knew they got sad one night every year, missing family in China, and we had special mooncakes, but I knew nothing about what the festival meant,” she said.

Her daughter, Kaia Chou, is carrying on the activist tradition along with her best friend, Taryn Flaherty.

“Our moms were comrades in blocking the casino,” said Chou, 20, a third-year student at Bryn Mawr College. “We remember going to Council meetings and protests. Now we’re college students fighting the same fight.’”

Flaherty, 19, is a second-year student at the University of Pennsylvania and said the developer working on the Sixers arena “made his fame and his wealth on the gentrification of West Philly.”

She is determined to stop that from happening to Chinatown, as the friends’ mothers stopped other potential harms to the community.

“We want to protect them like they protected us,” Flaherty said.

Said Wei: “The 76ers haven’t seen us in fighting mode yet.”