By Danielle Silva

This is the third year the Taiwanese Student Association (TSA) transformed one of Suffolk’s common areas into a replica of the Taiwanese night market on Thursday.

Chi Chen Hsieh, a junior and marketing major, who now serves as the club’s president looks at the Taiwanese Night Market as a time of unity in Suffolk’s cultural community.

“The purpose of the night is to bring a little bit of our culture to Suffolk, as well as an opportunity for all the Taiwanese students to get together,” said Hsieh.

The night markets in Taiwan are an old tradition, that went from small agglomerations in front of worshiping temples to large, entire-street showcases of lined up vendors. The streets of the night markets are crowded, with salesmen shouting their best offers and music playing loud. There are more than one-hundred street night markets in Taiwan.

A screen-projector displayed pictures of Taiwanese landscapes and music played on the background to set the scene. The Somerset Café had a big food table right in the middle, filled with traditional Taiwanese food and drinks such as green onion pancakes (spring onion flour pancake with many thin layers, made with scallions), and fried chicken fillet (chicken breast that has been pounded flat, marinated, battered and deep-fried with ground pepper), known as the fan favorite.

There weren’t any name tags on the dishes, making it interesting to try the variations of food without knowing what it was.

To imitate the vendors, the members of the Taiwanese Student Association arranged tables all around the sitting area with traditional games.

One of the most played games included the chopstick challenge. In the challenge, the players competed to see who would be able to put the biggest number of grains onto a plate using chopsticks in just 60 seconds.

The other popular game was the dice game. The dice game is simple, two players toss the dice at the same time, whoever makes the greatest sum, wins. Every won game came with a raffle ticket. The more one played, the more raffle tickets one would receive, and the higher the chance to win the movie tickets.

This kept the room bubbling with energy.

Despite the excitement for the activities, the club said they were not as prepared for the event as they would have liked to have been.

Cho-Yueh Chien, a sophomore information systems and operations management major began his time with the TSA during his freshman year after being influenced by a friend and explained to a Journal reporter during the event about the TSA’s preparation.

“We finished preparing just a few days before the event, so we did not have enough time to promote it,” said Chien. “Therefore, we did not expect the event to be filled with people.”

Although, despite the TSA’s concerns, they were wrong.

“We were expecting around twenty people max,” said club member Oscar Fang. “But there was at least fifty people, which is a great.”

The Somerset Café was filled with not only members of the Taiwanese community but also other curious students.

“The best part of the night was seeing how people got involved with the games and have fun with them,” said Chien on the success of the night. “Just seeing people have food and chatting with their friends during our event is awesome.”

Fang, a junior who joined the club in his freshman year, told a Journal reporter the organization has grown since the time he joined and was pleased over the success of the night.

“I joined the TSA during my freshman year, and it was the first year it started, which means we started from nothing,” said Fang. “Unlike the Vietnamese Student Union and the other big cultural clubs, we didn’t have much of a budget, but we managed to survive and eventually the night market event became a yearly event.”