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Denver welcomes the Year of the Tiger

The 2022 Lunar New Year (Year of the Tiger!) kicked off on Tuesday, Feb. 1, but the festivities will continue well into the weekend, snow be damned.

Image from Truong An Gifts

So, in honor of the first new moon of the Asian lunisolar calendar, the City Cast Denver team spoke with Mimi Luong, a Denverite whose family migrated here in 1975 to escape postwar Vietnam. Luong’s family founded — and still runs today — Truong An Gifts and the Far East Center, a strip of Pan-Asian stores, restaurants, and businesses on South Federal Boulevard where the gift shop is located.

Today, Luong regales City Cast Host Bree Davies with the tales of how her grandfather abandoned relative wealth in his native land to find refuge in a country where he didn’t even speak the language, and ultimately built a legacy for his family and all of Denver.

Hear from Mimi herself in today’s episode of City Cast Denver: The epic family saga behind Denver’s biggest Lunar New Year celebration.

🎧 Listen now

How to ring in the 🌑 new year: The Far East Center not only offers a taste of home for Denver’s Asian community year-round, it also just so happens to host the city’s largest Lunar New Year celebrations. This weekend’s festivities will include K-pop performances, a karate demo, and several traditional dances, including a Lion Dance (on high poles) and a Dragon Dance.

— Peyton Garcia, City Cast Denver Newsletter Writer and Year of the Rooster Baby 🐓

Peyton_R2

OTHER ODDS AND ENDS

🏘️ The latest in the fight for mandatory affordable housing: In October, Denver’s Department of Community Planning and Development drafted a proposal that would require developers building multi-family homes to reserve a percentage of units for people making less than the area median income or else pay a fee. Yesterday, the department shared some tweaks to the initial proposal that would essentially widen some parameters outlined in the original draft to include all developers, not just those building housing, and include a wider range of incomes. 

🛴 Not a great look for John Elway: A video from 2019 is making its way across the Twittersphere that appears to show John Elway cheering and riding a scooter down a busy Denver street at 2am — allegedly the night before he was scheduled to host an interview with Brian Flores. 

  • 👎 Why that’s bad: Flores, former head coach for the Miami Dolphins, is suing the NFL for patterns of descrimination against Black coaching candidates. The suit claims that Elway, among others in the league, supposedly only interviewed Flores for positions in order to include a Black man among their list of candidates and never gave him serious consideration. The Broncos fiercely denied the allegations… buuut this video doesn’t look too great.