Allan Appel Photo
Hunmae (in blue) and Hunyee McCollum, with parents Allen and Kathy and city culture commission chair Aleta Staton.
The half-Chinese and half-African-American McCollum sisters have been speaking Cantonese at home all their lives. Thursday morning they put their linguistic talents to inspirational use, only they had to switch to Mandarin, the national dialect of China.
The sisters were part of the cultural program on the occasion of formal signing ceremonies marking Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, becoming New Haven’s eighth sister city.
Detail of hand-enbroidered peony, Chinese national flower, gift from Changsha to New Haven.
As 75 officials and city staffers gathered on City Hall’s second floor Thursday morning, the girls recited poems on friendship written by Bai Ju Yi, a Tang dynasty-era poet whom Hunyee, a sixteen year old at Hamden Hall, likened to a 9th-century Robert Frost.
Translator, in white, and representatives from Yali and other Changsha institutions.
“Maybe I’m biased. I love Robert Frost,” she added as she paced a little before the program began.
The signing is the harvest of a recent trip by the event’s organizer, city culture czar Andy Wolf, who journeyed to Changsha in the fall to sign a letter of intent. It is also the culmination of more than a century of cooperation and interchange orchestrated largely under the umbrella of the Yale-China Association.
About 110 years ago, a group of Yale undergrads found themselves in Changsha and ended up helping to establish what today are Yali High School, one of the premier secondary schools in China, and one of China’s major hospitals and medical and nursing schools.
There have been interchanges and collaborations over the years, including between Yali and the Foote School and most recently with John C. Daniels Inter-district Magnet School of International Communication, said David Youtz, of the Yale-China Association, who was one of the hosts of the event.
With all the tensions in the world today, formalizing that relationship, nurtured over the decades, is particularly important, Wolf added.
New Haven is often cited as one of America’s oldest cities, but it is a “small child” compared to 3,000-year-old Changsha, said Mayor Harp before she and Wen Shuxun, the chairman of the Changsha Municipal Committee, formally signed the agreements and then received flowers.
Elm Shakespeare Executive Director Rebecca Goodheart corralled some lines of the Bard’s from Midsummer Night’s Dream on sisterhood and happy marriages in honor of the occasion — “two lovely berries molded on one stem.”
And Youtz described both cities as centers of culture, education, technology, and food: “Spicy Hunan meets the place where the hamburger was born.”
After the ceremonies, the Chinese visitors presented Mayor Harp with a hand-embroidered peony, China’s national flower, to be hung in City Hall.
In addition to a number of gifts the city offered in return, Wolf previously had presented Changsha officials a sculpted dove of peace made by a local New Haven artist during his Oct. 2016 trip, when the Sister Cities letter of intent was signed.
Kathy McCollum said she and her daughters are absolutely going to be on the very first trip of New Haveners journeying to Changsha.
New Haven’s other sister cities include Amalfi, Italy; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Leon, Nicaragua; Avignon, France; Afula-Gilboa, Israel; Hue, Vietnam; and San Francisco Tetlanohcan, Tlaxcala, Mexico.
