Sometimes a simple dish can help make meaning. That was the case at Purdue University (IN) when the Hawai’i Club recently baked butter mochi – a popular Hawaiian dish made from eggs, milk, sugar and butter – and shared it during an event at the Asian American and Asian Resource Cultural Center. For some students, the dish was a reminder of their family and home.
“This is something small that we can bring from home that people from Hawaii can get a bit of that sense of community,” Troy Tamura, president of the Purdue Hawai’i Club, told The Exponent. “This is giving me a chance to remind me of my roots.”
The butter mochi event also encouraged cultural overlap, according to Vice President Lyndsy Mashino. “Doing events like this is a great way to gather other people that are also from Hawaii and then also Asian communities,” she told the paper. “We’ve done a lot of collaborations with (the Japanese Student Association) to do other events, or combine them… like Korean and Hawaiian culture.”
Read more about this delicious community building event here.
