Staff Writer Emma Chung visits the Night Market and communes with the ghosts of her Bwog forebears.

Each year, the Chinese Student Club hosts Night Market, a four-hour extravaganza of food and performances, where vendors and student clubs sell overpriced treats even though everyone is broke. That is, excluding Red Bull, who tabled right up front and gave out free cans.

Just as the Night Market boasts a fabled history at Columbia, so does this humble news organization. In 2006, the year of our birth, Bwog’s first post about the Night Market was a pithy, observant poem titled “Night Marketing,” which noted how attendees included “everyone who’s anyone in the firmament of Columbia’s Asian cultural clubs.”

Sprawled out on Low steps and blossoming with festive strings of light, this year’s festival brought palpable cheer to the icy fall air. At one booth, the Singapore Student Association sold hot chocolate, while a few tables away, the Anua College Insider Program offered skincare products. Hundreds of students milled about, nibbling on Vietnamese rice crackers with peanuts or Filipino baked goods. As evidenced by 2024’s 2Girls1Snack coverage, the Night Market is a true celebration of Asian food. This year, their diverse array of Chinese desserts was particularly compelling: sugar-coated fruit called tanghulu, a tofu-like milk paste known as shuangpinai, Cantonese egg tarts, and many more treats.

Another Bwog post that covered the Night Market was Claire Friedman’s “Night Market Brings Happiness In The Dark Times Of Midterms” in 2010. Friedman mourns the emotional and spiritual toll of constant exams, writing, “In the amount of time I’ve spent stressing about midterms this week, I could…build a small colony of gingerbread houses.” Yet Night Market provided a night of relief for Friedman, highlighting its legacy of nourishing student souls: “A quick survey of my pockets yielded only a nickel and a mint of unknown vintage, but I still managed to snag a good-sized cupcake.”

Another staple of Night Market has been CU Generation, a dynamic, majority Asian dance group whom Friedman lauded as the “highlight of the performance lineup.” Their vibrant and fluid showcase wowed the audience in 2025 as well. Other starling acts included Ijoya, an African dance group, covers of “Golden” and “Your Idol” from the film K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the hip-hop dance group ONYX. Throughout the night, the vibrant humanity and expressive charisma of each performer was truly a spectacle in itself.

Autumn stress wraps thick around the mind of any person subsisting on fear and Red Bull. Yet amidst the eternal slouch of library lock-ins, the Night Market invites each of its members to rise to the occasion of feasting, dancing, and remembering their culture.

Night Market via Author