The first thing that you discover about Rita Liu is her cheery disposition, her positivity and charisma. A chat with her will thrust you into a can-do zone and keep you there for the rest of your day. She kneads every thought with the same rhythm a determined Chinese chef releases while kneading dough to create beloved dumplings.

Whether Liu does, in fact, make dumplings is beside the point. Whatever the task at hand, Liu approaches it with resolve and staying power. For me, nothing is difficult,” she extols. “You just need hard work to get there.”

Once again, her devotion to people and culture was evidenced in late winter at the Lunar New Year Year of the Snake 2025. The event’s sponsor is the Asian-Pacific Association of Longmont, is the nonprofit started by Liu and of which she remains president. The event was sponsored by numerous businesses, including the Kiwanis, Community Foundation of Boulder County and St. Vrain Valley Schools.

The scores of visitors that assembled inside the halls, auditoriums and gyms at Silver Creek High School were treated to a vast array of programs — everything from the chopsticks challenge to Tibetan mandala, from a Japanese origami workshop to live performances of Korean folk songs and a Chinese choir. Music and dance performances were staged by Silver Creek and Niwot High Schools. Chinese Folk dances were offered by Bohua Chinese School in Boulder.

Audiences, too, were dazzled by the Hygiene Elementary School-sponsored Vietnamese Snake parade. Meanwhile, Liu’s daughter, who holds a degree from Yale in International Relations and Political Science, worked a booth, “talking about Asian history,” her mother says proudly. “God is taking care of us.”

Then there was the free food, heaping and delicious portions of crowd-pleasers such as orange chicken, fried sesame rice balls and steamed broccoli. Truth be told, I was keen on spying an “ouroboro,” a classic Asian image of a snake eating its own tail. But I figured it had slithered away to sneak a coffee break while hanging from a tree on Nelson Road. Hygiene Elementary School’s Student Council dazzled audiences with a Vietnamese Snake Parade.

The colorful little posters lining the walls at the event speak to Liu’s devotion to the power of education and enlightenment. They call out to you. I found new information leisurely strolling. A plate of food in hand, I nourished my mind with fresh information about China. A few examples: “The Great Wall of China has cable cars to go up and down with roller coaster cars…Kites were invented in ancient China, originally used to send messages in the military…The Forbidden City is a palace in Beijing, the former seat of the Imperial Throne from the Ming Dynasty…Table tennis is China’s national sport. They have the most Olympic medals for the sport at 53…”

The planning that goes into the expansive, late-winter program is lengthy, Liu emphasizes. “It takes six months to get the team together, to come up with a program. But it’s worth it. There are many Asians in Longmont and Boulder County, but there wasn’t one group to bring them together.” The Asian cultures around Longmont and Boulder County include the largest, Chinese, along with Korean, Thai, Indonesian and Filipino.

Liu, a Longmont resident, feels comfortable in her role as orchestrator. The Shanghai native, whose family fled to Taiwan before Chinese communism took hold in 1949, said, “We didn’t have a chance to take anything with us.”

Liu capped a stellar career with IBM in Armonk, N.Y., beginning as a programmer before moving up the ladder into the iconic company’s ranks. Along a career that spanned 34 years, she hopscotched from Hong Kong to Singapore and Europe, applying her IT skills in support of the company’s workforce in those locations.

As a young woman, with her degree in economics, Liu moved to Germany to marry a man she had met in church. Finding herself in a strange land, unable to speak the language, proved to be a bit much for her at first. She says, “They thought Chinese were from outer space or something. I went to the ladies room and cried.”

Searching for employment during her time there also carried moments of self-doubt. With a job interview at General Electric looming, Liu needed help. “My husband was an engineer and his English was very good, because his father was a diplomat.” So he lovingly wrote down 200 questions and answers that would likely bubble up during the interview. “I memorized them,” she declares. “Can you imagine how scared I was?” She got the job.

When the right opportunities arise for community involvement, Liu’s poised to bring her skills to the table. Her roster of contributions include membership in the Longmont Multicultural Action Committee, a city council-sponsored effort designed to encourage residents to help foster cultural awareness and understanding.

“I think these events bring everyone together. When we learn from each other, we respect each other,” she says.

Several years ago, Liu chaired a committee that studied construction bonds for the St. Vrain Valley School District bond issue. She’s also a member of Longmont Rotary Club. Grassroots programs, she asserts, “bring everyone together. We learn from each other; we respect each other.”

After she retired from her high-pressure career, she and her husband moved to Colorado to be closer to their son, who had come here to study.

“He fell in love” with the area and dropped his plans to return to New York, she says. “We kept the house in New York, but found that maintaining two households was difficult. So we sold that one.”

In a calm, reassuring tone, Liu, who during her youth in Taiwan, played on a championship volleyball team and ran track, posited two rhetorical questions: “In this world, what’s the purpose of your life? If you’re just eating, sleeping, what’s the meaning? You want to contribute. You want to make a difference.”

In her work with the Asian Pacific group, she acknowledges that while a polyglot of languages and dialects dominate a world where 4.7 billion Asians call home, “I realized that we’re all the same.”

To put a finer point on it, “all the same” applies during May, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month, and all the days before and after the fifth month.

Tony Glaros, originally from Washington, D.C., is a longtime reporter and former educator. He says living on the Front Range sparks euphoria.