Photos by Ali Meizels ’23
Various Mount Holyoke students participated or performed in the Vietnamese Student Association’s annual Vietnam Night on Friday, Feb. 21. The theme, “Flashback,” focused on recent student memories of Vietnam.
BY JOCELYN ZHOU ’22
Mount Holyoke’s Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) held their annual Vietnam Night cultural show in Chapin Auditorium on Friday, Feb. 21. Among the guests were faculty members, Mount Holyoke and Five College students as well as local residents.
Established in 2003, the VSA aims to promote Vietnamese culture on campus. Every spring, the VSA delivers a show to demonstrate the essence of Vietnamese culture through various performances.
The event began with dinner, a popular portion among attendees. Guests waited around the two tables on both sides of Chapin Auditorium.
“[The food] was good,” Linda Zhang ’20 said. “They always have really good food each year.”
“I think [the food is] pretty authentic. It’s from Miss Saigon in Amherst,” Amelia Tran ’21 said. “It’s a taste of home.”
Senior Lecturer from the French department, Nancy Holden-Avard, sat with several other professors during dinner.
“I am not familiar with much Vietnamese food but it was light,” Holden-Avard said. “There’s so much flavor and ... different texture and full of bursts of flavor. Just delightful.”
Holden-Avard expressed her excitement for the show. “I have some Vietnamese students and I wanna know more about their culture, so I’ve come for years and I really look forward to it every year,” Holden-Avard said.
This year’s show followed the similar template of previous events.
“We always make adjustments every year, so it’s not always the same ... and not completely different,” Van Nguyen ’22, one of the organizers of Vietnam Night, said. “You can always expect the skit, but sometimes we make changes.”
Thien An Dang Nguyen ’22 opened the show by introducing this year’s theme, “Flashback.” This theme aimed to bring the audience back to 2010, using the recent history of Vietnam to immerse the guests into the memories of Vietnamese students.
Dressed in traditional garments, Lauren Nguyen ’20 performed a traditional Vietnamese dance to the song “Hello Vietnam,” along with other students. After the traditional dance performance, the skit, “Son Tinh, Thuy Tinh” brought famous Vietnamese folklore to the stage. The story explained the phenomenon of devastating floods as the result of monsoons, and portrayed the competing powers of two opposing forces: water and mountains.
After the skit, the hosts reported on the severe floods that happened in Vietnam in 2010, which connected the meaning of the folklore with real historical events The two students informed the audience of the massive storms that destroyed cities in Vietnam in 2010, presenting the details of the disaster through images and videos.
“The skit is the core of the show. Last year, we had the narrator come out and then talked about the meaning,” Van Nguyen said. “This year, we turned to the report to connect everything together.”
After the skit, Chi Doan ’22 and Khanh Nham ’22 sang two hit songs from 2010: “Em Ve Tinh Khoi” and “Hoa Ngoc Lan.”
After the medley, the VSA presented a Vietnamese game show to the audience. The host introduced “The Golden Bell Game Show,” in which competitors demonstrated their knowledge about Vietnamese cultures and geography.
“This year I wanted to do a game show because it’s the show I enjoyed like a kid,” Van Nguyen said.
During the intermission, the audience lined up for rice pudding, a famous Vietnamese dessert.
Next, a dance performance called “V-Pop Lover” utilized elements from hip-hop and classic Vietnamese literary works to bring cultural heritage to the audience in an accessible and modern way.
“It’s all very new songs, but they have traditional elements in it,” Van Nguyen said. “We try to incorporate the old and new. We try to balance that together. ” The annual fashion show was welcomed by cheers from the audience. This year’s fashion show reflected daily life in Vietnam, featuring high school uniforms, traffic police uniforms and other clothes.
Finally, some Vietnamese seniors performed a song together to celebrate their friendship found at Mount Holyoke. The screen displayed childhood photos of each student and the audience shouted out the performers’ names as they came on screen.
“I want to be here to support my friends,” Tran said. “I’m very happy to see people all over the world come here and share the happiness with me.”