Southeast Asian Student Groups Host Visibility Week

More than 100 Harvard affiliates and Cambridge residents gathered for live performances, film screenings, and poetry readings as a part of celebrations for Southeast Asian Visibility Week.

The three-day celebration, which lasted from March 3 to March 5, was co-hosted by the Harvard Undergraduate Philippine Forum, the Harvard Vietnamese Association, the Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia Association, and the Harvard Undergraduate Southeast Asia Journal.

Monday’s event — which took place at the Queen’s Head Pub — featured opening remarks by Harvard University Asia Center director Michael J. Puett, a dance performance by members of HUPF, a live band performance by Cambodian music group Jasper Crystal Wizard & The Prisms, and Southeast Asian games.

Afza Ahsan ’28, a Pakistani international student, said that while she does not typically attend events that center other cultures, attending the Southeast Asian Visibility Week events “proves to me you need to go out of your comfort zone and try to explore more traditions.”

“There’s definitely so many things that I never thought I’d be doing,” Ahsan said. “It’s very well organized. The food’s amazing. The dance, amazing. The vibes are good.”

Attendees also gathered for a screening of the Thai film “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” and a series of short films on Tuesday.

To conclude the festivities, Wednesday’s celebrations featured a cultural food reception, held in CGIS South with food catered from various Southeast Asian restaurants, and a poetry reading.

During Wednesday’s poetry event, poems were read in Indonesian, Thai, Filipino, and Vietnamese — along with English translations — by Harvard language preceptors and their students.

Khang D. Nguyen ’27 — who read aloud his English translation of the Vietnamese poem “The Tale of Kieu (Truyện Kiều)”— said he chose the poem because it “contained quite a lot of the imagery and figurative language that ended up being commonplace in the Vietnamese language itself.”

Victor Ngow ’28, an international student from Malaysia, said it was “nice to have food from back home” and to hear familiar non-English languages. He added that he hopes attendees from different backgrounds can experience Southeast Asian culture at the events.

“I came to America — there’s a lot of nuances that I had to learn,” Ngow said. “It’s pretty similar here, where you get to meet people from the region. While it may not be exact to how it is, it’s a little taste of what it might be.”

The visibility week planning began with a dining hall conversation between Jose Marco C. ‘Marcky’ Antonio ’25, Jay Hong Chew ’25, and Theodore ‘Ted’ J. Sunshine ’26, who, according to Antonio, wanted to “bolster Southeast Asian identity” and create a “defined space for all of us to come together.”

Chew said that the three of them were “generally frustrated over the lack of Southeast Asian visibility” on campus.

By bringing together different Southeast Asian organizations for the visibility week, Antonio said the organizers hoped to raise conversations about the Southeast Asian identity on campus and instituting a Southeast Asian Center in the future.

While not directly involved in the coordination of the visibility week events, the Harvard University Asia Center provided funding to support the organizers.

Jorge I. Espada, the associate director for Southeast Asia Programs at the Asia Center, said that by providing financial support for the events, they hope to push for more Southeast Asia programming at Harvard.

“We really are hoping that this just kind of highlights how much interest there is in Southeast Asia at Harvard that isn’t necessarily reflected in courses that are offered or even events that are offered,” he said.

—Staff writer Alexander W. Anoma can be reached at alexander.anoma@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @AnomaAlexander.

—Staff writer Chantel A. De Jesus can be reached at chantel.dejesus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @c_a_dejesus.