By Julian Orlando
A festival to celebrate the Lunar New Year overtook the Curry Student Center with food, games, performances and information tables representing Asian organizations from all over Massachusetts Saturday, Feb. 1.
The Asian Cultural Festival, which began at noon and ended earlier than expected at around 4:30 p.m., was organized by the Northeastern University Asian Student Union,NUASU, and the Northeastern University Vietnamese Student Association, NUVSA, to celebrate the New Year and increase awareness of the many Asian cultural organizations on campus.
“We feel that it is definitely important for us to get recognized,” said NUASU President Alex Toh.
The organizers hope to make this celebration of communication between Northeastern campus and Boston area groups a yearly event.
“As far as layout and participation, it was really good,” said Nimitch Payongsith, Vice President of NUASU and a middler engineering major at Northeastern, but the student turnout was less than anticipated.
The Executive boards of NUASU and NUVSA spent about three months organizing the festival, contacting Asian groups from around Massachusetts to participate.
“We just want to be able to connect all of the schools together,” said Cedrick Hom, a sophomore at Boston College, who was representing the Boston Asian Student Alliance at the festival.
BASA President Joy Lin, a sophomore at Harvard, said the goal of the festival was to “facilitate more communication and collaboration between Asian students in the Boston area in hopes that they become more educated as a community about issues that Asian Americans face today.”
The issues BASA focuses on include political activism, racism and apathy in the Asian-American community. These goals are similar to that of the Asian American Resource Workshop, a coalition of Boston area adults as well as students, which were also in attendance.
Todd Lee represented the Asian American Resource Workshop at the festival on Saturday with hopes of developing some of the ties between the Asian-American organizations on campus.
Other groups in attendance included ASPIRE (Asian Sisters Participating in Reaching Excellence), which helps to provide professional and educational support to young Asian women through mentor experiences and presentations aimed at reaching their goals.
A table was also set up to explain Falun Dafa, a peaceful meditation practice which is being violently persecuted in China.
“People are being tortured, beaten and killed for the practice,” said Dayin Chen, a sophomore at Northeastern.
“We’re not out here to convert the world or anything, we just want people to be able to practice the way they chose,” Erik Meltzer, a freshman at Emerson College, said. “We are just here to support the Chinese New Year and spread awareness.”
That was the main theme of the day, awareness between local Asian American groups, Northeastern organizations and students, to increase knowledge of local groups and culture while coming together to celebrate on this holiday.
The performance portion, including the singing of the national anthem, as well as songs by Devotion, of the festival began at 3 p.m. and was hosted by the president of NUASU and the president of NUVSA. The NU Karate Club presented a dramatic and comical rendition of The Karate Kid, which showed off their martial arts skills. The skit began with a fight scene in the audience followed by quiet, serious expositions as well as fast-paced pieces to upbeat music with carefully choreographed chops and kicks flying about.
The song “Because of You” was then sang in the Philippino national language to a silent, attentive crowd, followed by dance routines from Barkada and the NU Cultural Dance group. Barkada performed one traditional piece and one modern, and the NU Cultural Dance club performed a sassy club number to “Work It,” by Missy Elliott.
The festival wrapped up with an impressive, synchronized, choreographed show performed by NUVSA that got the crowd shouting and clapping along with the popular music, exciting moves and trendy, talented participants.
