Vietnam is 8,781 miles away from Fort Worth, but that’s not stopping some Vietnamese students from bringing their culture to the Lone Star State. 

The Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) is hosting the cultural event “Amazing Vietnam 2015: Alluvia” on Friday. They plan to offer a three course Vietnamese meal and entertain guests with the cultural performances of their homeland through dances and skits.

Huy Le, president of VSA and senior finance and supply chain management double major, believes the event will help the student body learn more about his homeland.

“I want people coming out of the show knowing more about Vietnamese culture,” Le said.

Last year’s event sold over 200 tickets and was entitled “Journey to the Motherland.” This year they plan to sell 250 tickets and have centered their event around the story of alluvia.

Alluvia is the fine-grained sedimentary soil that allowed the Vietnamese farmers to capitalize in agriculture. Le says that it’s representative of the work ethnic Vietnamese have in order to be prosperous.

“Although we were blessed by Mother Nature with such plentiful alluvia, we still have to work hard to achieve what we want” said Le.

Thu Pham, a first-year biochemistry major and VSA member, hopes that the event will help Vietnamese cultivate their love for Vietnam just as the alluvia helped in the farmlands of her homeland.

Pham said, “We want it to grow and nurture our love for Vietnam in order to spread our culture into an international environment like TCU.”

According to TCU International Student Services, there are currently 73 Vietnamese students attending TCU. Of those 73 students, 67 of them are undergraduates.

Vietnamese students make up the largest undergraduate international student group on campus.

Le contributed the large number of Vietnamese students on TCU’s campus through word-of-mouth. He said the universities good reputation spread overseas. 

Admissions officer Karen Scott works specifically with recruiting international students to Fort Worth. She is proud of the influence Vietnamese students are having on campus.

“The Vietnamese community is strong and tight knit here,” Scott said. “There are some excellent leaders who formed clubs like VSA and Beyond Borders, they’ve been OSA’s at orientation, Honors College students and so on. I’m very proud of how engaged they are on campus!”

The VSA will hold a Bamboo Dance on Tuesday to raise support for the event. A bamboo dance involves multiple people holding bamboo sticks and hitting them together in a rhythm while two dancers try navigate through the bamboo sticks.

The students will also be wearing their traditional Ao Dai, a national dress of Vietnam. 

You can find more information about the event on their Facebook page.