Celebrating Women Across Cultures: Let Her Shine Joins the ASEAN Spouses Circle at the Vietnam House

Some celebrations remind you just how big the story of women's empowerment really is.

On March 6, 2026, just ahead of International Women's Day, Let Her Shine had the honor of joining the ASEAN Spouses Circle at a celebration hosted by the Vietnam House in Washington, DC — an afternoon honoring the voices, cultures, and contributions of women across the ASEAN diplomatic community.

The setting itself told a story. The Vietnam House was beautifully adorned in pink lotus flowers — Vietnam's national flower, a symbol of resilience and grace rising from still waters. Our own Thania Trieu, Let Her Shine Co-Founder & President, had the joy of arranging the lotus centerpiece that graced the main dining table as the focal design of the celebration — a small labor of love for an afternoon devoted to women in bloom.

And then there was the food. Chef Anna Le led the gathering through the artistry of Vietnamese vegetarian cuisine, sharing how to create vegetarian crab noodle soup, shredded vegetarian chicken salad, and other vegetarian specialties — dishes that carry generations of tradition, reimagined with care. Around those dishes, something familiar happened: women connecting the way women have always connected — over food, over stories, over the shared experience of creating something beautiful together.

The room held stories from across Southeast Asia and beyond: women whose lives span countries, languages, and cultures, and whose journeys carry the kind of wisdom that only comes from building a life between worlds.

For Let Her Shine, it was also a working celebration. Behind the lens, our Co-Founder & CFO Sean Lam and our Own Your Voice team spent the afternoon doing what we do best: listening, capturing, and preserving. Through photo and video, and in interviews conducted throughout the celebration, we gathered the stories of women whose experiences cross borders — stories of identity, resilience, family, and voice. Because moments like these deserve more than memory. They deserve preservation.

At Let Her Shine, our own founding story is rooted in the immigrant experience — in knowing what it means to carry a story between cultures and to search for the confidence to tell it. So this celebration felt like home. Women's empowerment is a global conversation, and every culture brings its own wisdom to it — sometimes in words, sometimes in a bowl of noodle soup made by hand.

Our heartfelt gratitude to Madam Bich Van and the Vietnam House for so graciously hosting and welcoming us, and to the ASEAN Spouses Circle for including Let Her Shine in this celebration of women lifting women — across cultures, across continents. And to Chef Anna Le, for reminding us that culture is something we don't just talk about — we taste it, share it, and pass it on.

Stories captured at this event will be shared through our Own Your Voice platform as they are completed — always with each storyteller's full consent, because every story belongs to the person who lived it.