I’m thrilled to have my essay “Just One Box to Define My Child” in Brain, Child Magazine’s Cultural Diversity blog series: Which box should I check when my child fits into more than one category? White like me or Asian like her dad? Read more here
My creative nonfiction piece “Flickering Little Lights” appears in the September 2015 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Cha is an award-winning English online literary journal based in Hong Kong. “Fireflies are called flickering lights (đom đóm) in Vietnamese. As a child in the Mekong Delta, my husband saw them darting around the …” Read the rest here.…
My husband and I were interviewing his mother about her search for her missing sister’s final resting place. Talk of a sister tied to a post by the Việt Cộng and left to drown in the rising tide carries a heaviness, but Má’s eyes lit up at being able to tell her story. To be heard.…
Thanks to Chris Galvin Nguyen for nominating me for the “Very Inspiring Blogger Award.” The award is a way for bloggers to share other websites they admire. I’m honored to be thought of by Chris who writes about living in Vietnam and shares her incredible photography on her blog. Here are the guidelines for accepting the award and nominating…
Here are 5 interesting facts about Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta. 1. The islands in the Mekong Delta where my husband grew up are Ship Island (Cồn Tàu) and New Dragon Island (Tân Long). Next door was Phoenix Island where the Coconut Monk had his elaborate pagoda. 2. He watched Bonanza…
Mướp squash grew over the water coconut leaf roof of the hut my husband’s family fled to during the Tết Offensive. Because he was small enough not to crash through the leaf roof, Lượng could sit up among the mướp squash watching the U.S. planes and helicopters retaliate by attacking a Việt Cộng base in…
My daughter has a job babysitting chickens for our neighbors when they’re on vacation. A side benefit is fresh eggs. Last time most of the chickens were molting, so she said they were crabby. They didn’t want her to pick them up. Only the one chicken that wasn’t molting was laying eggs. She gets paid quite…
