Defunct Vietnamese American mutual/public benefit nonprofits incorporated in northern California from 1972 to 2019.

This week is the 49th anniversary of the end of South Vietnam, compelling hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in other countries and rebuild their livelihood. I’ve organized this list in a format similar to Maya Lin’s design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (which itself focuses on the American veterans).

I see patterns of multiple attempts of certain themes, such as chamber of commerces, women associations, veteran groups, etc. Sometimes this reveals a leadership transition problem. Some certainly have spiritual successors, such as the California Vietnamese Lawyers Association (1979–2021) succeeded by the Vietnamese American Bar Association of Northern California (2001–). It’s important to keep in mind that these orgs started because mainstream America could not effectively help the incoming Vietnamese who had limited English proficiency. Over time as more of the younger generation were able to speak English, they could access programs from mainstream orgs, reducing the need for Vietnamese-speaking ones, and eventually the org would slowly fade into irrelevance. That’s not to say we’re completely integrated; accessibility issues due to language barriers still continue to exist.

It is a reminder of the headwinds we face when trying to build a community and our resolve to try and try again to address unmet needs.

My coworker asked me how to raise aloe veras, so I created a planter recipe card, inspired by cooking and First 5 California-style childrearing checklists. I do believe that everyone here has their own recipes which vary person-to-person, just like how my spicy hamburger macaroni recipe differs from my neighbors because they’d substitute ingredients or entire steps.

Worth noting that I included USDA Hardiness Zone as well as AHS Heat Zone. My mother is in San Jose, which is also USDA Zone 9b, same as where I live (near Elk Grove), but we are not the same! Then I learned the concept of AHS Heat Zone, so we’re in Heat Zone 8 and San Jose is in Heat Zone 4. This explains a lot why her gardening advice doesn’t seem to apply well in our area.

How can Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans get along after the Vietnam War?

From ChatGPT-3:

The Vietnam War was a complex and difficult period in the history of Vietnam and the United States. It is important to acknowledge the pain and trauma that the war has caused for both Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans. However, there are ways that Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans can work towards building a positive relationship.

One approach is to focus on shared experiences and commonalities. Despite the war, there are many aspects of Vietnamese culture that are still cherished by both Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, such as the food, music, and traditions. By celebrating these shared cultural elements, both groups can build a sense of connection and mutual understanding.

Another approach is to engage in dialogue and education. Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans can engage in conversations about their different perspectives and experiences during and after the war. By listening to each other and learning from each other, they can gain a better understanding of the complexities of the conflict and how it continues to affect individuals and communities.

Additionally, it is important to acknowledge and address any lingering resentment or mistrust between the two groups. This can be achieved through open communication, empathy, and a willingness to forgive and move forward.

Ultimately, building a positive relationship between Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans requires effort, patience, and a commitment to mutual respect and understanding. By working together towards a shared goal of peace and harmony, both groups can create a brighter future for themselves and their communities.

Personal framework for running a global engineering team

Five months in being Director of Engineering for a fintech startup, overseeing a small team that spans south Asia and North America, I’m building a global engineering culture that produces a high-quality technology product. Greatest challenge I’ve ever faced. What is helping me?

1. Being a systems thinker.

As a child my uncle would go to a used computer store, Weird Stuff, in Silicon Valley and bring home junk. I would take apart and rebuild computers. At the same time, on weekends, I would help mom look after our garden filled with abundant fruit trees.

Looking after a garden helped me practice managing micro-ecologies. I played a lot of video games growing up, notably SimCity, Civilization, and SimEarth. It was fun to explore different ways of managing complex systems (cities, nations, planet).

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Multigenerational journey of a thousand miles

I went on a date today with my pregnant wife, nearing the end of her second trimester.

We started the morning watching an episode of Kitchen Nightmares in which master chef Gordon Ramsay was critiquing the practices of an Italian restaurant owner who was stuck in his ways after he took over the restaurant after his parents died, driving the business to near ruin. A great transformation took place, especially where the owner learned to let go of ritual habits (“this is how we’ve always done it when my parents were alive”), but still honor the memories of his family when Gordon had the restaurant redecorated and having a wall of the restaurant be filled with old photos of the owner’s parents when they ran the business.

We went to SeaQuest Folsom to enjoy some of the animal and marine life (it’s more for families with kids than to impress grown adults). We passed by this wine & painting studio that was selling paintings and she asked if I wanted to buy some to decorate the home. I declined, stating I wanted to decorate our home—which we purchased and moved into almost exactly one year ago—with photos of our family.

We stopped by the nearby Barnes & Noble bookstore, and I came across this book “Japanese Americans of the South Bay”, and flipped through its pages, taking note that they featured a lot of old photos and captions that told a story of what was going on. I told my wife “You know, my mom has a lot of photos from the past. I really want a copy of them.” I touched my hand on her womb. I really wanted our baby Timothy (“Tim” in Vietnamese means “heart”) to know where he came from, about the journey my mother’s family, my father’s family, and my wife’s family took to arrive here and thrive in America.

After eating delicious food at The River Thai Cuisine, we came home, took a nap. I remember this text message from my friends Christine Pham and Quyen Mai when they asked me about how we might commemorate April 30, 1975, the day South Vietnam ceased to exist and become part of a reunified Vietnam. In 2025, it will be 50 years since that moment, a pretty significant milestone. I think there is a lot to reflect about how the Vietnamese people, both within Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, have evolved after the end of the war. For my generation who were born after the war, we simply cannot observe it the way the previous generation did who viewed it as a loss of home through forced migration. But for me, and thinking about baby Timothy, I thought it more appropriate to find photos from the past that told a compelling story about our family’s journey from Vietnam, that we are like dandelion seeds scattering in the winds, making homes wherever we land.

Maybe something like 50 photos for the 50 years. Just like the Italian restaurant owner we watched about this morning. Just like the book of Japanese Americans in the South Bay. Something to adorn the walls of our new home in Florin of the Sacramento region. A multigenerational story of loss, reunion, love, reconciliation, and hope.

bánh mì, grand-père & the multiverse

Bánh mì is a Vietnamese term for wheat bread, as well as the sandwich derived from them. As a sandwich, in its most popular form, it uses a loaf of baguette, chicken liver pâté spread, deli meats (especially chả lụa ham, char siu BBQ pork, and/or grilled pork), topped with julienned pickled daikon and carrot, a sprig of cilantro for aromatics, and a few slices of fresh jalapeño peppers.

There is a similar food, bò né, which is essentially Vietnamese steak & eggs, often served with pâté, sometimes grilled onions, and with a side of baguette. I jokingly call it deconstructed bánh mì, a sandwich that you eat off the plate. The day before my grandfather’s funeral, I took my father out to eat some “deconstructed bánh mì”.

“Did grandpa ever had to go to reeducation camp like you did Dad?”

I wasn’t very close to my grandfather. I met him enough times to count on two hands, perhaps. And even during those times, it was difficult to communicate with him because of my limited Vietnamese language proficiency. Or maybe I was just very shy and didn’t know what to say to him. It turns out he was more fluent in English than I gave him credit for. It was not until I was already in college that I first learned he was a poet, about anything interesting about him.

Dad said no; ông nội had already left the Republic of Vietnam’s War Psychology Department, having served in the early 1960s for three years, about a decade before the end of the war between North and South Vietnam. He served as a battlefield journalist (aka war correspondent), reporting events from the front lines. I was curious whether grandpa—having served for an institution connected to the South Vietnam government that opposed the victorious communist political class—would have been incarcerated into reeducation camps following the end of the war. They were prisons with the purpose of de-radicalizing any possible insurgent elements loyal to the former South Vietnam. My father spent 3 years in one as a low rank-and-file soldier; and that was considered short and for good behavior. I asked that question wondering if grandpa had to endure that kind of hardship, on top of the fact that postwar Vietnam had to face difficulty in reconstruction while getting embargoed by America and by China due to Cold War politics. And although grandpa wasn’t detained into one, I can only imagine what he felt knowing he had friends and relatives (my dad among them) who disappeared from his life for years.

Bò né as deconstructed bánh mì is a somewhat silly (and delicious) way of describing how I have this tendency to take things apart, appreciate the pieces, and then recombining them again. And so over the few years that I had a chance to try to understand grandpa, I placed his life in front of me, deconstructed it, and examined the moments of his life. There are many details to everyone’s life, his included. But what I think stood out to me, as soon as I examined his life, was this inexplicable parallels to my own life.

Born Ngô Đa Thiện in 1923 in Quảng Trị, Việt-Nam, then part of the Indochinese Union as a French colony, he was the son of a Chinese immigrant from the nearby island of Hainan who married into a local Vietnamese family. Dad told me how grandpa was kind of the black sheep among his siblings. He grew up taking an interest in literature, especially foreign literature, while his siblings made their living through trade and business. In his youth he would participate in poetry recitals. By 1943, during the time of Imperial Japanese occupation, he would earn his Diplôme d'Étude Primaire Supérieurs Franco-Indigène as proof of his French fluency, and continued to learn English himself. Shortly thereafter, he would move to Saigon, work for a French commercial company as an accountant, marry my paternal grandmother, and have their first child in the late 1940s. My father would become their third child in 1949, whereupon my grandfather would move back to Quảng Trị to open up a portrait photography studio and operate it for ten years while becoming a father to more children (my aunts and uncles). By the end of his life, he would have 13 children; 11 with his wife, and adopting another 2. In 1960, he moved back to Saigon and served for three years as a war correspondent. In 1966, he would go work for an American financial company for three years. When my father sponsored the entire family over to the United States through the Orderly Departure Program, my grandfather would continue to hone his translation skills by taking courses in Japanese at a local community college, as well as helping translate news articles and poems among Vietnamese, English, French, and Chinese.

If I could speak to grandpa, I would tell him—despite not having grown up around him all that much—I grew up reading the English dictionary, and in my middle school years, started composing poetry. I learned French and Spanish in high school. Parlez-vous français pépère? I entered university UCLA and, rather than focusing on my computer science major—selected as the sensible thing to choose given many of my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side had a career in the technology industry—I instead developed my photography and graphic design sensibilities. I dropped out of UCLA’s computer science program, trying to pursue and survive on a graphic design career. Thinking that I had to try to get back into a “real career”, I tried to pursue accounting. I could not get past the second quarter in it. And yet within the past 3 years, I would join my best friend Duy to help him create a financial technology company. And now I am married to my beloved Thuy. (As she was reading this paragraph noting the parallels between my and my grandfather’s lives, she insisted on not having 13 children.)

Even my father has a creative streak: a singer-songwriter, musician, and three degrees in Buddhist philosophy, Vietnamese literature, and radio telecommunications.

And so there is a part of me that is in awe and wonder of the parallels of creative men of three generations. It is a mysterious coincidence, that perhaps there is some kind of underlying order in the universe that gives rise to this kind of repetition. My dad would say it is karma or that it runs in the blood. I don’t know about karma. However I concede that there are still things about the universe human beings only have the faintest glimpses of understanding. Maybe our souls are mathematically divine states of quantum wave functions, vibrating like music along cosmic strings.

But the idea of human behavior running in the blood, or rather our DNA, has some merit. Consider that when kittens are born and begin to grow up, they instinctively know to use a litter box. There is plenty we do not know about human epigenetics, little “programs” within our DNA that facilitate certain behaviors. And then I had a rather interesting thought about my relationship to my grandfather and to my extended family on my father’s side of 12 aunts/uncles and ~30 first cousins. Me and every single one of my first cousins have about 25% of each of our DNA shared with our grandfather. Each of us is literally 25% Ngô Đa Thiện. I felt like each us are an alternate reality of his DNA. I, Ngô Thiên Bảo, am the manifestation of his genetics living as a male Vietnamese American doing software engineering. My cousin Catherine Ngo is the manifestation of his genetics living as a female Vietnamese American learning animation. Christie Ngo is the expression of his genetics living as a female Vietnamese American studying statistics/informatics. And Richard Ngo is the manifestation of his DNA as a Vietnamese American aspiring to be a computer scientist.

There are times when I dream of alternate realities and alter egos, like a role-playing video game where you assume the life of another person. And yet, my family are the very physical, real, manifestations of my own genes played out in different lives in different ways. And when you deconstruct their lives, and then “replay” their lives to understand where each one is coming from, you not only build empathy, but start to become aware of your own possibilities. Family is the manifestation of your own personal multiverse. (I am aware of the multiverse connection to the recently debuted film Everything Everywhere All at Once.) Like it or not, they are what you are if you were born as another person. If that is not reason enough to state why family is important, then I don’t know what is.

And so after understanding glimpses of grandpa’s life, what is my possibility? What I see from his life, is a life filled with love and compassion (I mean… with 13 children and his wife, my grandmother, that is impossible to refute). I see a life filled with awe and wonder of the deep mysteries and patterns of the universe. I see a life of creativity, and the courage to take the road less traveled (one of the poems he translated in his book was “The road not taken” by Robert Frost). And it fills me with warmth and hope that that legacy that my grandfather has bestowed upon our family will carry on into my as-yet-born child who will draw breath this autumn.

Rest in peace grandpa. You’re not only with me in spirit. You are me.

Ngô Đa Thiện (1923 Quảng Trị, Việt-Nam–2022 San Jose, California)

We got married 9/9/2021, but kept it a simple affair without an extravagant ceremony. So here’s my artistic interpretation of our union. Hello Kitty’s dress inspired by wedding fashion designer Phuong Minh Nguyen https://www.instagram.com/dreamdressesbypmn/

I woke up from a dream where I was walking through a landscape filled with the ink and color from the dozens of artists I’ve featured (and have yet to feature) on the Visual Artists of Vietnamese Ancestry (VAVA) group. I was listening Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir singing “Sing Gently” who wove together 17,572 voices. I felt like Waldo in one of Martin Handford’s illustrations.

ALT

And it reminded me of a similar style of work by Lys Bui.

Although this work was commissioned, one by one my mind replaced each character to ones drawn by each of the artists I’ve featured in my VAVA group.

I remember Vietnamese American pixel artist Pluuey, with an original character Enola: an artist who fell in love with Orion and had two children together, strolling through the marketplace.

I remember Brian Duy Hoang’s “Lunch With Friends” enjoying noodles at a street stall.

And I remember Jenny Lelong (French of Chinese-Vietnamese descent) “Traveling by train”.

It is like the opening scene of the movie BELLE, from Mamoru Hosoda and Studio Chizu, set in a virtual reality world where all users represent themselves with their own digital avatars.

My dream flashes to a conversation I once had with an older, successful Vietnamese American businesswoman I met over coffee, and she asked me: “Why do you care so much about the Vietnamese community?” referring to my involvement in my younger years as a youth organizer within the United Vietnamese Student Associations of Northern California and Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations. I struggled to find the answer then. Maybe my personal essay, an answer to the Quora question “Do Vietnamese Americans ever feel that they belong to Vietnam?” shed some light: A desire to express the love I want to envelope on the relations among Vietnamese in light of the wars during the 20th century.

When I look at Lys Bui’s illustration, the people are illustrated with a pretty simple color palette. And the way I interpret it is that, I may not have been born in Vietnam. But my DNA patterns have—built from a simple palette of 4 nucleotides bases—and through my ancestors, my DNA has witnessed the same red sunset and felt the warm monsoon rains as every other person with Vietnamese ancestry. I’d like to think that our genetics is like a musical refrain, an expression of our place in this world, and someday I’d love to see an artwork that visually expresses a choir song of the Vietnamese people, who are according to mythology, descended from the Dragon Lord Lạc Long Quân and the Faerie Princess Âu Cơ.

Leon Vương, founder of Saigon Augusta, “Fairy Mother Âu Cơ”.

I started a Facebook group Visual Artists of Vietnamese Ancestry to share my interest in Diasporic Vietnamese art.