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Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong and NBC anchor and investigative journalist Vicky Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTS:Betty Duong represents more than 400,000 San José residents on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. She proudly represents District Two, comprised of Downtown, the East Side, Little Saigon, and the surrounding neighborhoods. The proud daughter of immigrants, Betty is the first Vietnamese American and the first Asian American woman to serve on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Vicky Nguyen is an NBC News chief consumer investigative correspondent, anchor of NBC News Daily and New York Times best selling author of the new memoir “Boat Baby.” She reports for the Today show, Nightly News with Tom Llamas and NBC News Now. She graduated as valedictorian from the University of San Francisco. Vicky lives in New York with her husband and three daughters.

Poets Barbara Jane Reyes and Karen Llagas converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSBarbara Jane Reyes, born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, is an acclaimed Filipina American poet and author of several books, including Gravities of Center (2003), Diwata (2010), and Letters to a Young Brown Girl (2020), with Daughtersong Diaspore forthcoming in 2027. She has also published chapbooks and numerous poems and essays in major literary journals and outlets.A recipient of awards such as the James Laughlin Award and a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Reyes holds degrees from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. She teaches Philippine Studies at the University of San Francisco and lives in Oakland with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo.Karen Llagas’s new poetry collection, All of Us Are Cleaved, is recently published by Nomadic Press in 2023. Her first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010. Other recent projects include translations of Filipino children’s books into English: Dancing Hands: A Story of Friendship in Filipino Sign Language (Chronicle Books, 2023) & How Do You Eat Color (Eerdman’s Book for Young Readers, 2025). A recipient of a RHINO Founder's Prize, Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize & a Hedgebrook residency, her poems, translations, and book reviews have also appeared in various journals and anthologies, including most recently, Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, 2023). She teaches Filipino at UC Berkeley and divides her time between San Francisco and Los Angeles. You can find more about her at www.karenllagas.com.

Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi, Asian American Studies professor, and Cathy Linh Che, writer and multidisciplinary artist, converse with Viet Thanh Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTS:Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Dr. Gandhi’s first book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022), was awarded the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize in History. She is the co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South during the Cold War and its afterlives.Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), a Finalist for the National Book Award, Split (Alice James Books) and co-author of An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed, and her film We Were the Scenery was shortlisted for an Academy Award and won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

Writer and illustrator Thi Bui and writer Vu Tran converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSThi Bui is a writer and artist from Việt Nam, California, and New York, now planting roots in New Orleans. Best known for her graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, which tells the story of her family amidst Việt Nam's struggles for independence, she has also been a longtime educator in public high schools, a professor of comics, a public speaker, an organizer and artist-activist, an ambivalent sculptor and puppeteer, a fledgling screenwriter, and an award-winning illustrator of children’s books and comics journalism.Vu Tran is the author of Dragonfish, a NYT Notable Book, and a forthcoming novel, Your Origins. His writing has also appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bread Loaf. Born in Saigon and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts and director of undergraduate studies. 

Filmmaker Bao Nguyen converses with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pullitzer prize-winning writer.ABOUT THE GUESTBao Nguyen is an Emmy- and Grammy-nominated Vietnamese American filmmaker whose work explores memory and myth. His films have premiered at major festivals including Sundance, Cannes, and Telluride, and he directed Be Water, ESPN’s most-watched 30 for 30, and The Greatest Night in Pop, Netflix’s number one English-language film in its debut week and a multi-Emmy, Critics Choice, PGA, and Grammy nominee. His latest film, The Stringer (Sundance 2025), premiered on Netflix on November 28th. A partner at EAST Films and a Gold House A100 and BAFTA Breakthrough honoree, he recently joined the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Award-winning writer Ocean Vuong converses with Pulitzer Prize-winning host Viet Thanh Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTOcean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he used to work as a fast-food server, which inspired The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York City.

Writers Aimee Phan and Christina Vo converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen in this special live episode, in partnership with KALW.ABOUT THE GUESTSAimee Phan was born and raised in Orange County, California. She is the author of two books for adults, We Should Never Meet: Stories and the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. Her most recent book is The Lost Queen, the first book in a young adult fantasy duology. She has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Djerassi and Hedgebrook. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, USA Today and CNN.com among other publications. Christina Vo is the author of My Vietnam, Your Vietnam and The Veil Between Two Worlds. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Drawing from her Vietnamese American heritage and a life lived across cultures, her work explores identity, belonging, inherited trauma, and emotional transformation.

Cathy Linh Che and Christopher Santiago converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSChris Santiago is the author of Small Wars Manual, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in April 2025, and Tula, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Conduit, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, American Public Media’s The Slowdown, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/ACLS, and Kundiman, he is a graduate of Oberlin College and received his PhD from the University of Southern California (USC)’s Literature & Creative Writing Program. He teaches creative writing, sound studies, and Asian American literature in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and has also taught at USC and at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

Abbigail Rosewood, Travis Snyder, and Katherina Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSKatherina Nguyen is a creative technologist building ways to better connect with the past and future. She led high-impact design systems development for organizations like Harvard Kennedy School and Google, and currently works on AI storytelling tools at Meta. A Bay Area native and 1.5 generation Vietnamese-American via the H.O. program, she has been exploring her evolving diaspora identity through poetry and narrative essays. With DVAN, Kat leads the Texas Tech publishing series and upcoming Mapping the Diaspora project.Abbigail N. Rosewood was born in Vietnam, where she lived until the age of twelve. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel, IF I HAD TWO LIVES, has been hailed as “a tale of staggering artistry” by the Los Angeles Review of Books and “a lyrical, exquisitely written novel” by the New York Journal of Books. The New Yorker called it “a dangerous fantasy world’ that ‘double haunts the novel.” Her short fiction and essays can be found at Electric Lit, LitHub, Catapult, The Southampton Review, The Brooklyn Review, Columbia Journal, The Adroit Journal, among others. In 2019, her hybrid writing was featured in a multimedia art and poetry exhibit at Eccles Gallery. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Short Story 2020. She’s the founder of Neon Door, a forthcoming immersive literary exhibit.Travis Snyder is the acquisitions editor at Texas Tech University Press, working on scholarly and literary genres. He has a PhD in 20th century American literature and postmodern theory. He has taught at Trinity University and the University of Texas - San Antonio.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Francois Chan, Kim Ly, and Nguyen Phan Que Mai converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSViet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, The Refugees, and Race and Resistance: Literature, Politics and Asian America. His most recent book was Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son Ellison. His most recent book is The Committed. He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer.François Chau is an Asian-American actor. Born in Phnom, Penh, he is half Cambodian and half Vietnamese. He has been a professional actor for over 35 years with over 150 credits in film, television, and stage. He is best known for his roles in Lost, The Expanse, and  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. He is very pleased to have been the narrator for both of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books, The Sympathizer and The Committed.Kim Ly was born 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden to a Vietnamese father and a Swedish mother. After graduating from the university of Stockholm with a masters degree in marketing, he decided to pursue a career in modeling and film. In 2014 he got an opportunity to star in the Vietnamese action film Hương Ga. The film was well received and Kim has since then resided in Saigon. In 2017, he produced and starred in the Action/Comedy Saigon Bodyguards. The film became a big hit and The Russo Brothers (Marvel films) acquired the rights for the remake in 2020. Kim Ly has continued working as a brand ambassador for numerous high end brands as well as humanitarian work with Newborns Vietnam, Heartbeat Vietnam and UN Women. He is currently working on the film/tv adaptation of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen.Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is an award-winning writer in both Vietnamese and English. Her eight books of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese have received the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, the Capital’s Literature & Arts Award, and First Prize in the Poetry Competition celebrating 1,000 Years of Hanoi. Her debut novel and first book in English, The Mountains Sing, is an International Bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, Winner of the Blogger’s Book Prize 2021, and Winner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for “a work of exceptional quality” and for “contribution to peace and reconciliation”. Quế Mai is an editor of DVAN’s publishing series with Kaya Press and Texas Tech University Press. She has a PhD in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. Her writing has been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. She has just been named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring Vietnamese women of 2021.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Bao Phi, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Cathy Linh Che, and Paul Tran converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSA two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, featured in the live performances and taping of the blockbuster diasporic Vietnamese variety show Paris By Night 114: Tôi Là Người Việt Nam, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His poems and essays are widely published in numerous publications including Screaming Monkeys and Spoken Word Revolution Redux. He has two collections of poems, both published by Coffeehouse Press, Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, the latter of which was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award and was chosen as 2017’s best poetry book of the year by San Francisco State’s Poetry Center.Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her work has been published in The New Republic, McSweeney’s, and Poetry. She has received awards from MacDowell, Djerassi, The Anderson Center, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Poets House, Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Jerome Foundation. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU. She was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence. She serves as Executive Director at Kundiman and lives in NYC.Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in English and Communication Studies from UCLA, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019) and debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), selected for the Omnidawn Open Contest and a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Colorado Book Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, and PEN America. Paul Tran is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Their work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Good Morning America, NYLON, and elsewhere, including the RZA-directed movie Love Beats Rhymes (Lionsgate) alongside Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. Since 2013, Paul has coached the poetry slam teams at Brown University, Barnard College & Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Paul was the first Asian American since 1993—and first transgender poet ever—to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam, placing top 10 at the Individual World Poetry Slam and top 2 at the National Poetry Slam.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Dao Strom, Hoa Nguyen, and Thi Bui converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSBorn in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Hoa Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011. She is author of several books including Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and Violet Energy Ingots which was nominated for a Griffin poetry prize. Her forthcoming book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure is a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” with verse biography on the poet’s mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. A popular teacher of poetics, Hoa teaches for Miami University’s low residency MFA program; as Co-chair of Writing in the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and as associated faculty for University of Guelph as well as occasional reading-focused writing workshops that take place in cyberspace.Dao Strom is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Firecracker Award in Poetry; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). She is co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s).Thi Bui‘s debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) was selected for an American Book Award, a Common Book for UCLA and other colleges and universities, an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco public libraries, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics. Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Kieu Chinh, Bao Nguyen, Jenni Trang Le, and Viet Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSBao Nguyen is an award-winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Saigon. His work has appeared in the New York Times, HBO, Vice, NBC, ARTE, among others. He was the producer and cinematographer of NUOC2030 a feature sci-fi that opened the Panorama section of the 2014 Berlinale and was awarded the Tribeca Sloan Filmmaker Award. In 2015, he directed the documentary feature, LIVE FROM NEW YORK! which opened the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. He produced Tran Thanh Huy’s ROM which world premiered at the Busan International Film Festival where it won the festival’s top prize, the New Currents award. Jenni Trang Le born & raised in Houston, Texas and in 1994 moved to California where her cousins "Vietnamized" her and there was no turning back from there. She has always had a flair for the dramatics and in 1999, she joined Club O' Noodles, a Vietnamese American theatre troupe and started writing and performing spoken word. It was through Club O' Noodles that she started getting more involved in the Vietnamese arts community which would eventually lead to meeting her fellow panel members today. Jenni fell into filmmaking via helping friends with their various projects and in 2005, she was invited to Vietnam to be the 1st Assistant Director of "The Rebel", a period action film set in French-occupied Vietnam in 1922, where peasant rebellions against the French colonialists have erupted throughout the country. This film was directed by Charlie Nguyen and started off Jenni's love affair with Vietnam. In 2009 she moved to Vietnam, intending to stay for a year and check out the film scene. She blinked and now it has been 11 years. Since then she has produced mostly feature films along with short documentaries, commercials, and music videos.Kieu Chinh is a legendary Vietnamese-American actress with nearly six decades of international contributions to the motion picture industry from: Vietnam, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, China, India, Australia, and Canada. Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Kieu-Chinh became a refugee. She came to the U.S. under the generosity and sponsorship of actress, Tippi Hedren, whom helped Chinh get back to work in Hollywood.Viet Nguyen has directed a bunch of tv shows including: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Flash, Lucifer, and iZombie. He also directed and co-wrote the award-winning, horror-comedy feature, Crush the Skull, which has been seen by at least 12 people on Amazon Prime.Next up, Viet will be directing new shows, Panic, for Amazon, as well as, Big Shot, for Disney Plus.Viet is an Austin native who graduated from film school at the University of Texas. He’s known for his Southern charm and firm handshake, but his real talent, according to his wife, is he’s super handsome. (Viet's wife did not approve of this bio.)Lastly, Viet is constantly mistaken for the Pulitzer-prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and has autographed several books on his behalf.

Phuc Tran converses with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTPhuc Tran was born in Sài Gòn Việt Nam, his family fled to America in 1975, and he grew up in Carlisle PA. Reared on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, John Hughes, Star Wars, Bones Brigade videos, and bootlegged cassettes of Minor Threat and TSOL, he graduated high school in 1991. He majored in Classical Languages and Literature at Bard College—how did no one talk him out of that?—got his Master’s Degree at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then moved to New York City in 1997. There he apprenticed to be a tattooer while teaching Latin during the day, and he's been teaching and tattooing ever since. He's never been good at staying in one lane—ask his wife about his driving. In April 2020 my memoir Sigh, Gone was published by Flatiron Books. You can read the memoir to get all the gory details of his childhood and adolescence, but spoiler alert: he does somehow survive.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Marc dela Cruz, Qui Nguyen, Diep Tran, and Susan Lieu converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSMarc dela Cruz got his start in theater in Seattle with the Northwest Asian American Theatre, ReAct and the series Sex in Seattle, while a student at the University of Washington. After finishing his degree in International Studies with a minor in Japanese he continued training and performing around the Seattle area with Village Theatre and the 5th Avenue Theatre. In 2006, he moved to New York and began auditioning for everything he was remotely right for. Credits since then have included the national tour of Disney’s High School Musical, the world premiere of Where Elephants Weep in Cambodia, his Broadway debut in the original cast of If/Then and subsequent national tour and his current post in the Broadway cast of Hamilton where he is in the ensemble and understudies Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Laurens/Philip and King George. Off-Broadway he appeared in Keen Company’s revival of Ordinary Days and Transport Group’s Three Days to See. Regional highlights include Quang in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at Studio Theatre in D.C., Dan in Next to Normal with Tantrum Theatre and the world premiere of Allegiance at the Old Globe. He currently lives in Harlem with his cat, Eddie.Qui Nguyen is a Co-Founder of the OBIE Award-winning Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company of New York City, the “pioneers of geek theatre.” His best-known plays include Vietgone, Poor Yella Rednecks, She Kills Monsters, Revenge Song, Alice in Slasherland, and Living Dead in Denmark. For TV, he most recently wrote on AMC’s Dispatches from Elsewhere and Netflix’s The Society. His upcoming film, Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, co-written with Adele Lim, premieres this March 12, 2021. He’s also a recipient of a 2016 Daytime Emmy Award for his writing on PBS’s Peg+Cat.Diep Tran is a journalist and editor based in NYC. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NBC Asian America, Hello Giggles, Playbill, Time Out New York, Backstage, CNN, Salon, and other publications. Her day jobs include being features editor of Broadway.com and senior editor of American Theatre magazine. She is a judge for the 2020 Obie Awards and is a 2020 Drama Desk Award voter. During quarantine, she co-founded a media company called Token Theatre Friends (you can subscribe to their podcast) and helped launch VietFactCheck.org, where she’s the managing editor.Susan Lieu is a Vietnamese-American activist, playwright, and performer who tells stories that refuse to be forgotten. With a vision for individual and community healing—made possible through the interplay of comedy and drama—her work delves deeply into the lived realities of body insecurity, grieving, and trauma. Her first theatrical solo show, 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, is the true story of how her mother died from plastic surgery malpractice when Lieu was 11 years old and her search to find her mother’s killer. Susan self-produced a nearly sold-out 10-city National Tour with press from L.A. Times, NPR, The Washington Post (The Lily), NBC News, American Theatre, and The Seattle Times. Lieu has performed her show and its sequel 51 times to 6000 people in the past year. Her work has been showcased with The Wing Luke Museum, The Moth at Benaroya Hall, On The Boards, and Bumbershoot.

Dao Strom, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Sophia Terazawa, and Vi Khi Nao converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSDao Strom is a poet, musician, writer, and interdisciplinary artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author/composer of several hybrid-literary works, including the poetry-art collection, INSTRUMENT, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE, and the forthcoming TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025). She co-edited/co-curated the hybrid-literary anthology + exhibit A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS (2024). Strom’s work encompasses both solo and collaborative art and writing projects, and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, NEA, Oregon Community Foundation, and others. Born in Vietnam, Strom now lives in Portland, Oregon.A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Root Fractures (2024). Her video work has recently been exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.Sophia Terazawa is a poet of Vietnamese-Japanese descent. She is the author of two chapbooks: Correspondent Medley (winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, published with Factory Hollow Press) and I AM NOT A WAR (a winner of the 2015 Essay Press Digital Chapbook Contest). Her poems appear in The Seattle Review, Puerto del Sol, Poor Claudia, and elsewhere. She is currently working toward the MFA in Poetry at the University of Arizona. Her favorite color is purple. sophiaterazawa.comVi Khi Nao is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), the short story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others; her interviews with writers have appeared in many publications as well. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry. vikhinao.comThis episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Tu David Phu, Genevieve Erin O'Brien, and Mark Padoongpatt converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSTu David Phu is a Vietnamese-American, Top Chef Alumnus, and SF Chronicle Rising Star Chef from Oakland. Chef Tu’s Vietnamese-California cuisine began garnering press and accolades, first in 2016 with his weekly pop up dinners “ĂN – a Vietnamese Dining Experience.”; then in 2017 San Francisco Chronicle named him Rising Star Chef. In 2019, he was a featured contestant on Bravo’s Top Chef Season 15 and invited to host ABC’s Taste Buds: Chefsgiving which was nominated for a James Beard Award.As a first-generation, Vietnamese-American, food justice comes naturally to Chef Tu, who finds opportunities to use the medium of food as a vessel for meaningful work from cooking with incarcerated men in San Quentin; to being a community ambassador in Oakland working with Asian Health Services and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. Chef Tu not only applies these Zero Waste principles in his own kitchen, he is a James Beard Smart Catch Leader, recognized for promoting the use of sustainable seafood options; and an avid teacher, sharing the riches and lessons of his birthright through food.Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Queer Vietnamese/Irish/German artist with 20+ years as a community organizer, trainer, cultural producer, and chef. O’Brien holds an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a Fulbright Fellow to Vietnam in 2009. O’Brien has been a frequent lecturer in Asian American Studies. Their short film For The Love of Unicorns has screened internationally. O’Brien received the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles’ Creative Economic Development Fund in 2015 & 2016. As a US Dept. of State/ZERO1 American Arts Incubator Artist, O’Brien traveled to Hanoi to develop a digital media project highlighting LGBTQ visibility and equality in 2016. Recent works More Than Love on the Horizon and Sugar Rebels were commissioned by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. The Critical Refugees Studies Collective of the University of California recently funded O’Brien’s current performance series “Refugee Resistance Menu.” O’Brien, once a butcher’s apprentice, is also a private chef and chef/owner of sausage enterprise Meat My Friends (www.eatmeatmyfriends.com). Visit https://www.erin-obrien.com for more information.Mark Padoongpatt is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2011. His researches and writes on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the twentieth-century United States, with a focus on empire, migration, race, and urban and suburban cultures. His book, Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), explores how and why Thai food shaped the contours of Thai American community and identity since World War II. He’s currently writing a book and developing a podcast series on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Las Vegas titled “Neon Pacific,” which explores histories of race, space, and placemaking in Vegas.

Thao Nguyen converses with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTThao Nguyen, also known as Thao, is an American singer-songwriter originally from Virginia and now based in San Francisco. She is the lead musician of the band Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, and has collaborated with Joanna Newsom and Andrew Bird. Outside of the band she has collaborated on projects with several artists including Merrill Garbus, The Portland Cello Project, and Mirah. Her music is influenced by folk, country, and hip hop. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Nguyen Phan Que Mai converses with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTDr Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is an award-winning writer in both Vietnamese and English. Her eight books of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese have received the 2010 Poetry of the Year Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, the Capital’s Literature & Arts Award, and First Prize in the Poetry Competition celebrating 1,000 Years of Hanoi. Her debut novel and first book in English, The Mountains Sing, is an International Bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, and Winner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for “a work of exceptional quality” and for “contribution to peace and reconciliation”. Quế Mai’s writing has appeared on The New York Times, BBC Vietnamese, Lit Hub, Poets & Writers Magazine, among others. She has been named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring women of 2021.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Kim Thuy, Vincent Lam, Eric Nguyen, and Thi Bui converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSThi Bui was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees fleeing Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) has been selected for an American Book Award, a Common Book for UCLA and other colleges and universities, an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco public libraries, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics. It made over thirty best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates’ top five picks. She illustrated the picture book, A Different Pond, written by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017), for which she won a Caldecott Honor. With her son, Hien, she co-illustrated the children’s book, Chicken of the Sea (McSweeney’s, 2019), written by Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and his son, Ellison. Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about immigrant detention and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House.Dr. Vincent Lam is from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam, and was born in Canada. He did his medical training in Toronto, worked as an emergency physician, and now is an addictions medicine physician. He is currently assisting with the COVID-19 vaccination rollout in Canada. Dr. Lam’s first work of fiction, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize. His novel, The Headmaster’s Wager, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2012 and the Commonwealth Prize in 2013. His non-fiction guide to influenza pandemics, The Flu Pandemic And You, received a Special Recognition Award in 2007 from the American Medical Writers’ Association. Dr. Lam is currently completing a novel which will be published in 2022.Eric Nguyen earned an MFA in creative writing from McNeese State University in Louisiana. He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary, Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA), and the Tin House Writers Workshop. He is the editor in chief of diaCRITICS. He lives in Washington, DC. ​Things We Lost to the Water ​is his first novel.Kim Thúy was born in Vietnam in 1968. At the age of 10 she left Vietnam along with a wave of refugees commonly referred to in the media as “the boat people” and settled with her family in Quebec, Canada. A graduate in translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer and chef-restaurant owner. She lives in Montreal and devotes her life to writing. Kim Thúy has received many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2010 for her novel Ru, and was one of the top 4 finalists of the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018. Her books have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world and have been translated into 29 languages and distributed across 40 countries and territories.

Lan Cao, Duong Van Mai Elliott, Le Ly Hayslip, and Marcelino Truong converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSLan Cao was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in the middle of a war that devastated all Vietnamese in both parts of Vietnam. Amidst this violence, Lan found solace in books. Her love of reading and writing began early in her childhood when her parents gave her a copy of 1001 Arabian Nights. She was fascinated by the story about a woman who saved her own life and her sister’s life by telling stories, their fate hanging on the fabulous words that make up each story’s thread.Duong Van Mai Elliot is the author of The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family, a personal and family memoir which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era, chronicles this think tank’s involvement in research about the Vietnam War at the behest of policy makers in Washington D. C. and the impact of this involvement on RAND itself.Mai Elliott served as an advisor to Ken Burns for his documentary on “The Vietnam War,” which aired on PBS in September 2017, and featured in seven of the ten episodes of the film. She is a frequent speaker and writer on Vietnam. She recently contributed a chapter for a Cambridge University Press 3-volume work on the Vietnam War, and has completed a novel on Vietnam in the early 1960s. Mai Elliott was born in Vietnam and grew up in Hanoi and Saigon. She attended French schools in Vietnam and is a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington D.C. (She also writes under the name of Duong Van Mai Elliott).Marcelino Truong was born in Manila in 1957, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and of a French artistic mother. He studied Public Law at Sc Po Paris and English literature at the Sorbonne before becoming a self-taught illustrator, painter, and comic art author. His illustrations are seen on book covers, in picture books for young readers, in the French press, and in art galleries. His re-discovery of Vietnam North and South in 1991, a country he had left in 1963 at the beginning of the war, led to a near obsessive production of sketches and drawings, of temperas and oil-paintings, all about Vietnam and its people.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Bao Nguyen and Carol Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSBao Nguyen is an award-winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Saigon. His work has appeared in the New York Times, HBO, Vice, NBC, ARTE, among others. He was the producer and cinematographer of NUOC 2030 a feature sci-fi that opened the Panorama section of the 2014 Berlinale and was awarded the Tribeca Sloan Filmmaker Award. In 2015, he directed the documentary feature, LIVE FROM NEW YORK! which opened the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. He produced Tran Thanh Huy’s ROM which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival where it won the festival’s top prize, the New Currents award. In addition, it was one of the highest grossing films in Vietnam in 2020.Bao Nguyen’s latest directorial effort BE WATER world premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was invited to other major festivals such as Cannes, SXSW, Telluride, San Francisco, Hot Docs, Sydney, Hong Kong, among many others. BE WATER broke ratings records with its world broadcast premiere in the United States as part of Disney owned ESPN’s ’30 for 30′ series. Recently, Nguyen has also formed a new production company, EAST Films, with offices in Los Angeles California and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Nguyen, alongside other creative partners Ham Tran, Jenni Trang Le, Anderson Le, among others. They formed EAST to nurture and produce transnational stories with a focus on Southeast Asia. It is a creative studio with three silos — genre films for the local Vietnamese market, Pan-Asian streaming series based in Southeast Asia, and prestige fare to support the burgeoning cinema culture of Vietnam and bring it to international audiences. He is an alumnus of the 2012 and 2014 Berlinale Talent Campus as well as a Firelight Media Producers Fellow. He earned his BA at NYU and his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.Carol Nguyen is a 22 year-old Vietnamese Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto and Montreal. Her films often explore the subjects of cultural identity, family, and memory. Her most recent film “NO CRYING AT THE DINNER TABLE” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and had its international premiere at IDFA 2019, where she was also invited as the Opening Night speaker. It also received the Jury Prize for Short Documentary at SXSW. Carol is a 2018 Sundance Ignite fellow, Adobe Creativity Scholar, and a TIFF Share Her Journey ambassador, where she strives to empower diverse voices and women through her own stories and personal experiences in the film industry. Today, Carol is working towards developing her first documentary feature as well as an animated short.

Tung Nguyen, Thi Bui, and Tram T. Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSThi Bui was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees fleeing Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) has been selected for an American Book Award, a Common Book for UCLA and other colleges and universities, an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco public libraries, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics. It made over thirty best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates’ top five picks. She illustrated the picture book, A Different Pond, written by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017), for which she won a Caldecott Honor. With her son, she co-illustrated the children’s book, Chicken of the Sea (McSweeney’s, 2019), written by Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and his son, Ellison. Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about immigrant detention and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House.Tung Nguyen, MD is the Stephen J. McPhee, MD Endowed Chair in General Internal Medicine and Professor of Medicine (http://profiles.ucsf.edu/tung.nguyen) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is a practicing general internist and an educator. Dr. Nguyen has conducted community-based participatory research (CBPR) with Asian American populations including Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans on cancer control, tobacco control, hepatitis B and C screening, nutrition and physical activity, and end-of-life care. Dr. Nguyen is Director of the Asian American Research Center on Health (www.asianarch.org), Program Leader of the Cancer Control Program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer (http://cancer.ucsf.edu/research/programs/cancer-control/), and UCSF School of Medicine Dean’s Diversity Leader (http://medschool.ucsf.edu/deans-diversity-leaders). Dr. Nguyen came to the U.S. in 1975 at the age of 10 as a refugee. He graduated from Harvard College and Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Nguyen served as Commissioner on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) from 2011 to 2014 and as the Chair of the Commission from 2014 to 2017. Tram T. Nguyen is the Massachusetts State Representative of the 18th Essex District. She is a first generation Vietnamese-American immigrant and was the first person in her family to attend college and law school. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Tufts University and a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law. From the start of her legal career until she took office, Nguyen worked at Greater Boston Legal Services as a legal aid attorney and advocated for domestic violence survivors, workers, seniors, veterans, and children. She also engaged in legislative advocacy and worked with statewide coalitions, lawmakers, and lawmaking bodies to push for laws that address issues of racial and economic justice and protect the rights of the most vulnerable populations. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Loan Thi Dao, Nghiep "Ke" Lam, and Dkauj lab Yang converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTS:Loan Thi Dao (she/her) is an Associate Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies at St. Mary’s College of California. She specializes in Southeast Asian refugee migration and community development, immigrant and refugee youth, social movements, and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Dao has published on topics related to memory and war in cultural productions, Vietnamese American female leadership, undocumented AAPI activists, transnational activism, and Southeast Asian American deportation. Her recent publications include the book, Generation Rising: A New Politics of Southeast Asian American Activism (2020), “AAPIs and Immigrant Rights Today,” in Power of the People Won’t Stop: Legacy of the TWLF at UC Berkeley (2020),“Untold Stories, Unsung Heroes: Using Visual Narratives to Resist Historical Exclusion, Exoticization, and Gentrification in Boston Chinatown,” in Journal of Folklore and Education (2020), “Asian American Studies and the Fight for Worker Justice” in AAPI Nexus (2019), and co-editor of JSEAEA Special Issue: Voices from the Field: Centering Southeast Asian American through Policy, Practice, and Activism (2019). She teaches interdisciplinary ethnic studies courses, and her service has included leadership positions in student groups, cultural productions, diversity and inclusion initiatives and training, and immigrant rights and policy advocacy. Nghiep “Ke” Lam is the Program and Facility Manager for Asian Prisoner Support Committee and a former juvenile lifer. He was incarcerated at the age of seventeen and served 23 years. He assists formerly incarcerated, i.e. API and "Stranded Deportees" with accessing resources (ID, Work Permit, Mentorship, etc.) in their transition back into society. He is also the Facility Manager to oversee the maintenance of the office. He is one of the Co-founder of the ROOTS program inside San Quentin State Prison. One of his passions is fixing bicycles and donating them to our system's impacted communities.Nkauj Iab Yang received her Bachelor of Arts in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and pursued her Master of Arts in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University in 2012. Nkauj Iab has over a decade of community organizing and policy advocacy experiences. Through organizations including Youth Together, Banteay Srei, Serve The People, Hmong Innovating Politics (HIP), Nkauj Iab has created brave spaces for young people to organize, transform and realize their power to impact change. She served as the Director of California with the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) partnering with Southeast Asian led and serving organizations throughout California to advocate for access to services and resources and racial equity. In 2020, she served as a co-director with HIP where she developed an infrastructure to organize Southeast Asian youth in Sacramento and Fresno and oversaw HIP’s integrated Southeast Asian voter engagement work throughout California. Today, Nkauj Iab is the Executive Director of the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs, elevating the political and socioeconomic issues of Asian American, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander communities in California by contributing to how state government addresses our needs and concerns.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Thien A. Pham. Bao Tran, and Ham Tran converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSThien A. Pham is a producer/director with accomplished experience in over 20 different languages and markets. While pursuing a film degree at Cal State University, Long Beach, Thien founded what is now known as 3388 Films, a media & film production and distribution company specialized in Asian and Southeast Asian content, with a mission to create with intention and connect diverse media & film content to global audiences. Thien actively seeks projects that highlight the rich layers of cultural identities in our global world and is a proud Vietnamese-American who thrives on forging new paths. Early in his career, Thien directed the first-ever Vietnamese-American singing competition TV series, sponsored by McDonald’s. Recent feature film projects include producing Actress Wanted, an award-winning thriller/horror genre film that explores the intergenerational diasporic identities, cultural memories and collective trauma of the Vietnamese-American community in Orange County, California.Bao Tran was mentored early on by master action director Corey Yuen, where Bao was instilled with an approach to action that doesn’t rely solely on spectacle, but also draws on story and character. Screen Anarchy commended his written-and-directed short BOOKIE for its “flawlessly realized world populated by entirely fleshed out and believable characters, driven by a compelling narrative and brought to sumptuous life.” His editing credits include CHO LON, one of Southeast Asia’s highest-budgeted action blockbusters, and JACKPOT, a heartfelt comedy selected as Vietnam’s official entry to the 2016 Oscars for Best Foreign Film. Variety praised his first directorial feature THE PAPER TIGERS as an “irresistibly good-humored debut,” while the New York Times remarked his “lighthearted, refreshing approach neither succumbs to whitewashing nor the model-minority myth.” Rotten Tomatoes ranks it in each of their top categories for Best Action, Comedies, and Asian American Movies with a “Certified Fresh” rating. He also recently joined the ViacomCBS Directors Initiative.Hàm Trần received his MFA in Directing from the UCLA School of Film and Television. His first two short films The Prescription and Pomegranate were finalists for the Student Academy Awards® in 2000 and 2001. Tran’s thesis film The Anniversary was Short-listed for the 2004 Academy Awards® for Best Live Action Short. In 2006 Tran premiered his first feature, Journey from the Fall, at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. This film went on to receive 16 international festival awards for Best Feature Film and was the first Vietnamese film released by Netflix. On October 4, 2019, Journey was listed by the LA Times as one of the Best 20 Asian American films in the last 20 years. On May 11, 2020, Tran was interviewed, along with Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, as part notable figures in the Vietnamese American community in the celebrated PBS documentary series, Asian Americans.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

James Huynh, Yvonne Y. Kwan, Danny Thien Le, & Thu Quach converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSJAMES HUỳNH grew up in desert-turned-suburbia Fontana, CA and is the son of Vietnamese refugees who come from the city of Huế, Việt Nam. James is a PhD student in Community Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He is also a Health Policy Research Scholar, a fellowship funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His scholarly and activist commitments are to issues of health equity, racial capitalism, queer Asian/American community well-being, the social and political construction of family and kinship, and grassroots organizing. Prior to graduate school, James was a Fulbright Fellow in Việt Nam. Outside of academia, James is Chair of the Board of Directors of Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC), a grassroots organization that builds community and mobilizes intergenerationally primarily with LGBTQ+ Vietnamese Americans and their loved ones through research, education, and advocacy. James earned his MA in Asian American Studies and MPH in Community Health Sciences from UCLA and a BA in Human Biology from Stanford University.DANNY THIEN LE is a Vietnamese American poet, community engager, and public librarian from San Jose, California. For the last 20 years his work has centered around AAPI causes, nonprofits, fashion, design, event organizing, and the creative arts. He has worked with numerous organizations in the Bay Area and beyond – most notably with Cukui, Universal Grammar, POW! WOW! San Jose, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), and the APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit. Danny has used poetry and writing as a vehicle to build upon his own redefining Southeast Asian identity and to help others reclaim their own personal narratives through the art of storytelling. When he is not busy producing events, starting new collaborations, or working the reference desk at the Santa Clara City Library, he enjoys dancing, traveling, good food, eclectic music, and collecting rare books and recordings.DR. YVONNE Y. KWAN is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies and the previous Director of the Ethnic Studies Collaborative at San Jose State University. Dr. Kwan led efforts in the implementation of the California State University Ethnic Studies Graduation Requirement. She currently leads the CSU-wide Asian American Studies Caucus and serves as a representative on the statewide-CSU Council on Ethnic Studies. In 2021, Dr. Kwan was also the lead organizer of the Southeast Asian American Studies Conference. Her research explores how social trauma may not be verbalized or articulated, but yet children of survivors can still develop the capacity to both identify with and experience the pain of previous generations. She also collaborates with the local San Jose community to document oral histories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander elders and contemporaries from Santa Clara County.DR. THU QUACH, Ph.D has been working in public health and health care for nearly 25 years. Her research, service, and advocacy work have been grounded in her own lived experience as a refugee from Vietnam, and the struggles her family faced in the healthcare system. Trained as an epidemiologist, she has conducted community-based research, focusing on Asian Americans and immigrant populations, including examining occupational exposures and health impacts among Vietnamese nail salon workers. This work was inspired by her own mother, who passed from cancer at the age of 58, after working as a cosmetologist for decades.

Hoa Nguyen, Joshua Nguyen, Susan Nguyen, and Truong Tran converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSHoa Nguyen is the author of several books including Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 and the Griffin Prize nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, published by Wave Books in 2021, is the winner of the Canada Book Award and nominated for a National Book Award and the General Governor’s Literary Award for Poetry. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Hoa lives in Tkaronto with her family.Joshua Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He is the author of the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother” (Bull City Press, 2021) and has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in The Offing, Wildness, American Poetry Review, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, Crab Orchard Review, and Gulf Coast Mag. He has also been featured on both the VS podcast and The Slowdown. He is a bubble tea connoisseur and works in a kitchen. His debut poetry collection, Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), was the winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of “three women poets to watch.” Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. She writes a lot about identity, the body, and the Vietnamese diaspora and also likes to make zines. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2021.Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1969. He is the author of six previous collections of poetry, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words and 100 words (coauthored with Damon Potter). He also authored the children’s book Going Home Coming Home, and an artist monograph, I Meant to Say Please Pass the Sugar. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Tran lives in San Francisco where he teaches art and poetry.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Jes Vu, Kieu Chinh, and Ysa Le converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSKìêu Chinh is a legendary actress with a long successful career dating back to 1957. Throughout her career, she has played female leads in 22 feature films in Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taipei, India, as well as in American productions shot in Asia such as Operation CIA, co-starred with Burt Reynolds. She has also appeared in over 80 television shows. Along with journalist Terry Anderson and the late Vietnam Vet Pulitzer Prize author Lewis Puller, Kieu Chinh is a founder / co-chair of The Vietnam Children’s Fund, a non-profit organization that has built a network of elementary schools in Vietnam as living memorials to remember the families and children lost in that country’s long wars. Her new memoir, Hồi Ký Kiều Chinh, has just released and is available worldwide.Ysa Le began her art activism with VAALA since 2000, serving as VAALA’s Board as President from 2004-2008, and then as Executive Director from 2008 until now. She is one of the original co-founders of Viet Film Fest. Prior to VAALA, Ysa was a radio host for the Viet Nam California Radio (VNCR), from 1995 to 2010. She hosted a weekly show called “Vòng Chân Trời Văn Học Nghệ Thuật” (“The Art Horizon”), which covered interviews with various artists and art events. Her show was syndicated for Voice of America (VOA), which broadcasted in Vietnam. In 2005, Ysa was chosen by the Orange County Register as one of the “30 Vietnamese Americans to Watch” in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Vietnamese American community in the United States. She received the Arts and Culture (In-Language) Award from New California Media in 2003 for her article on Mimi News, reporting the revival of the traditional performance art Cải Lương in the Vietnamese community. She was awarded with the “Service Award” from the USC (University of Southern California) Asian Pacific Alumni Association in 2012. Ysa received the inaugural VIMO Luminary Champion Award for her contribution in cultivating positive advancements for Vietnamese filmmaking. Ysa received her Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) degree from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1994. She currently works as a clinical pharmacist at St. Joseph Home Infusion Pharmacy in Anaheim.Jes Vu is the Communications Manager at CAPE, a non-profit organization that champions diversity by connecting, educating, and empowering Asian American and Pacific Islander artists and leaders in entertainment and media. A child of refugees from Vietnam, she grew up in the land of cheesesteaks, hoagies and Wawas—otherwise known as the Philly suburbs. She works in the intersections of Asian America and Hollywood, and recently served as one of the Story & Cultural Consultant for Disney Animation’s Raya and the Last Dragon as part of their Southeast Asia Story Trust. She is 1/2 of the producing team with Keith Chow for Southern Fried Asian, a podcast under The Nerds of Color, which profiles the diversity of Asian Americans from the American South.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Writers André Dao and Kevin Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen, pulitzer-prize winning author, and Philip Nguyen, Vietnamese-American studies scholar.ABOUT THE GUESTSAndré Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia.Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novels Mỹ Documents and New Waves. He is the features editor at The Verge, was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Multimedia artist Anida Yoeu Ali and urban anthropologist LinDa Saphan converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSAnida Yoeu Ali (b.1974, Battambang) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Raised in Chicago and born in Cambodia, she is a woman of mixed heritage with Malay, Cham, Khmer and Thai ancestry. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity. Ali is the winner of the 2024 Arts Innovator Award and the 2014-2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize for her series The Buddhist Bug, a multidisciplinary and internationally recognized work that investigates displacement and identity through humor, absurdity and performance. Ali has performed and exhibited at the Haus der Kunst, Palais de Tokyo, Musée d'art Contemporain Lyon, Jogja National Museum, Malay Heritage Centre, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, The Smithsonian, and the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Her artistic works have been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Art Matters Foundation. Ali’s pioneering poetry work with the critically acclaimed performance group I Was Born With Two Tongues (1998-2003) is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program. Currently based in Tacoma, Ali is also the co-founder of Studio Revolt, an award-winning independent artist-run media lab. Ali holds an MFA from School of the Art Institute Chicago (2010) and a BFA from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1998). Ali currently serves as a senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington, Bothell where she teaches courses in Interdisciplinary Arts, Global Studies and Performance. She spends her time traveling and making art between the Asia-Pacific region and the US.LinDa Saphan, a Fulbright Scholar, is an urban anthropologist and a prominent voice in Cambodian cultural studies. She has published extensively on Cambodia's early popular music. LinDa served as the lead researcher and associate producer for the documentary film Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll, and has acted as executive producer for several other film projects. She is the author of Faded Reels: The Art of Four Cambodian Filmmakers 1960-1975, published by the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2022, and Remnant of the Past: A Filmography of Cambodian Early Cinema in 2024. Since 2013, LinDa has been a professor of sociology, and in 2025, she became the Assistant Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mount Saint Vincent.This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Musician and filmmaker praCh and multimedia artist and activist Silong Chhun speak with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTSSilong Chhun is a multimedia artist and communications specialist at Washington State's Office of Equity who uses art to advance social justice for all communities. As co-founder of the Khmer Anti-Deportation Advocacy Group (KhaagWa) and a co-founder of the award-winning Southeast Asian Comedy Collective, he focuses on sharing his cultural heritage while amplifying the voices of the marginalized. When not working on community initiatives, Chhun explores storytelling through various mediums, including his work as a DJ, connecting people through music.praCh is an internationally renowned, critically acclaimed, award-winning artist. His debut album is the first #1 rap album in Cambodia, and Newsweek proclaimed him “The First Cambodian Rap Star.” His powerful lyrics not only entertain but also educate, with his music published by multiple publishers and used in Southeast Asian Studies. praCh has scored music for films like Rice Field of Dreams (2010) and Enemies of the People (2010), and produced award-winning films such as Paulina (2013) and Invisible Dance (2015). He’s the writer, producer, director, and performer of Khmeraspora (2023), a Cambodian-American musical experience in collaboration with the Long Beach Symphony. praCh has lectured at prestigious institutions, including the Smithsonian, Brown, and Harvard, and been featured in major media outlets like ABC, BBC, and The New York Times. He’s received numerous honors, including being Grand Marshal of Long Beach’s Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Parade (2014) and the "Special Recognition" award from the Long Beach Symphony (2023). He is also the co-founder and co-director of the Cambodia Town Film Festival and serves on the Board of Directors for the Long Beach Symphony.

Writer from Singapore, Amanda Lee Koe, and playwrite from France, Olivier Dhenin, converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.ABOUT THE GUESTS:Amanda Lee Koe was born and raised in Singapore and has lived in New York, Beijing, Berlin and Bangkok. Her debut novel, Delayed Rays of a Star (Doubleday, 2019) was named a Most Anticipated Title by ELLE, Los Angeles Times, Thrillist, and USA Today, and one of NPR's Best Books of The Year. Her most recent book, Sister Snake (Ecco, 2024) was a Gold House Book Club pick, an American Bookseller’s Indie Next selection, and one of Kirkus Review’s Best Fiction Books of the Year. Amanda has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN America, the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the National Arts Council of Singapore, and the Fóndation Jan Michalski. She was previously fiction editor of Esquire Singapore.Olivier Dhénin Hữu is a poet, playwright and director. Olivier Dhénin Hữu holds a master’s degree in the semiology of text and image from Paris VII and is a graduate of the Conservatoire national de région d'Amiens. He was artistic coordinator of the Théâtre du Châtelet from 2006 to 2008 and then of the National Drama Centre of Bretagne. Olivier was Resident at the Villa Medici - Académie de France in Rome in 2015, winner of the Anne Schlumberger / Fondation des Treilles writing prize in 2018, associate artist at the Scène Watteau since 2022, and now laureate of the French Institute/Villa Saïgon in 2023. His writing focuses on the poetry of language, the mute expression of actions and the silence of characters. By constructing a sensitive and lyrical literary work, centred on the passage of time and the mourning of memory, he aims to touch on the fickleness and fragility of the human being. His work is closely linked to music : several of his works have been adapted by Nicolas Bacri, Karol Beffa and Jacques Boisgallais. Paysage dans l’oubli (From on oblivion Landscape), the opera written and premiered in Saigon, is set to music by Benjamin Attahir. As stage director, he is pursuing a hybrid approach combining text and music, image and movement. In April 2025, a new play, inspired by the Saigon libretto will be premièred at Guimet national Asian Arts Museum in Paris : Partition vietnamienne (A Vietnamese Part)This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Emerging writers Steven Duong and Vivian Pham converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS Steven Duong is the author of At The End of the World There is a Pond (W. W. Norton, 2025). His poems and short stories have appeared in publications including The American Poetry Review, The Drift, and the Yale Review, as well as The Best American Short Stories 2024, selected by Lauren Groff. The recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Kundiman, and the University of Iowa, he is currently a creative writing fellow at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Vivian Pham is a Vietnamese novelist, essayist, and poet from southwestern Sydney. In high school she wrote a novel called The Coconut Children, which was published in March 2020 by Penguin Random House. Vivian is the 2024 Writer-in-Residence at University of Technology, Sydney. She is a course director and key tutor for Faber Writing Academy, where she designs and teaches a year-long course on writing a novel. Vivian holds a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Philosophy and Creative Writing from Western Sydney University. She’s currently adapting The Coconut Children for stage with Belvoir Theatre and screen with Exit Films. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Award-winning chefs Tu David Phu and Anh Luu speak with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS Chef Tu David Phu, recognized as a San Francisco Chronicle Rising Star Chef, is a two-time TEDx speaker, Top Chef alumnus, acclaimed cookbook author, and storyteller. Growing up in Oakland, he began his culinary journey in his mother’s apartment garden, ultimately advancing to some of the nation’s top kitchens. His path has brought him to GiGi's, a Vietnamese-inspired wine bar in San Francisco, and inspired his Emmy-nominated PBS film Bloodline. Chef Anh Luu, born and raised in the southern United States by Vietnamese immigrant parents, started her culinary journey at the age of 16, cooking in restaurants in and around New Orleans. After she and her family were displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, they moved to Portland, OR where Chef Anh attended the Western Culinary Institute and spent years honing her craft and creating new dishes by blending Vietnamese and Cajun/Creole cuisines together. Luu is formerly the chef-owner of Tapalaya, a vibrant Viet-Cajun bistro located on Portland’s bustling NE 28th Ave. Tapalaya after being open for nearly 11 years, has since permanently shuttered when Chef Anh returned to New Orleans in the spring of 2020. Her move back home was influenced by the sudden and tragic death of her mother, Tam Thi Tran, who is Chef Anh’s primary inspiration for her cooking. As of March 2023, Chef Anh has created her own company, Busy Be LLC, that specializes in private dinners, culinary consulting, and catering events with her Vietnamese street food pop up, Xanh Nola. Check out ChefAnh.com to book a private dinner! Chef Anh has earned notoriety by appearing on Food Network's Chopped, Food Network's Grill Dads, "Portland Cooks" cookbook, and went viral with her Phorrito pop ups. She most recently appeared as a hero in an episode of the Emmy award winning Nextflix show, Queer Eye.

Writer Khue Pham and runner/writer/designer Thi Minh Huyen Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen, pulitzer-prize winning author, and Philip Nguyen, Vietnamese-American studies scholar. ABOUT THE GUESTS: Khuê Phạm is an award-winning Vietnamese-German journalist and writer. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she worked for The Guardian and NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at the weekly Die Zeit. In 2012, she co-wrote “Wir neuen Deutschen”, a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel “Brothers and Ghosts” was adapted to the stage as “Kim” and will be published this year in Britain, Australia and the US. She’s a founding member of PEN Berlin and part of this year’s jury for the International Literature Prize of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. More at khuepham.de/english Thị Minh Huyền Nguyễn (she/her) is a writer, designer and runner working at the intersections of fashion, art, culture and sports. She is the founder of @joyruncollective. Her work appears in Vogue Germany, Daddy Magazine and Konfekt Magazine. She was part of the mediation team of the 12th Berlin Biennale and has been a contributing editor for diacritics. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Screenwriters Maegan Houang and Anchuli Felicia King converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen, pulitzer-prize winning author, and Philip Nguyen, Vietnamese-American studies scholar. ABOUT THE GUESTS: Maegan Houang is a writer/director based in Los Angeles and Michigan. She is currently a co-producer on The Sympathizer (HBO) and previously served as a story editor on Shōgun (FX) and a staff writer on Season 2 of Counterpart (Starz/MRC). She also co-wrote Jamojaya directed by Justin Chon (Blue Bayou, Gook), which premiered at Sundance, and is currently writing Nekrokosm (A24) for director Panos Cosmatos (Mandy). In 2018, she received a VSCO Voices Creator Grant to direct In Full Bloom starring Kieu Chinh (The Joy Luck Club). The short film premiered on Short of the Week and played at festivals including Fantastic Fest, Atlanta, Oak Cliff, Indie Memphis, New Orleans, LAAPFF and Sidewalk Film Festival. She recently directed two episodes of the WGA Award Winning Three Busy Debras (Adult Swim/HBO Max) Season 2. Her new short film Astonishing Little Feet starring Celia Au and Perry Yung (Warrior, The Knick) is currently on the festival circuit with screenings at the Hammer Museum, MoMA, Palm Springs ShortFest and the American Cinemateque. Maegan has also directed music videos for artists such as Mitski, Vagabon, Charly Bliss and Hana Vu. Her videos have been recognized by SXSW, Noisey, Fact Magazine, UKMVAs, Stereogum, Pitchfork, and Vimeo Staff Picks. Her work primarily focuses on the complexity of the Asian-American experience, intergenerational trauma and her own experience living as a mixed-race American. Anchuli Felicia King is a playwright, screenwriter and multidisciplinary artist of Thai-Australian descent. King’s plays have been produced by the Royal Court Theatre (London), Manhattan Theater Club (New York), Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.), American Shakespeare Center (Staunton), Melbourne Theatre Company (Melbourne), Sydney Theatre Company, National Theatre of Parramatta, Belvoir Theatre (Sydney) and La Boite Theatre (Brisbane). She is under commission with the Royal Court Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Atlantic Theatre Company, Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company. Her play “Golden Shield” had its Off-Broadway debut at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2023. As a screenwriter, Felicia has written episodes on “The Sympathizer,” the TV adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel starring Robert Downey Jr and Sandra Oh (HBO), and “Mary and George” (AMC), a historical drama series starring Julianne Moore. She has also written episodes for "The Baby," a dark horror comedy produced by Sister Pictures for HBO/Sky, "The Twelve," a trial drama for the Foxtel Group and “Deadloch,” an Amazon original series. She has several original series in development, including projects with AMC, BBC Studios, A24, See Saw, CJ Entertainment and Warner Brothers. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Writer KT Nguyen and multimedia artist Tammy Nguyen speak with guest host Ly Tran and host Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS Tammy Nguyen Bio Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist based in Easton, CT whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking and book making. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists. @tammowhammo on Instagram https://tammynguyenstudio.com/ K.T. NGUYEN is a former magazine editor. Her features have appeared in Glamour, Shape, and Fitness. After graduating from Brown University (just barely), she spent her twenties and thirties hopping from New York City to Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, and San Francisco. She’s now settled just outside Washington, D.C. with her family and their adopted terrier Alice. You Know What You Did is her debut novel. Ly Tran LY TRAN is the author of the memoir, House of Sticks, winner of the NYC Book Awards Hornblower Award and named one of Vogue and NPR’s Best Books of the Year. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, Yaddo, and Millay Arts. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Journalist Tina Nguyen and sculptural/digital storyteller Tuan Andrew Nguyen converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS TINA NGUYEN is a national correspondent and founding partner for Puck, covering the world of Donald Trump and the American right. Previously, Nguyen was a White House reporter for Politico, a staff reporter for Vanity Fair Hive, and an editor at Mediaite. Nguyen graduated from Claremont McKenna College and lives in Washington, DC. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work explores the power of storytelling through video and sculpture. His projects are based on extensive research and community engagement, tapping into inherited histories and counter-memory. Nguyen extracts and re-works dominant, oftentimes colonial histories and supernaturalisms into imaginative vignettes. Fact and fiction are interwoven in poetic narratives that span time and place. Nguyen (b. 1976, Saigon) holds a BFA from the University of California, Irvine and a MFA from The California Institute of the Arts. Nguyen is a founding member of The Propeller Group, an entity that positions itself between a fake advertising company and an art collective. Accolades for the group include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and a Creative Capital Award. Nguyen’s work has been included in major international festivals, biennials, and exhibitions including, in the past year, the 12th Berlin Biennale, Germany; Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo; Aichi Triennale, Japan; and Biennale de Dakar, Senegal. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Screenwriter and novelist Brandon Hoang and filmmaker Elizabeth Ai speak with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS Brandon Hoàng is the author of the young adult novel Gloria Buenrostro Is Not My Girlfriend and the middle grade The Crossbow of Destiny. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Brandon grew up coveting the Baby-Sitters Club books and slurping noodles. Before he was a writer, Brandon was an animation executive. Now a screenwriter by day and novelist by night, he currently resides in Portland, OR with his wife and two daughters. Elizabeth Ai is an award-winning Chinese Vietnamese American storyteller and filmmaker. Her directorial debut, New Wave, premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Festival and was awarded a Special Jury Mention for Best New Documentary Director. Ai writes and produces independent feature films and branded content for companies including ESPN, VICE, and National Geographic, for which she won an Emmy. She produced the documentary features Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe (2008), and A Woman’s Work: The NFL’S Cheerleader Problem (2019). Her narrative features include Saigon Electric (2011) and Ba (2024). She’s an alumnus of Berlinale, Center for Asian American Media, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Film Independent, Firelight Media, Sundance, and Tribeca. Her work is supported by Adobe, California Humanities, Cinereach, Ford Foundation, Independent Television Service, Knight Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Sundance. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Artist and educator Phung Huynh speaks with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen about her recent projects. ABOUT THE GUEST Phung Huynh is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator with a practice in drawing, painting, public art, and community engagement. Her work explores cultural perception and representation. Huynh challenges beauty standards by constructing images of the Asian female body vis-à-vis plastic surgery to unpack how contemporary cosmetic surgery can whitewash cultural and racial identity. Her work of drawings and prints on pink donut boxes explores the complexities of assimilation and cultural negotiation among Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who have resettled in the United States. Phung Huynh has had solo exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills and the Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including spaces such as the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She has also completed public art commissions for the Metro Orange Line, Metro Silver Line, the Los Angeles Zoo, and the Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture. Phung Huynh is Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Los Angeles where her focus is on serving disproportionately impacted students. She has served as Chair of the Public Art Commission for the city of South Pasadena and Chair of the Prison Arts Collective Advisory Council, which supports arts programming in California state prisons. She is currently on the Board of Directors for LA Más, a non-profit organization that serves BIPOC working class immigrant communities in Northeast Los Angeles. Huynh completed undergraduate coursework at the University of Southern California, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with distinction from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and received her Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University. She is a recipient of the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship, the California Arts Council Individual Established Artist Fellowship, and the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship. Phung Huynh is Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Los Angeles, and she is represented by Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles.  sored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Lao writers Krysada Phounsiri and Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS Krysada Phounsiri is a Lao American award winning poet, professional dancer, optical engineer, and photographer. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a Physics & Astrophysics double major. He minored in Creative Writing with a focus on poetry. His poetry has been featured in various publications like the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education, SEARAC 40 & Forward, and San Diego Poetry Together anthology. He has authored two poetry books: "Dance Among Elephants," 2015, which takes readers on a profound journey of identity, family, homeland, love, and dance, and "Every Passing Minute," 2020, continuing the exploration of themes from his first book." Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is a Lao American poet and playwright. CNN’s “United Shades of America” host W. Kamau Bell called her work “revolutionary.” She is the author of the children's book When Everything Was Everything (Full Circle Publishing 2018) and is best known for her Kung Fu Zombies play cycle. Her work has been presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Theater Mu, Walking Shadow Theatre Company, and elsewhere. She's currently living large thanks to grants from the MN State Arts Board and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, as well as fellowships from the Bush Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Power this year. She's a recent writer in residence at Hedgebrook and at Djerassi by invitation of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. www.refugenius.net  @refugenius This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Montagnard Degar writers H'Abigail Mlo and Y-Danair Niehrah speak with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS H’Abigail (Abi) Mlo is a Montagnard American, Southerner, and writer based on Lenape Land (Philadelphia). As a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, she co-founded Voices of the Highlands to meet a long-time need in the Montagnard community for connection and storytelling (Instagram: @voicesofthehighlands). In 2021, she wrote a children’s book in four weeks with Room to Read titled Yă’s Backyard Jungle. Outside of writing, H’Abigail is a hobby film photographer, outdoor enthusiast, and foodie. Born and raised in Charleston, SC, Y-Danair Niehrah has studied creative writing since his father introduced computers to the family. He grew up reading genre fiction and horror but shifted to historical fiction in high school, focusing on the stories of the Degar people—the indigenous tribes of Vietnam. He studied creative writing at the College of Charleston under fantastic writers and mentors like Bret Lott and Anthony Varallo before pursuing an MFA at Queens University of Charlotte studying under writers like Fred Leebron, Naeem Murr, and Jonathan Dee. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Podcaster and film producer Kenneth Nguyen and poet Oliver de la Paz converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS Kenneth Nguyen is a Los Angeles based podcaster and film producer with over two decades in the Vietnamese media space. Kenneth hosts and produces The Vietnamese podcast with over 300 episodes recorded. Kenneth Nguyen was a founding partner of Wave Releasing, the first U.S. based Vietnamese language film distribution company. Kenneth managed distribution on Vietnamese language films such as OWL AND THE SPARROW, DE MAI TINH, and MAIKA. He currently is a founding partner at EAST Films with several film projects in development. He has served honorably as a former U.S. Marine and holds a B.A degree from USC in Visual Anthropology with an emphasis in Cinema Studies.  Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is published by Liveright Press (2023), was a winner of the2023 New England Book Award, and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Photographer An-My Le and writer Jamie Jo Hoang speak with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen. ABOUT THE GUESTS An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1960. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She was educated at Stanford University and at Yale University and has been the recipient of numerous awards including the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. Lê is currently the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, New York. A 30-year survey of her career has opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and will continue until March 2024. The title is Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières.  Jamie Jo Hoang, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, grew up in Orange County, CA—not the wealthy part. She worked for MGM Studios and later, as a docu-series producer. Now she writes novels and blogs full time. When Jamie’s not writing, she’s wandering, pondering, and chasing experiences. Her self-published first novel, Blue Sun, Yellow Sky, is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of My Father, the Panda Killer. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Graphic novelist and illustrator Thi Bui converses with guest host Susan Lieu about her projects, such as her book "The Best We Could Do." ABOUT THE GUEST Thi Bui was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1978 as part of the “boat people” wave of refugees fleeing Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. Her debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do (Abrams ComicArts, 2017) has been selected for an American Book Award, a Common Book for UCLA and other colleges and universities, an all-city read by Seattle and San Francisco public libraries, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in autobiography, and an Eisner Award finalist in reality-based comics. It made over thirty best of 2017 book lists, including Bill Gates’ top five picks. She illustrated the picture book, A Different Pond, written by the poet Bao Phi (Capstone, 2017), for which she won a Caldecott Honor. With her son, Hien, she co-illustrated the children’s book, Chicken of the Sea (McSweeney’s, 2019), written by Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and his son, Ellison. Her short comics can be found online at The Nib, PEN America, and BOOM California. She is currently researching and drawing a work of graphic nonfiction about immigrant detention and deportation, to be published by One World, Random House. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Chocolatier Wendy Lieu speaks with guest host Susan Lieu, her sister, about her journey to create her business, Socola Chocolates. ABOUT THE GUEST Wendy Lieu is the CEO and Chief Chocolatier of Socola Chocolatier, an award-winning chocolate company in San Francisco. Born in a Malaysian refugee camp, Wendy embodies the grit and optimism of the American Dream. A self-taught chocolatier, Wendy has been working with chocolate for over 20 years. At 19 years old, she and her sister launched Socola at a farmer’s market in Santa Rosa, California. After graduating college, Wendy became a management consultant but never forgot her love of sweets. After 8 years in the corporate world, she stopped moonlighting and finally took the plunge. Sôcôla, which means “chocolate” in Vietnamese, creates inventive flavors reflective of the diverse flavors of Vietnam, including their iconic Little Saigon Box. Socola’s clients include Ferrari, Cartier, Sephora, YouTube and American Express. Socola has been featured in Forbes, Zagat, HuffPost, NBC Asian America, The San Francisco Chronicle, KTVU, KPIX, KGO, KPFA, and ABC7 Localish. Learn more at: Socola.   Lieu is the recipient of the NAWBO Aspire Award, PAAWBAC Monarch Leadership Award, Renaissance Entrepreneur of the Year, and CAAM Rising Star. She is a UC Davis, Tante Marie Pastry School, Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center alum, and former East Cut Community Benefit District Board Member. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Youth Poet Laureate Alexandra Huynh converses with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen about her journey in poetry. ABOUT THE GUEST Alexandra Huynh is an 18-year-old Vietnamese American poet from Sacramento, CA. She is the 2020 Sacramento Youth Poet Laureate, a program of Sacramento Area Youth Speaks, and is a Western Regional Ambassador and the 2021 National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. Alexandra began writing poetry in elementary school in the form of song. She gravitated towards poetry as a means to express complex emotions, but she seldom shared her work. When she competed in her first poetry slam in high school, she landed a spot on the Sacramento Area Youth Speaks Slam Team, which would go on to compete at the International Brave New Voices Festival. Heartened by the warm and visionary people she met, she has been immersed in poetry ever since. As a second-generation individual, Alexandra employs poetry as a tool of self-reclamation and social justice for marginalized communities. She embodies a radical pride in her Vietnamese heritage, and seeks to write her story outside of the context of whiteness. Through poetry, she hopes to give students a vocabulary to articulate their lived experiences and empower them to shape their future. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Scholar and anthropologist Allen Tran speaks with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen about his research publication, "A life of worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam's Age of Anxiety." ABOUT THE AUTHOR Allen Tran is an associate professor of anthropology at Bucknell University. He is the author of A Life of Worry: Politics, mental health, and Vietnam's age of anxiety, which is available on Open Access, and teaches classes on medical anthropology and Southeast Asia.  This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Children's book authoer Hanh Bui converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen about her book, "The Yellow Áo Dài." ABOUT THE GUEST At eight years old, Hanh Bui and her family left war-torn Vietnam for safety and a new beginning. After nine days at sea, they were rescued by the United States Navy. Hanh will always be grateful for the kindness of her first American helpers. Growing up, she connected with universal themes of family, friendship, and love in the books she read. However, she didn’t see stories about families similar to her own represented between the pages of books. There weren’t any characters she could identify with or who looked like her. Inspired by her first American teacher at Fort Indiantown Gap, a refugee camp, Hanh grew up to also become a teacher. During her years as an educator, she was disappointed that there were few books with Asian American characters or stories written by Vietnamese American authors. She wanted all of the students in her class to see themselves represented in the books they read. When her own children’s love of books blossomed, Hanh decided to write stories based on her childhood refugee experiences and Vietnamese heritage. Hanh feels honored to add her voice to the countless diverse creators sharing their stories with young readers today. As noted by renowned school librarian, Dr. Rudine Bishop, Hanh hopes her books will be a “mirror” for more children to know their experiences matter and serve as a “window or sliding door” for all readers. The second book,  Ánh’s New Word illustrated by Bao Luu, which will be released in 2024, is inspired by Hanh’s own refugee experience. It was written as a tribute to her grandparents and the teacher who taught her English at the refugee camp. Hanh hopes her book embodies the gratitude she feels for the teacher who helped her embrace her voice in a new country. This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.

Poet Angela Peñaredondo speaks with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen about their book "nature felt but never apprehended." ABOUT THE GUEST ANGELA PEÑAREDONDO is a queer Filipinx, interdisciplinary writer and educator. Peñaredondo is the author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, Winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Book Prize) and Maroon (Jamii Publications). Their work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. They've received fellowships and awards from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, Macondo, TinHouse among others. They are Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University San Bernardino. Currently, Peñaredondo lives in Los Angeles with their partner and many cramped plants. Follow them on @domaindenarwhal or www.angelapenaredondo.com This episode is sponsored by AppLovin. AppLovin’s leading marketing platform provides developers a powerful set of solutions to grow their mobile apps. AppLovin’s technology platform enables developers to market, monetize, analyze and publish their apps. The company’s first-party content includes over 200+ popular, engaging apps and its technology brings that content to millions of users around the world. AppLovin is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with several offices globally. Learn more at ⁠⁠applovin.com⁠⁠.