Stories of life, travel, and the Vietnamese soul
Across the US, Vietnamese Americans are picking up the đàn tranh and đàn bầu not to perform on a stage, but to feel something they couldn't name before. It turns out the music their grandparents hummed was waiting for them all along.
Some Vietnamese American chefs have built entire careers around French pastry, West African stews, or Japanese ramen — and they've had to fight for the right to love what they love. What happens when your culinary passion doesn't match your family's expectations?
For many Vietnamese Americans, a bowl of phở or a properly assembled bánh mì isn't just food — it's a test. A reckoning with memory, distance, and the version of yourself you left behind. What happens in that first bite says more about belonging than any passport ever could.
Millions of Vietnamese American children grew up in households where the past was a locked room — present in every sacrifice their parents made, yet never explained. This is a look at why so many parents chose silence over story, and what that quiet costs the generations left to fill in the blanks.
Vietnamese immigrant parents are famous for their sacrifices — but rarely for their dreams. As their children grow up and start asking harder questions, a quieter story is beginning to surface: the one about what our parents gave up before they ever gave us anything.
For years, Vietnamese Americans were told — implicitly or otherwise — to pick a side. But a growing number of people are done waiting for permission to exist in the middle. They're building lives that are fully Vietnamese and fully American, and they're not apologizing for either half.
Across the US, young Vietnamese Americans are doing something their parents rarely did: talking. About depression, about queerness, about money, about the war. It's not disloyalty—it's survival by different means. And it's changing what it means to be Vietnamese in America.
For many Vietnamese American women, the kitchen isn't just where dinner gets made—it's where identity gets negotiated, contested, and ultimately claimed. From adapting phở for a Brooklyn apartment to rewriting bà nội's recipes in their own handwriting, these women are using food to say something their mothers never could.
Many Vietnamese Americans grow up feeling a vague, unnameable anxiety — a hypervigilance, a compulsion to overachieve, a difficulty asking for help. The roots of these feelings often trace back further than their own lives. This is about the inheritance no one talks about at the dinner table.
For many second-generation Vietnamese Americans, the decision to learn their parents' language as adults is less about fluency and more about finding their way home. It's a journey full of shame, laughter, and unexpected grace. Here's what it looks and feels like from the inside.
Long before 'slow coffee' became a café trend in Brooklyn or Portland, Vietnamese people were already practicing it—one drip at a time, through a small aluminum filter called a phin. For Vietnamese immigrants in America, this ritual is far more than caffeine. It's a daily act of memory, patience, and belonging.
For a growing number of Vietnamese American millennials and Gen Z, booking a flight to a small village in Quảng Nam or Hà Tĩnh isn't just travel—it's an excavation. They arrive with questions their parents never answered and leave with something harder to name than answers. These journeys are rewriting what 'home' means for the diaspora.