Carina Kimlan Hinton is a mixed race, Vietnamese American poet and writer who explores issues of identity, cultural belonging and intergenerational trauma in her writing. Her mother's family are Vietnamese refugees, and she grew up hearing stories of their escape during the Vietnam War. She seeks to understand this journey and legacy in my writing. In 2020, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in History, and concentration in Post-Vietnam War Vietnamese Amerasian History. As part of her program, she completed a senior thesis exploring the experiences of Vietnamese Amerasian children born in Vietnam during the war. You can find her work in the following publications: DiaCRITICS (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network), Project Yellow Dress (and here), Vietnamese Boat People (and here) Watercress Literary Journal (here and here) and UC Berkeley Literature and Arts Magazine. She was a finalist for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Digital Storytelling Contest.
Carina Kimlan Hinton is a Vietnamese Amerasian poet and writer who explores the intricacies of her own mixed race heritage through her work. Her mother's family are Vietnamese refugees, and she grew up hearing stories of their courageous escape from Vietnam, which has inspired her from a young age to seek to understand this complex journey. This year, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in History, and concentration in Post Vietnam War Vietnamese Amerasian History.
Explore more of her work on:
Instagram: @carina.hinton
Medium: Carina Kimlan Hinton
Sabaitide is an emerging Asian American artist and writer from Santa Barbara, CA. She seeks to understand both her eastern culture rooted in Buddhism and her western views as a Christian while going through the motions of an extra ordinary life.
She is currently challenging herself to write at the graduate level as she explores difficult ideas to put into words. She would like to write a science fiction novel someday, but in the meantime, she is working on her portfolio and she has a vegan food blog called @partyinmyrice.
Darlena Chiem is a Vietnamese-American visual artist based in Brooklyn. She hails from the Bay Area, California and is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Through filmmaking, illustration, and writing, she hopes to better understand and connect with herself and the world. When she is not in a state of existential crisis, she enjoys training in Muay Thai and tending to her growing army of plants.
Emmeline Ha, MD is a family physician and daughter of Vietnamese boat people refugees. Originally from northern Virginia, she attended The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and recently graduated from Stanford Family Medicine Residency. Her professional interests include immigrant health, community outreach, and increasing diversity in medicine.
David-Toàn Nguyễn is a second generation Vietnamese American community organizer based in Houston, Texas. Since the age of 13, he has conducted human rights advocacy in Washington, D.C. with Boat People SOS (BPSOS) representing Vietnamese political dissidents and prisoners of conscience. In 2018, he was the youngest candidate appointed to the executive board of the Vietnamese Culture and Science Association (VCSA) and has served since.
Carina Kimlan Hinton is a Vietnamese Amerasian poet and writer who explores the intricacies of her own mixed race heritage through her work. Her mother's family are Vietnamese refugees, and she grew up hearing stories of their courageous escape from Vietnam, which has inspired her from a young age to seek to understand this complex journey. This year, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in History, and concentration in Post Vietnam War Vietnamese Amerasian History.
Explore more of her work on:
Instagram: @carina.hinton
Medium: Carina Kimlan Hinton
Pray for Myanmar.
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In recent years, there has been a growing Burmese population in the United States. According to the Burmese in the 2017 U.S. Fact Sheet by the Pew Research Center, the top 5 metropolitan areas with Burmese concentrations are Minneapolis-Saint Paul (MN), Dallas-Fort Worth (TX), Greater New York (NY), the Bay Area CA, and Atlanta (GA). Around 81% of Burmese immigrants have come to the United States within the last 10 years, many as refugees. According to a recent UNESCO report on migration flows for college-level international students, there are around 10,000 Burmese students studying abroad, with about 1,600+ in the United States.
CRPH Restore Democracy in Myanmar Fund: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/crph
Yannie (Gia-Nhi) Hoàng graduated from USC in 2020 with Journalism and Health Care Studies degrees. She loves listening to her family’s stories and exploring all the different ways that we can “be Vietnamese.” In her free time, she enjoys jamming to Tiny Desk Concerts and making friends laugh.
Twitter: @yannieh_
Email: hoangyannie@alumni.usc.edu
Emily C. Taing is a second generation Khmer-Chinese American writer and activist raised in the Bay Area and based in Los Angeles.
Emily plans to continue the legacy of resistance against the genealogy of oppression faced by Southeast Asian diaspora, through creating community spaces and narratives from a radical and intersectional lens. She is inspired by Khmer poet, Monica Sok @monicajuice, writer, Anthony Veasna So @fakemaddoxjolie, and performing artist, Tiffany Lytle @dancecreatiffity.
This piece was originally published on Medium by Pink Box Stories, which shares stories of the Cambodian families behind California's donut shops. You can follow Emily on Medium @em.taing.
Y-Bình Nguyễn (she/they) is a proud daughter to American War in Vietnam refugees, descendent from a rural farming community in An Giang, Việt Nam, and situated in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She is currently the Literary Curator & Program Director at El Taller and Co-Founder & Literary Editor at Exposed Brick Literary Magazine. Her work has been featured in Vănguard, Red Pocket Press’s Queer Lunar New Year Zine, and Harvard’s Freedom School Magazine.
Y-Bình is a passionate educator with a praxis of communal learning; one of her favorite places in the world to teach and learn is Mamelodi, South Africa. On sunny days, you can find her relearning how to grow food, making art with heart, immersed in works by creatives of color, and figuring out how to be the best role model for her younger sisters (Bảo Trân and pup Nieves).
You can follow her on IG @ybinhtherebefore and @ybinhwrites.
T. Tran fled South Vietnam with her family when she was just 31 years old. Now in her late 70s, she still lives in Minnesota.
UyênThi is a consultant, educator, and writer who has worked in higher education and non-profit settings. She is a cat mom, a daughter of refugees, and honored to be both a contributor and editor with Project Yellow Dress.
Thi Nguyen is a self proclaimed millennial hipster. She loves black coffee and writes poetry when she feels like it. Three fun facts about Thi: she had active tuberculosis and was in isolation for a month; at the end of freshman year of high school, she won Most Improved in water polo as well as in orchestra for playing the flute; and finally she can solve the Rubik’s cube in under 2 minutes, (sometimes). Her poems can be found here: https://medium.com/@mintyn.
Tammy Tran is one of the co-founders of Project Yellow Dress. She is originally from the Greater Washington D.C Area (NoVa) and is also a child of Vietnamese Boat People Refugees. At the moment, she is currently working towards her second Master’s degree in Library & Information Science and focusing on equitable access to resources and preservation.
My name is Vanthay Hong. I was born in Siem Reap, Cambodia to Leth and Kim Hong. I have three siblings - two sisters and one brother. I am the second child of the family. I played division soccer for a year at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. After I obtained a knee injury, I transferred to Augsburg University and graduated from there with a biology degree. Now, I work at Deloitte & Touche and run a nonprofit called Spam FC Scholarship Foundation that helps students pay for college.
Click here to read our interview with Vanthay from May 2018.
Click here to read a previous Written Submission by Vanthay, titled “The Space Between.”
Also, if you can, help support the amazing work that Spam FC is doing for students in Hennepin County, Minnesota by making a donation.
Learkana is a Cambodian American writer whose work has been featured in All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color, The Asian American Literary Review, and Sample Space; and is forthcoming in Stilt House. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she isn't writing, she's probably dissecting cultural and political thinkpieces on her Facebook feed, eating too much junk food, or learning how to drum. You can check out her musings on awkward dates, sexuality, pop culture with an intersectional lens, and other miscellaneous topics at lampshadeonherhead.com.
Kimberly Nguyễn is a Vietnamese-American poet originally from Omaha, Nebraska but currently studying at Vassar College in upstate New York. Her poetry explores complications of language, home, and identity. In addition, she is a groundbreaking investigative journalist for her college newspaper, The Miscellany News. Her articles have garnered widespread attention and have been the catalyst for policy changes from senior administration. You can stay up-to-date on her work at www.kimberlynguyenwrites.com.
Susan Lieu is a Vietnamese-American playwright, solo performer and activist whose parents are Vietnamese refugee nail salon workers. “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother" is the unfortunate true story of how Susan’s mother died from plastic surgery malpractice. At the time, Susan was 11 years old. The show weaves together several through-lines: the multi-generational immigrant experience; body insecurity and shame; repression and subsequent examination of personal loss; lack of accountability in the medical system. “140 LBS” will make its world premiere as a full-length production February 7-17, 2019 at Theatre Off Jackson in Seattle, Washington.
In 2018, she performed this show at the On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival and Bumbershoot, North America’s largest contemporary arts festival. Her work has been profiled in NPR, KING5 News, and the Northwest Asian Weekly. Her work is supported by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, 4Culture, Artist Trust and STG. Lieu works with non-profit Washington Advocates for Patient Safety to increase awareness on looking up the background of medical providers before invasive procedures.
Susan began performing comedy in 2012, at venues including the Purple Onion, Carolines on Broadway and Jet City Improv. Her training includes Yale School of Drama and Freehold Theatre. She has a BA in Social Studies from Harvard, an MBA from Yale and is the co-founder of Socola Chocolatier, an artisanal chocolate company in San Francisco. She has been the Artist-in-Residence at The Collective in Seattle and is an alumna of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers Program and Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs.
Jennifer Ho grew up in San Diego and lives in Chicago. By day she is an archivist; by night she runs Lawrence & Argyle, an apparel company that celebrates America’s immigrant heritage.
I am Hok Sreng Te. I was born in Cambodia and immigrated to the United States when I was twelve. I am the youngest and seemingly the most American in my family. However, unlike my parents and older siblings who are Asian, my identity is split. I am situated in a spot in which I am neither Asian nor American. I am a little bit of both, but I cannot ever say that with ease because it would oversimplify my complex and intertwined web of identity. I am currently a pre-med student at the University of Minnesota, and I hope to bring healing to all people by becoming a physician who goes beyond the biological causation of disease by addressing health disparities and promoting health equity.
Samnang Than is a Cambodian American born in Kirkland, Washington but raised in Olympia. He has two older siblings. His family are refugees from Cambodia. He is the first in the family to be graduating college with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing at Western Washington University. His goal is to pursue a career in Secondary Education where he can share his passion for writing. His biggest goal is to introduce and expand Cambodian literature in the U.S. He hopes to travel to Cambodia to learn more about his cultural roots. Click here to see more of Samnang’s writing.
Vanuyen (she/her) is born and bred in the Bay Area, which for her means she will always root for the A's and have a deep appreciation for BART. She studied history in college and seeks to understand how stories from our past can help us heal in the present and inform systems changes in our future. Vanuyen is proud to be a second generation Vietnamese American and is grateful for the enduring love and strength her family has taught her. Although she complained about going to Vietnamese school every Saturday when she was younger, she is now grateful for the ability to speak with her grandma and parents in their native tongue, and she hopes to someday keep learning more languages.
Born and raised in Iowa, Alex Baccam is a second generation Asian American and a daughter of Tai Dam refugees. She prides herself in her lesser-known ethnic identity and strives to preserve it by listening to her father’s stories and remembering her grandmother’s, by writing, and learning to prepare traditional cuisine.
Alex graduated from the University of Iowa with her BSN. She is currently working at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics as an adult oncology Registered Nurse.
Alex is constantly looking to expand her knowledge and skill through her many interests including yoga, gardening, traveling, cooking, and being outdoors. She appreciates the connections she cultivates through these hobbies and through her career and believes that they are pertinent to exploring her Asian American identity.
She hopes to encourage others to explore their identities in doing what they love.
David Lor is Cambodian-American and lives in Long Beach, CA with his wife Ashleigh and dog Jackie. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature, as well as a Master of Science in Transportation Management. His parents, Huot and Huoy Lor, escaped the repressive Khmer Rouge regime and landed in the United States in 1979. He writes on his parents' immigrant experience as a way to learn more about himself and his family. To follow along, visit his Seeing Hands project.
Olyvia Chac-Nguyen hails from the Pacific Northwest. She currently works at Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, Oregon. She is currently the Outreach & Curator Coordinator for Project Yellow Dress. In her spare time, Olyvia adores traveling to new destinations, writing creative pieces, igniting her foodie game, capturing polaroid photography, and keeping her coffee game strong.
UyenThi lives in Minneapolis and is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. She received her Master's in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota, but is a Wisconsin Badger at heart, and occasionally puts that journalism degree to use by contributing to Project Yellow Dress. UyenThi is a cat mom, friend to many dogs, and infrequent knitter.
My name is Vanthay Hong. I was born in Siem Reap, Cambodia to Leth and Kim Hong. I have three siblings - two sisters and one brother. I am the second child of the family. I played division soccer for a year at University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. After I obtained a knee injury, I transferred to Augsburg University and graduated from there with a biology degree. Now, I work at Deloitte & Touche and run a nonprofit called Spam FC Scholarship Foundation that helps students pay for college.
Click here to read our interview with Vanthay from May 2018.
Also, if you can, help support the amazing work that Spam FC is doing for students in Hennepin County, Minnesota by making a donation.
My name is Terra and my pronouns are she and her. I am a first generation, non-binary Cambodian-American who is passionate about intersectional feminism within public health, public policy and governance, and economics. My long term career aspirations involve structural reform to promote the wellness of minority populations, including the socially and economically displaced, those LGBTQ+, people of color, and many more mis- or underrepresented. In time, I hope to be a leader in work which equitably shapes policies and social structures.
Outside of academics, I love experimenting with makeup, playing Pokemon, and watching intense shows and movies.
June Kuoch is an aspiring activist-scholar-writer-artist. June is a queer and trans-nonbinary child of Khmer-Refugees. They use they/them pronouns. They are a recent college graduate from the University of Minnesota. They’re a local community organizer. Their activist works have been inspired by the Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama. They have worked with grassroots groups in Minnesota such as ReleaseMN8, TCJ4J (Twin Cities Justice 4 Jamar), RadAzns, and Shades of Yellow (SOY). In the fall, they will be a first-year MA student at UCLA in Asian American Studies. Their current research focuses on haunting as it pertains to memory politics brought by United States empire building, specifically as it intersects with critical refugee studies, Asian American studies, critical archival studies, and queer of color critique. Follow them on Instagram: @gucci_kuochie
Thuy Thi Nguyen serves as the seventh President of Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California, a position she has held since July 2016. Nguyen is believed to be the first Vietnamese American college president in the country.
Prior to her arrival at Foothill, Nguyen served as interim general counsel for the California Community College’s Chancellor’s Office. For over eleven years, Nguyen was the General Counsel for the Peralta Community College District.
When she was 3, she and her family joined the wave of “boat people” who fled Vietnam after the end of the war. They drifted in the Pacific Ocean on a boat for more than 20 days before a commercial ship rescued them and took them to a refugee camp in Japan. Eventually, the family relocated to Wichita, Kansas, and then moved to the warmer climate of New Orleans, and later to Oakland, California.
For a full biography, click here.
An Uong is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and a current Creative Nonfiction MFA candidate at Emerson College. She is Editor and Community Liaison at AIR (the Association of Independents in Radio). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, Skin Deep Magazine, Roads and Kingdoms, and Wildness Journal. She lives in New England, where she can be found camping, hiking, or rock climbing when she’s not running after a bus or subway. She also has a knack for ill-timed laughter. Find her on Twitter or Instagram: @anuonganuong.
My name is Hứa Kim Hiền. Originally from Boston, I'm a nonbinary Chinese Vietnamese American (they/them pronouns), who's currently finishing a BA at Smith College. As a student activist and aspiring community organizer/researcher, I want to continue to push for social justice, equity, and the destruction of all systemic oppression while trying to center softness, radicalism, and resilience in my life.
I wrote this poem to celebrate what it means to be "yellow". Yellow is a soft color, a lovely color and I hope this poem can be a reminder for us to love and honor our "yellowness" - our skin color, our body, and the stories that comes with the image of us.
Julia Ha is one of the co-founders of Project Yellow Dress. A Chinese-Vietnamese American from the San Francisco Bay Area, she is also the child of Vietnamese Boat People refugees who came to the U.S. in the early 1980s. You can follow her on Instagram at @jbwahaha.
Tara Tran is a high school senior who wrote the following response to a personal statement prompt that asked, "What matters to you, and why?"
Tim Reason is an editor in Boston. He grew up in New York City and his father served as sponsor for nearly 20 Cambodian and Laotian refugees in the early 1980s. The taste of lemongrass still instantly transports him back to his first time eating Cambodian food while sitting cross legged on the floor of an apartment in Queens. He can be reached at @cleverreason on Twitter.
UyênThi has a B.A. in Journalism but only recently returned to writing. The youngest in the family of six, she is the daughter of refugees, and grew up less than a mile away from Paisley Park, although she spent much of her childhood singing along not to Prince, but to The Sound of Music. UyênThi has a healthy appreciation for fresh journals, Tom Hardy, and golden retrievers, but she is a cat mom at heart. She and her partner (and hopefully a fur baby in the near future) live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can find her online at https://whenyousaywe.wordpress.com/.
About the author:
Kim Truong is a recent American University graduate. A transplant from Vancouver, Canada, she now calls Washington D.C. home. She works in social change communications and in her free time writes essays and stories about voluntourism, travel privilege and cultural authenticity. For more of her work, visit: medium.com/@kttruong_
About this work:
I had actually written this piece a couple of months ago and submitted it to a literary journal. But as the political climate in the United States becomes increasingly unsympathetic and the government increasingly hostile to refugees and immigrants, I thought it important to share my story now, and I withdrew it from consideration. Our voices are more important than ever now, in support of and solidarity with people of color here and around the world.
Teresa Pham-Carsillo is a writer living and working in Oakland, California.
I wrote the poem The Children Who Live in Boats because the plight of boat people feels especially relevant in the current political climate. Our supposed “leader of the free world” is a man who is dead-set on fomenting more and more fear and xenophobia within the population, on closing the borders and turning away those who seek sanctuary. It’s a strange and sad time to be the child of refugees in America.
There’s this narrative that we’re fed in this country, that America is a melting pot of immigrants who came here seeking a better future. It’s this idealized promised land. And while that may be true for many families, the Vietnamese American experience is largely separated from this narrative because our parents aren’t immigrants by choice - they’re refugees. They came here because it was the only option available to them when their home became a war zone, when everything they knew and loved became untenable.
There’s a Warsan Shire poem titled Home that goes: “you have to understand/no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land.” To me, that feels like the crux of what refugees face when they put their children in rickety vessels and pray for a safe passage.
The refugee experience is one in which there are no good choices or a sought after American utopia. There's only the hope of survival - for yourself and for future generations.
Casey Tran is a poet and storyteller in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more of her writing, visit medium.com/@caseytran or follow her on Twitter @tran_casey.
This is a letter from Phi Minh Tam, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Class of 1963, writing to the Director of Alumni Affairs and his fellow alumni about his attempts to escape Vietnam in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Below is a photo of the copy of the letter, followed by a transcript of the text.
Note from author: This is my college personal statement and the prompt was about describing our favorite word. My favorite word is peservance because it reflects my family's hard work and the world they come from.
Writer: Dennis Nguyen
Directed by Alex Luu, The Lonely Water Buffalo was an autobiographical play written and performed by Dennis Nguyen for Alex Luu's Asian Voices/My Own Story performance on September 11th, 2009 at the University of California, Davis.
Julia Ha is one of the co-founders of Project Yellow Dress. A Chinese-Vietnamese American from the San Francisco Bay Area, she is also the child of Vietnamese Boat People refugees who came to the U.S. in the early 1980s. You can follow her on Instagram at @jbwahaha.
