Lan Cao, Duong Van Mai Elliott, Le Ly Hayslip, and Marcelino Truong converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Lan 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 GUESTS

Bao 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 GUESTS

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, 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 GUESTS

Thien 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 GUESTS

JAMES 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 GUESTS

Hoa 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 GUESTS

Kìêu 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 GUESTS

André 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 GUESTS

Anida 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.