Phuc Tran converses with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Phuc 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.

Kieu Chinh, Bao Nguyen, Jenni Trang Le, and Viet 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 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.

Marc dela Cruz, Qui Nguyen, Diep Tran, and Susan Lieu converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Marc 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 GUESTS

Dao 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.com

Vi 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.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.

Tu David Phu, Genevieve Erin O'Brien, and Mark Padoongpatt converse with hosts Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Nguyen.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Tu 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 GUEST

Thao 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 GUEST

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 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 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, 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 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.