These are the words that 17-year-old poet Thy Hope Luong read aloud the first time she ever performed poetry. It was her first spoken-word poem, written about her experience with intergenerational trauma and not feeling “Vietnamese enough.” Thy decided to perform the poem at a Vietnamese American Round Table at Brave New Voices, an international poetry festival, in San Francisco. After her performance, Thy looked up and saw her mother crying. That was the moment, Thy recalls, when she began to understand why poetry is so important to her: it has the power to touch people who mean something to her.
Thy, who’s name quite literally means “poetry” in Vietnamese, is a high school student in San Jose and is Santa Clara County’s youth poet laureate. Her writing and art have been recognized by the New York Times, YoungArts, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and various galleries.
In addition to being a poet, a critical part of Thy’s identity is as a youth activist. She is the founder and executive president of Learn4Justice, a youth-led outreach program to bridge the educational gap and facilitate cultural exchange among young global change makers; the co-chief of policy at GENup, which pitches bills to California legislators to support student attendance, mental health, equity, and more; the youth commissioner for San Jose’s District 4; and an intern at Harvard Law School, where she researched and tracked rhetoric and campaign strategies of conservative candidates for the 2024 presidential election.
“all i truly know is that i am a culmination and a beginning all at once a product of a million wants. and i hope i can strive to grow a seed that has been with me, within me all along.” -From “to be longing”
Thy’s exposure to poetry started young— her father is also a poet. Although she initially looked down at poetry as a form of expression that was “pretentious and inaccessible,” she has come to view it as a way to deal with and process the world. To Thy, poetry and activism are inextricably linked, two forces that work together to create more meaning. “Art is inherently an act of resistance,” Thy said. “It is useless, and that is the point. There is such beauty in creating something simply for the sake of creating. There is a reason why oppressive regimes crush art during resistance. Both poetry and activism create community and connection, which works against individualist forces like capitalism.”
Thy is so passionate about social activism because she recognizes the power of young people’s voices, as well as the potential for their words to be manipulated or misconstrued when they let someone speak on their behalf. Thy points out that the voices of young people are often tokenized, especially for political benefit. She claims, “Our voices deserve equal standing. So many issues affect us, and it is important that we find our way into decision-making spaces.”
To Thy, poetry, much like activism, is not an art that needs to be created and performed individually. Her deepest motivation in continuing her art is other youth and the lessons she has learned from her peers. She believes in the power of collaboration as a way to create new meanings and understandings of the world. One such act of collaboration was a group poem that Thy wrote alongside three other youth poet laureates—Matthew Kim, Sage Cobb, and Emma Zhang—for Santa Clara County’s State of the County Address on January 25, 2024. “If safety is home, / And home is you and me, / I find refuge in you,” they wrote in “Home.”
Thy also draws inspiration from Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese American poet who shares his experiences with queerness, loss, love, and heartbreak in novels such as On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and poems like “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong.” Similarly to the deep introspection and evaluation of childhood that Ocean explores in these works, Thy’s poetry has explored a loss that occurred before she was born, but that nonetheless left a deep and indelible mark on her family and her place in it—the death of her older sister very soon after she was born. “I think of her often, alive, and wonder what it’d be like to be the younger sibling, to not pave the way. It would have clashed with my independence, I think. Or it would have unraveled me, in the sense that everything I am is premised only by my sister’s death,” Thy writes in her poem “White Lies.”
Just as poetry has been a way to connect with, process, and acknowledge her own trauma and pain, poetry is also one of the deepest sources of beauty in Thy’s life. “One thing that I have learned is that creation is so important,” Thy said. “Don’t just consume, create.”
Growing up in Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh City—Vinh G. Nguyen was the kid who preferred to be alone. He cherished his time painting with watercolors and oils and sketching fashion ideas. When he was 10, he immigrated with his parents to the United States. Despite the challenge of learning English late in elementary school, his daily routines were sweetened by afternoons at the library, where he gathered books on arts and crafts. In the evenings, while his cousins played video games, Vinh drew deeper into his inner world, making sense of it with just a pencil and paper. The desire to develop his artistry was instinctual.
In high school, he participated in choir and drama for the first time. That’s where he found friends—some of whom he stays in touch with to this day. Yet while at San José State University, Vinh found he was a late bloomer in the world of theater.
He remembered talking to a friend and sharing, “I always felt like I’m one step behind all of my peers in the audition room who had been training since they were like two.” But Vinh’s friend pointed out that his passion to catch up was what drove Vinh’s career forward.
And his friend’s words were true. Vinh took enough classes in the musical theater department that he was only a few upper-division courses from majoring in it. So, along with his major in hospitality, Vinh graduated with a BA in musical theater.
“I feel like my cultural identity is now my superpower.” -Vinh G. Nguyen
For a few years afterward, Vinh worked as a freelance actor and an elementary school drama teacher. His discovery of theater informed his approach. Growing up in an Asian household, making a living as an artist had never been in the picture. But his goal was clear. He stated: “Number one, do more of this art stuff, and then two, share it with the world.”
He continued to share that he wanted to do whatever he could “to spread that joy with the next generation.”
He wanted to take his passion further. Showing his family that he could make a living while also making a big impact, he pursued an MFA in musical theater at San Diego State University and then taught collegiate-level drama. When the pandemic pushed everyone online, his unique pathway became vital.
In 2020, as the world contended with injustice and change, the theater community pushed for better practices as well. “The We See You White American Theater movement came out of the Black Lives Matter [movement],” Vinh explained. “We called out all the white theater companies that [were] not doing the work.”
To support the changes for anti-racist theater systems, Vinh became an equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) consultant and helped local theaters rebuild from the ground up. These initiatives informed how companies should treat actors, pay their staff, and facilitate conflicts.
Vinh also worked as a casting director. “That’s where I felt I was able to go in and make a direct impact in my community,” he emphasized. He sat on plenty of boards and EDI committees, but casting allowed him to influence the process directly. “Instead of bringing in what the director [wanted], I would also present three other actors whom they wouldn’t even think of,” he explained. “You challenge the director with, ‘Well, they did great. Why didn’t you pick them?’ ” He set specific goals for each show, aiming to have a certain percentage of the cast be from marginalized communities.
As live theater returned, Vinh continued his EDI consulting work, which was in high demand. But the downside was being pigeonholed and losing out on work as an artist. So Vinh adjusted his strategy. He marketed himself as a director with EDI experience. “If you want me for my EDI [experience], then just hire me as a director and everything will come with it,” he said.
Leading with that intention, Vinh began to direct for local theaters. Directing was as fulfilling as he had hoped, because it was relational and relied on a clear vision. He shared, “All the theaters that I have directed for are theaters that I have acted for. And it has to be a show that I have a very strong artistic vision for, where I come in and say, ‘This is why I want to do the show now and at your theater.’ ”
In 2023, Vinh became the managing director of Chopsticks Alley Art, which is a southeast Asian arts organization that commissioned him for the play Tales of Ancient Vietnam. This play examines the ideal of cultural authenticity through the lens of a second-generation Vietnamese American and debuted as a staged reading in 2024.
This was not just about his success as a playwright, but also as an artist taking power in his identity. As a young actor, he used to intentionally stray away from “cultural” work such as this play. “I wanted to prove that I could do the ‘normal work,’ ” he remembered. “I had to fight to be in the same room as five other white actors to read for a role that I didn’t even care much for.” The stories he did care about were being told by the wrong people in the American theater landscape, well-intentioned as they may have been.
At this point in his career and life, Vinh has the triplethreat ability to tell these stories himself through his vision as the director or through his own creation as a playwright. In his own words: “I feel like my cultural identity is now my superpower.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first recognition as a writer happened when he was eight years old as a student at Lowell Elementary School in San Jose. “Lester the Cat” is a story about an urban cat who, stricken with ennui and bored with city life, flees and falls in love with a country cat. Viet’s childhood story was selected for a prize at the former Martin Luther King Jr. Library located on W. San Carlos Street (now located at 150 San Fernando).
As an eight-year-old, the experience left a big impression, both as a very public and private experience—publicly, because he received recognition from the very library where he absorbed literature throughout his childhood and, privately, because his parents weren’t able to take him to the award ceremony. His school’s librarian took him, while no one in his family knew. To Viet, it was his little secret, and although he did not make a conscious decision to become a writer, he found that writing books could be fun and interesting.
Viet was born in Ban Mê Thuột, Viet Nam (now Buôn Mê Thuột) and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. His family settled in San Jose in the late 1970s, opening one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores, Sàigòn Mới (later demolished to make room for the Miro Luxury Apartments on East Santa Clara Street). His path to becoming a writer dates back to being eight years old, dabbling with journaling, poetry, short fiction, and drama through high school and into college. This period, according to Viet, was the “first of many disasters in aspirations to being a writer.” He adds, “I think all writers have to make all kinds of mistakes.”
His ambition to be a serious writer and scholar solidified while he was a student at UC Berkeley. Not only did his education further his interest in literature and writing, but he also developed awareness as an Asian American and an English and ethnic studies major. The opportunity to read beyond canonical Western writers—including women, BIPOC, and decolonizing writers—was crucial in that it gave him a sense that there is a serious purpose to literature. Viet’s time at Berkeley developed his understanding of literature, both in his approach as a scholar and as a writer. Before then, according to Viet, “I think I had a very romantic idea of literature,” he says, adding, “From 19 to 20 years of age, I began to think of literature as a political, theoretical, and eventually philosophical issue.”
Fast forward to the present and Viet is a celebrated scholar, author, and essayist. His novel, The Sympathizer, is a New York Times Bestseller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and has debuted on over thirty bookof-the-year lists. His writing (although not a complete list) includes the sequel, The Committed, A Man of Two Faces, The Refugees, two children’s books, (Chicken of the Sea and Simone), and his next book, slated for 2025, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other Viet is thinking about writing even when he’s not physically writing—a process that involves thinking, planning, and revising, in addition to writing. He states, “There is something mysterious about inspiration and where that comes from, but you have to do the work to get to the inspiration, and to do the work just means you have to be doing something every single day, whether that’s the thinking, planning, writing, or revising.”
Understanding the inside and outside of language was key to Viet’s growth as a writer, “For me, I immersed myself as deeply as I could into the English-language literature,” he says. This absorption allowed Viet to understand how language works, not just as a tool, but how it works internally. Knowing some Vietnamese also allowed Viet to look at his writing both as an insider and an outsider. He shared, “One of the best compliments I got about The Sympathizer was a Vietnamese author coming up to me saying, ‘I can hear the rhythms of Vietnamese in your writing.’ And I don’t think I intended to do that, but the fact that it’s there because I have an inside and outside relationship with the language was really helpful.” In addition, Viet believes that all writers develop their own voice by finding whatever is authentic within themselves as a driver for their writing. To Viet, speaking your truth is crucial to being a successful writer.
“My personal identity could never be separated from the identity of being Vietnamese and eventually Asian American.” -Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet’s work as a writer, critic, and essayist is undeniably tied to issues of identity and memory. Growing up in San Jose, he was exposed to the notion of the collective identity at a young age because of the existence of racism and his own awareness of how the Vietnam War impacted Vietnamese refugees and Americans as a whole. Stories have power, and to Viet, the complexity of power as it relates to his individual and collective identity gave him the authority to write about his own story and the Vietnamese American experience. “I believed in the idea that stories had the power to transport me out of San Jose, my parent’s house, the grocery store that was our reality, but then I realized that stories have the power to destroy as well, the power to save as well as destroy. And that’s the complexity within power that also made me convinced I wanted to become a writer.”
Viet’s body of work through this lens of identity and memory is deeply personal. He shares, “My personal identity could never be separated from the identity of being Vietnamese and eventually Asian American. Those identities were inevitably tied in with memory, because how we think about the past, our individual past, but also the collective past of our cultures and nations is going to impact our sense of identity. There’s always been this dynamic between individual and collective memory for me that has been tied to issues of my racial identity but also to America’s national identity as well.”
Viet’s drive to speak to identity and memory, to write the stories that have brought him success, has been partly shaped by his upbringing in San Jose. He recalls, “I grew up in a very edgy part of San Jose’s downtown by the 280 access ramp on South 10th Street, and it was a tough environment to grow up in. But it was that friction between the beautiful diversities but also the economic struggle of so many people in that area that taught me so much about human nature and provided me with the stories that would eventually be really important to my motivation as a writer, scholar, and essayist.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen was raised in San Jose, educated in the East Bay at UC Berkeley, and now resides in Los Angeles as the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. “What’s important to me about being a writer is just writing,” he states. The Bay Area provided Viet with an environment where stories—including his individual and collective identity—his complicated relationship with San Jose–could take root and shape his craft. “[Growing up in San Jose has] always been so much more complex, because it’s the difference between the comforting parts of San Jose and the difficult parts for my family and myself that generated the emotional friction that turned me into a writer.”
