Your works span from poetry to essays, and your memoir tells your story through a mix of poems, essays, and letters. How did you set out to write Hair, and did you know that these pieces would come together as a memoir as you were writing them? Is there such a thing as the best time in a person’s life to write a memoir? How do these different forms that you work in help you to tell your story? 

During the pandemic, I was teaching a creative writing class in which the students were really interested in poetry. As I was sharing with them different forms through poets I admire (Noah Arhm Choi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ada Limón, Jose Olivarez, Hala Alyan, and Ocean Vuong), I felt irresponsible because I hadn’t written poetry myself since childhood (imagine rhyming “Save the Dolphins” verses here). So, with the sequestration that quarantine imposed, I started learning by drafting poems while my babies slept. The photo album chapters in Hair, for instance, are inspired by a Kundiman workshop I took with Kimiko Hahn whose instruction on the tanka form–its pairing of the familiar haiku and the twist element of the closing couplet–aligned with my emotions while exploring my familial photographs. 

A couple of years later, during a severe suicidal dip in my chronic depression, writing felt more imperative, urgent. Through my mental health treatment, I realized there was so much that I was holding in, even when I was writing. When I saw the DVAN call for submissions to their memoir contest for publication through Texas Tech University Press, I committed to writing–unfettered and uninhibited–every night after my kids went to sleep. Every night for three months. I returned to those pandemic poems and wrote everything that I did not initially say, and a handful of those pieces evolved into chapters of Hair. All of the other chapters–whether poems, letters, or short prose–were attempts to concretize key memories that persistently cycled through me, especially during mental health crises, so piecing them together was a way of making sense of memories that confused, plagued, and made me. Because I had always been told what I was or what I wasn’t (oftentimes in conflicting ways), writing Hair felt necessary to better understand and validate myself as a Vietnamese American, an eldest daughter, a mother, a wife, a writer, a teacher. Memoir, for me, has been a process of refusing to lose myself. 

I never thought I would write a memoir because I didn’t feel like anything I had lived or written would matter, but I’ve realized that this personal kind of narrative is urgent work for the self, for surviving trauma and imagining other ways of living. Perhaps this is a continuation of the writing (and identity formation) process, but I keep revising parts of Hair in my mind. I guess writing the book has activated an ongoing, probably lifelong, process of discovering myself and what it means, for me, to be a Vietnamese American woman. 

As I read your essays, I have to echo what many others have already said of your writing – there’s a distinct, unflinching voice that references your childhood shrouded in poverty, generational trauma, and the feeling of never being enough when navigating the world as half Vietnamese and white. Was it natural for you to find your voice as a writer or something you had to consciously workshop? Has it stayed consistent or evolved over time?

Wow! If that’s what people are saying about my writing, I am touched and honored–thank you! I don’t know if I feel I’ve found my voice yet, or if there is one voice to find for a code-switching multilingual life. 

I think I’m still learning to respond to childhood-rooted feelings of invisibility and marginalization that cause me to doubt whatever sense of voice I have. While being mixed has undoubtedly afforded me privileges, the translation involved in those identities has made me feel like I have many voices–a gift but also a source of doubt about which is “mine.”

When I entered college creative writing workshops, I had some experiences of other students crossing out entire pages of my work, of professors asking for translations of “otherworldly” Vietnamese words and customs. That expectation and pressure to serve as a translator admittedly influenced my earlier aestheticization of my heritage. I felt forced to explain and package it to an audience who didn’t get me. I also felt–feel–guilty and ashamed about being complicit in those historical continuities of servitude. 

Through self-reflection, practice, and inspiration from other Vietnamese American writers and authors of color, I have tried to empower myself to use writing as a form of resistance against those expectations that reinforced colonialist, patriarchal optics on my very own identity and the histories that birthed me. In doing so, I think that I’ve become more honest by writing stories with acceptance that they don’t fit into boxes and hopefully challenge reductive dominant narratives that have contributed to the oppression of our people. 

For me, writing with an honest voice means resisting those systemic issues and confronting traumas, but also breaking stereotypes by sharing love and weirdness and humor. Any time some generous soul tells me they took the time to read my story, I want to ask, “Did my trauma dump make you laugh? And what snacks did you eat while you were reading my book?” Maybe my writing voice is a sick need to smile. 

I read in your interview with Southern Humanities Review that reading le thi diem thuy’s the gangster we’re all looking for changed your life. I agree that her novel is a rich part of the Vietnamese American literary canon. What role did narratives by early Vietnamese American writers play in your identity formation and coming-of-age? And taking a step back, I’d love to hear any reflections that you have, as an English professor teaching classes like Asian American Literature, on how Vietnamese American writers have remained consistent or branched out in their themes and if there’s a direction you’d like to see our stories move toward.

I was a full-on adult in a Master’s program when I found the gangster we are all looking for, but better late than never. That novel gifted me the feeling that I was not alone in my identity and in the ways that I had experienced love and pain and loss and hope but had always hidden away because I felt different than everyone else at school, including the literary canon of dead white male writers. 

Then, as I continued on into a PhD program and started writing for DVAN’s diacritics.org, I met and read so many other writers like Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lac Su, and Beth Nguyen who were expanding the boundaries of representation for our people. 

Twenty years later, I’m so happy that my TBR pile of Vietnamese American literature  is too tall for me to keep up with, and that every semester it gets more difficult to narrow down the readings for my classes. I love laugh-crying at Carolyn Huynh’s expertly crafted trash-talking dialogue, Ly Tran’s indelible imagery in her honest portrayals of the hardest and most beautiful experiences, and not to mention the work being done in romance, horror, and children’s/YA genres… I’m just excited to see more of our community’s diverse stories being represented–let’s get it, fam! 

It’s truly heartwarming to watch my children grow up with shelves of Vietnamese American literature in their home, to know that they won’t feel as lost or unseen as I did as a child. And, even truer, I’m always a pizza-earning book club fan at heart, so I’m grateful to be here reading right along with them.  

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This interview was conducted by Cathy Duong as part of the Author Spotlight series. All featured authors participated in Viet Book Fest 2026, a literary event presented by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA).

Join us on Sunday, April 12, 2026, from 10 AM to 5 PM at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California for a full day honoring Vietnamese storytelling and culture in literature.

Viet Book Fest 2026 offers a full day of programming focused on Vietnamese literature, storytelling, and culture. Attendees can participate in five panel discussions, enjoy interactive activities for children, and experience youth performances that showcase Vietnamese traditions and creativity. The festival also provides a space for community collaborations, where participants can create their own art and engage in hands-on projects.