My parents would dress us up in traditional Vietnamese clothing to go to school for heritage day. We have a Vietnamese nanny that my parents wanted us to have so we could stay in touch and know where we came from.
I grew up speaking Vietnamese - that was my first language because my parents didn't speak any English, and I didn't learn English until I started school.
And just as there was something of every Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh so there is something of Ho Chi Minh in almost every present-day Vietnamese, so strong is his imprint on the Vietnamese nation.
My parents always wanted me to learn about my culture and tried to make me eat Vietnamese food.
One of my best friends growing up was Vietnamese, and he and his mom would teach me how to say certain things so I could impress my nail girls. Then the nail girls would teach me how to count to 100 and basic things like 'Thank you' and 'You're welcome.' It's funny, because any accent that I do now always turns into Vietnamese.
I believe firmly in reconciliation among Vietnamese to avoid unnecessary shedding of the blood of Vietnamese.
The crimes committed by the North Vietnamese regime against the Vietnamese people were minor compared to the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodians, but for us on the left they were emotionally far more significant.
My parents liked to go dancing, and they encouraged all of us to bring our friends home. My brother had a skiffle group, and there would often be dancing in the house. And my parents would come and dance with us.
I study once in a while. But my parents never pushed us into anything. Until we were 18, my mother would make us go with her to Kingdom Hall, and when we turned of age, she let us choose what we wanted to.
Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.
My parents were very permissive when it came to animals. As long as we earned the money to buy them and built whatever structure it was they were going to live in, we could have any kind of pet we wanted. They would have let us have a rhinoceros if we could have afforded it.
Everyone from my high school and junior college are now doctors and lawyers. I came from that kind of environment, but I chose to go on another path, even though I did promise my parents that I would get a degree. After that, I could do anything I wanted; that was the deal.
When I was growing up, I cared very little for the customs of my parents, the special things that we're supposed to do as Vietnamese people. But now that I am a parent, I go out of my way to make sure that my son goes to visit his grandparents and participates in customs like the Lunar New Year celebration.
I'm working on this fashion line that's all inspired by Vietnam. I'm Vietnamese so a lot of the clothes are inspired by Vietnamese culture, and I'm trying to mix that with the streetwear style.
I was a Vietnamese kid with a mullet hair cut. I had all Westie mates, and, geez, a Vietnamese guy with a mullet doesn't work; no wonder I couldn't get a girlfriend for so many years.
After everything my parents were teaching us about Korean culture, about being respectful and all these things, you know, here came my grandmother, who is very crass and wanted to teach us how to gamble.
I have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time. Trouble was, in my household it was a no-no to speak English because somehow it is disrespectful to call parents and grandparents "you" - impersonal pronouns are offensive in Vietnamese.