It's New Orleans: VietNOLA

Have you ever been to the DMV or some other official kind of place and seen immigrant parents with little English proficiency helped out with the paperwork by their school aged children Tung Ly was that kid. When he was growing up in Tulsa, there were many occasions where he had to help his parents with basic stuff that many of us would have taken for granted. Nowadays Tung is still playing that role but instead of helping his parents to understand a tax form, or to renew a drivers license, he s helping staff at all levels at the City of New Orleans to understand and to adopt complicated software systems that will hopefully make their jobs easier, and improve services that are provided to the people that need them; it s an incredibly important job these days as the City makes major efforts to modernize the way it does business. Tung stops by to talk about that, and some of the many community service activities he s active in, including work with Propellor, VAYLA, and the Awesome Fund, just to name a few this week on VietNOLA.

In 1980, Quoc Hoang was born in a refugee camp in a Malaysian jungle. Two and a half months later, his family found itself in Canada in the dead of winter, totally dislocated from friends and family, and in a city Toronto that, at the time, had very few Vietnamese people. Now Quoc lives in New Orleans and helps run Tulane's A.B. Freeman School of Business. For Quoc, one of the surprising things about living in New Orleans has been the way the city s Vietnamese population has rekindled his interest in his own Vietnamese background. On the show, Quoc talks about growing up Vietnamese in the Great White North, and of what it was like to visit Vietnam and discover his ethnic heritage, as if for the first time.

A true "professional bohemian", Stephen Collier is a nationally known artist and one of the founders of the Good Children Gallery on St. Claude. The son of a white father and a Vietnamese mother, Stephen grew up in Natchitoches where he was one of the only Asians for miles around. Now living and working in New Orleans, he s become known as "one of the city s edgier and most engaging conceptualists". This week Stephen joins us on VietNOLA to talk about his art and music, and he even shares some thoughts on one of Vietnam s more intimate contributions to world culture The "Sniff Kiss".

Vietnamese Motorbike Culture from Head to Heels

Generally speaking, Vietnamese people particularly the older generation don t go to counselors, they don t see life coaches, and they sure as hell don t see shrinks. It s not that they don t have problems like the rest of us , but for various reasons, they tend to deal with them on their own, and that s one of the things that makes this week s guest, Lily Ngotran Moghtader, a Tulane psychiatry resident, so interesting. Lily is Vietnamese and to give an indication of what we re talking about, when she decided on psychiatry as her area of specialty, her traditional Vietnamese mother "flipped out" and said "Oh my god, you re going to turn crazy like your patients " This being the same mother who, upon hearing Lily was dating a Persian Jew the man who is now her husband exclaimed "Oh my god, you re dating a terrorist " This week Lily joins us on VietNOLA to talk about the challenges of practicing psychiatry in a Vietnamese community, about the secret to successfully navigating a romance between two distinctly ethnic families, and about her experience as someone now steeped in western medicine of growing up in a household where getting scraped on the back with a coin cao gio was the go to treatment for someone with a cold or a flu.

New Orleans born Hanoi based photographer, Aaron Joel Santos, gives us a picture of Vietnam life. From weddings to double amputees, Aaron Joel Santos shows us Vietnam from behind the lens. But today he s showing us Vietnam from behind the mic. Aside from being an amazing photographer Aaron is really funny and interesting guy, and tells Kim about his travels through Vietnam and South East Asia.

Uyen Vu is a high end jewelry marketing expert. She s also a recovering metal head with a New Orleans past. From Chopin to Metallica music, Uyen talks about musical influences, her her life on the road as a working heavy metal musician, and her current days in L.A. fashion culture mogul.

Grandmaster Tai Le began his disciplines in Tae Kwon Do and Kung Fu as an eight year old in Vietnam. In the years before he fled the country, he would teach classes to hundreds of people at a time sometimes on tennis courts When he came to the US as a refugee in 1982, he had to work as a pipe fitter to support his young family, but he continued to train on his own. The family settled in the NOLA area in 1990 and Grandmaster Le began working out at Moon College Tae Kwon Do in Metairie. Nowadays he owns the place and his sons Thanh and Vinh are two of his best students. Luckily for us, while everyone in the family was focused on preparations for Thanh s third ever professional fight THIS FRIDAY June 6, 8pm at Harrah s Casino they still found some time to share their story and to talk a about their disciplines this week on VietNOLA

When we think of the big city racial crises, there s often that image of an Asian community caught in the middle of it perhaps epitomized by the Asian shopkeeper in Spike Lee s "Do the Right Thing" who, in defending his business from the same angry mob that had just burned down Sal s Pizzaria shouts "I no white I black You, me, same " Things could have been that way in New Orleans East in the days following Hurricane Katrina with Vietnamese and African American neighbors pitted against each other in competition for resources dedicated for the city s recovery, and on other issues. But instead of following that pattern, Vietnamese and African Americans forged solidarity on matters such as the speed and quality of FEMA assistance, and on the construction of the proposed landfill it was powerful, and it made a difference. Our guest this week, Dr. Eric Tang, a scholar at the University of Texas has spent time in New Orleans and written on the subject of relations between the Vietnamese Americans and their African American neighbors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Why weren t Vietnamese and African Americans antagonistic towards each other in New Orleans as they have been during times of crises in other places We discuss that this week on VietNOLA.

Think back if you can, to a time when you were a kid and your parents were called to school to talk about your progress in the classroom, or about disciplinary problems on the playground. And try and imagine what it would have been like if your parents didn't speak English and the school admin couldn't properly communicate with them due to the language barrier, and so they had to call in one of your bilingual classmates to act as an interpreter. And imagine the things discussed in the meeting were sensitive and deeply personal it would be profoundly embarrassing, wouldn't it It's no secret that since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has seen a boom in the population of immigrants from Latin America many of whom came to New Orleans and played a big role in the recovery of the City. It's not that the Parish schools ever did a particularly good job of dedicating the scarce resources it had to better facilitate communication with the Vietnamese and other immigrant populations that were already here but with the influx of "New" New Orleanians since Katrina, these challenges have only grown. VAYLA is one organization in New Orleans that is working to fix this problem they've filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice to address language barriers in the schools. They ll be our guests this week to talk about it on VietNOLA.

What do you do after earning runner up status on NBC s The Voice and releasing a 1 single on iTunes You go to Vietnam and appear on their version of the The Voice of course That s what New Orleans based recording artist Terry McDermott did anyway, and he killed it there too Terry s been described by Adam Levine as having a "clean, and really pristine, beautiful voice" and by others as having a brit pop sound that s well, just "bloody good." We don t disagree with any of that. This week the Scottish born rocker joins us on VietNOLA, to talk about his experience in Vietnam, to share his deep connections with Vietnamese culture, and how it was his voice came to be heard during every J.League professional soccer game in Japan.

Many of us are aware of some of the profound changes happening in Vietnam as it emerges into the global age. We see images of modern skyscrapers appearing on the Saigon skyline and cars replacing the ubiquitous motorbikes on Hanoi s streets, but change also means shifts in family structure and how men and women see their place in the family, and in society at large. In the early 1990 s, Seattle University anthropologist Harriet Phinney went Vietnam with the intention of conducting research on reproductive health, but found that what many people really wanted to talk about was a phenomenon of single women opting to have children on their own, and by intention, without a husband. VietNOLA caught up with Harriet a couple weeks ago when she visited the Tulane School of Public Health to talk about her research and its implications for that society, and on our sense of what it means to be Vietnamese.

When Barbara Weaver s father Mike went to Vietnam in 1967 to serve in the war, he brought with him not much more than a rucksack with his toothbrush, a few family photos, and some clothes. When he returned to the States almost ten years later, it was with a Vietnamese wife and seven children the five children she had from a previous marriage, and the two children they d had together. The family settled in Portland, Oregon and that s where Barbara lived until 2009 when she moved to New Orleans. This week Barbara joins us on VietNOLA to share memories and challenges she had growing up an Amerasian "War Baby" both in Vietnam, and in the United States.

More than twenty years before the Cyndi Nguyen ran for City Council, there was the self described rebel Cindy Nguyen who nearly got herself kicked out of high school and went off to Iowa in search of something different. The Cyndi who returned to New Orleans nearly ten years later had a college degree and the determination to improve the lives of people in the community she d left behind and she channeled that into starting Vietnamese Initiatives in Economic Training VIET , where she now serves as Executive Director. This week Cyndi joins us on VietNOLA to talk candidly about her life s journey, the experience of running for City Council and why she d be extremely reluctant to ever run again , and about the important work she s doing at VIET.

The Vietnamese were among the first to return to the City to rebuild their homes after Hurricane Katrina in many cases before there was a promise of any kind of assistance from government, Brad Pitt, or anyone else. As things began to return to normal, the City of New Orleans released plans for the creation of a dump for storm related waste less than two miles from the densest settlement of Vietnamese people in the New Orleans area. The proposed dump served as a catalyst for a kind of community activism that nobody had ever associated with the Vietnamese community, and filmmaker Leo Chiang was on the ground to capture it in his award winning documentary, "A Village Called Versailles". This week Leo Chiang visited VietNOLA to talk with us about how he became acquainted with the Vietnamese of New Orleans, and what it was about the story that resonated with him as a filmmaker and with audiences around the country.

We ve all heard stories of the hard working immigrant who finds success however you define it through their own hard work and determination, but do you wonder if it ever truly happens It has in 22 year old Ngoc Pham s case When the Ngoc came to the United States, she was eight and had spent all but three years of her life in a refugee camp. Her father, despite limited English language proficiency supported the family as an auto mechanic, and her mother worked in a factory. Now Ngoc is at Tulane studying under a full scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that will carry her through to a PhD. Ngoc joins us to talk about her big plans for a career in Public Health, the role Confucian Buddhist values play in her life, and she even gives us a little appreciation of K pop, this week on VietNOLA.

Anybody who s followed the New Orleans food scene over the past few years would likely have noticed the proliferation of Vietnamese restaurants across the city. Food that was once found only in Vietnamese enclaves on the West Bank or in the East is now found in restaurants, grocery stores, and even growing in gardens throughout the greater New Orleans area. Local filmmaker writer Suzanne Pfeferle sought to shed some insight on that trend with a documentary produced in 2012, and more recently with her just released book, Vietnamese Cuisine of New Orleans. This week on VietNOLA, Suzanne visits with us about her new book, shares some insight about Vietnamese culture, and more specifically about a cuisine that spent many years under the radar, but has more recently become an important part of our New Orleans food culture.

Having left Atlanta, Cam Tu Nguyen moved to New Orleans for love and stayed for her love of New Orleans and its Viet community. As a non profit organizer Cam educates everyone in the NOLA Viet community from underserved fisherfolk to church going professionals about Obamacare.

Have you ever been walking the streets of Saigon, looked around, and said to yourself, "this place is great but it s needs more hillbilly soul bands." Well wish no longer because Kim sat down with Nick Rivette and Davis Zunk of The Wanderlusters. Nick and Davis joined us all the way from Saigon to talk about living and working as an American band playing American music in Vietnam. So if you re in Vietnam and looking to catch an awesome show, or if you just want to hear what it s like to party in Saigon with Australian dignitaries, listen now

Kim s in Mexico this week so we re taking you back in time to one of our favorite episodes with Alison Ecker. Alison Ecker lives in Hanoi, and joins us with a live report on the strange fate of the motorcycle helmet in Vietnam, and the importance of women's shoes in shifting gears.

NOLA Acupuncturist Quang Huynh volunteers in the Philippines

VSA at UNO

Bi-racial, Bi-national Children

Bi-racial, Bi-national Love

Spoken word artist Travis Tran balances East and Westbank

Louisiana Viet starts Asian Basketball Team

NOLA's Valedictorian Viets

Vietnamoney

Professor Nguyen flies in

Eastern Entrepeneurials

New Orleans country music in Saigon

LGBTV (Vietnamese) New Orleans

Dinner Lab goes Vietnamese

Lessons on aquaponics and Vietnamese drinking culture

A New Orleans East lifer tells it like it is

Kieu Tran gets ready to bake in the big league

Vietnamese Food Bloggers Share Secrets

Rebuilding the East

Vietnola on pins and needles

Public health, VietNola style ...