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Kelly (Jackson) Brownlee
In April of 1975 I was evacuated from Vietnam during Operation Babylift and survived the second flight out which crashed shortly after take off. I grew up south of Seattle, survived cancer at age 11, and eventually went on to college in Washington state where I studied Graphic Design and Illustration. While freelancing as an illustrator, I took an additional job as an artist rep where I was able to merge my love of art with the desire to assist others in the field. Currently, I advise college students and professionals on their portfolios and also work as a liaison between non-profit organizations wanting to hire designers and junior graphic designers who are looking to volunteer their design for non-profit.

Upon the 25th anniversary of Operation Babylift last April, I decided to work with an issue that hit close to home: adoption. Being an adoptee had very little meaning for me as a way of an identity growing up. In college I often struggled with issues about being identified as Asian American, but also being identified by some as being "too white" to fit into the ethnic student unions in school. My questions about Vietnam, my past or "roots" went unanswered for 25 years because, I had never bothered asking about them. It was only when I was brought together with other adoptees that I could finally start to address these issues about my identity as an adoptee and the desire to begin exploring my culture seemed to be a natural process for me. This past January I was very fortunate to make a trip back to Vietnam for the first time on a trip organized by Ms. Indigo Williams who runs AVI, Adopted Vietnamese International and is also a member of VWF.

Currently I am active participant with the Greater Seattle Vietnamese Association; a group that fosters aid to Vietnam, Families with Children from Vietnam, Asian Adult Adoptees of Washington. Having a personal appreciation for the importance of International Adoption, I have also had the opportunity to give insight into adoption for visiting delegates from Vietnam through Holt International. One of my larger projects involves working with a group called Vietnamese Adoptee Network. Exchanging thoughts and ideas through forums has given me the opportunity to contribute my perspective and reflect on others.

Mai Bui
I am an active member in the community. I am on the Board of Directors for Cultural Initiatives (CI) of Silicon Valley, www.ci-sv.org, which promotes the arts in schools. CI is lead by former San Jose Mayor, Susan Hammer. I am the chair person for Association for Viet Arts (AVA), www.vietarts.org, a San Jose based non-profit organization providing a catalyst for Vietnamese American artists. I am responsible for leading and executing AVA’s vision and am dedicated to bringing Vietnamese American art to the mainstream. I have experience in sales, management and product marketing with previous companies like Fortis Investors, Quintus and Avaya. I am also pursuing an MNA at San Jose State University. With an affinity to Vietnamese and international art, I am related to Phan Mai Truc, a Vietnamese artist and professor at the University de Beaux Arts in Saigon.

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Julie Kieu Linh Dam
I'm 30, a senior writer at PEOPLE magazine. She also edits the “Where Are They Now?” weekly feature in the publication. The child of a linguistics professor and a school district administrator, Dam graduated from Harvard University.

I got my first real-life lesson on the power of the written word when a negative review I wrote of an ill-prepared, one-person production was heatedly discussed on local talk radio. The following year, I was one of three college students selected to intern at TIME magazine. My experience that summer made me decide that journalism was a great career in which you could learn new things and meet interesting people all the time. That expectation has proved fairly accurate, particularly when I was covering the arts and fashion throughout Europe.

I was in London when Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car accident. For a week I barely left the office as I pitched in on the reporting. Only on the day of the funeral did I walk the eerily silent streets of London and experience for myself the grief that consumed the city.

Darlene Damm
I currently work as a Program Director at Volunteers in Asia (VIA) arranging programs on American Culture for visiting students from Asia. I also worked with VIA in Hanoi teaching English and throughout Vietnam with American high school students as a Program Leader with "Where There Be Dragons." My other work includes involvement with the World Bank in Indonesia and with Japan-US Community Education and Exchange in Tokyo. I received a degree in History from Stanford University in 1998. I run a discussion group on current issues every other Sunday out of my apartment in San Francisco.

Maura Nguyen Donohue
I was born in Saigon and raised in Rhode Island. I am the Artistic Director of a NYC based performance troupe, In Mixed Company www.inmixedcompany.com My work has toured across the U.S. and to Canada, Europe and Asia. I choreographed le thi diem thuy's the bodies between us for New Works for a New World and choreographed and performed in Dragonwings for Seattle Children's Theater, the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, GA and Syracuse Stage. In Vietnam, I taught and/or choreographed for the Saigon based October Ballet Company, Ho Chi Minh City Ballet, and Hanoi’s Vietnam Ballet. I have served as the Asian Bureau Chief, writer and advisor for the Dance Insider www.danceinsider.com, sat on the Board of Directors for Dance Theater Workshop www.dtw.org and advised Dance Theater Workshop’s Southeast Asian based Mekong Project.

I was a 1996 Emerging Choreographer at the Bates Dance Festival , a 1995 Van Lier Choreographic Fellow, a member of Chen & Dancers from 1994 - 1996 and facilitated The Field's Asian American Artist Workshop. I toured the US performing Peking Opera wu dan (woman warrior) roles with Jamie H.J. Guan (M. Butterfly) and as a member of La Mama ETC's Great Jones Rep Co has toured to Korea, Taiwan, Italy, Greece and Austria in Andrei Serban/Elizabeth Swados' experimental operas Medea, Electra and The Trojan Women. I currently train relentlessly in Seido Karate with Kaicho (Grandmaster) Tadashi Nakamura. Osu! I am a fiercely loyal Smith College alumni and the proud mother of Sasa Mai Ying Yung.

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Anne Frank
I am the founding librarian of the UCI Libraries' Southeast Asian Archive, established in 1987 to document the experiences of refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam who have resettled in the U.S. after the end of the Vietnam War. There is a special focus on Orange County and California. My related activities include the Refugee Forum of Orange County, the California State Refugee Forum, and the Association of Asian American Studies. Please come and visit the SEA Archive when you are in Southern California.

UC Irvine Libraries Southeast Asian Archive features information about the collection, copies of its newsletters, a virtual exhibit: "Documenting the Southeast Asian Refgugee Experience," images of Hmong paj ntaub, and links to relevant web pages. Check it out: www.lib.uci.edu/rrsc/sasian.html

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Simmone Hall
I am from Footscray, Melbourne where we have one of the largest clusters of Vietnamese in Australia. Among many things, I'm an ex-gang member and nationally ranked skateboarder. In the mid 1990s, I spent two years in Viet Nam studying Vietnamese language and culture.

Currently, I am the regional manager for WORKPLACEMENT (Business Response to Youth Unemployment), where I have mostly Vietnamese Australian clients.

My interest with the Vietnamese culture probably stemmed from the fact that I grew up in a predominantly Vietnamese community in Australian. Being here, I witnessed first-hand how my Vietnamese friends were wrongly perceived as criminals by the non-Asian population. Because of the racism my friends have to deal with here, it makes their adaptation that much more difficult (watch the movie "Romper Stomper" with Russell Crowe to get an idea of what I'm talking about).

I can't change the negative stereotypes out there, but I will do what I can to preserve justice in my community.

Anh Thu Hoang
I am a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. I received my doctorate from the University of Washington in Zoology researching the evolution of host-parasite relationships. Currently, I am looking at the effects of herbicides on sexual development of frogs. I have been looking for information on basic research on the environmental effects of Agent Orange on animal populations in Vietnam. If anyone has any information on this topic, please let me know.

Minh-Mai Hoang
I am a New York-based journalist and fiction writer who has lived in Hanoi and Johannesburg. My reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, The International Herald-Tribune, Time Magazine, The San Francisco Examiner, and Fox Online News. My commentaries have aired on KQED public radio. I am currently an editor at Ms. Magazine.

Que-Lam Huynh
I was born in Sai Gon and migrated to the U.S. with my mother at the age of 11. Before moving to Southern California for college, I spent 8 formative years in Arizona. During that period, I lived in a predominantly white community, had mostly African American and Latino friends, and made frequent visits to Viet Nam. These early experiences -- mostly interesting, sometimes confusing -- later spurred my interest in studying multiple identities. I am currently a doctoral candidate in social/personality psychology at the University of California, Riverside. I earned my B.A. in psychology with a minor in sociology at the University of San Diego in 2002, and I received my M.A. in psychology at California State University, Long Beach in 2004. My research interests include acculturation/enculturation theory and measurement, biculturalism, multiple identity negotiation, bicultural identity development, and cultural essentialism. Currently, my major research focus is on identifying the underlying processes and commonalities among biculturals of different American ethnic groups as they negotiate conflicting value systems, norms, and dual identities.

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Anh Đŕo Kolbe
Born outside Saigon, Vietnam, Anh Đŕo Kolbe came to the United States via New York City in 1972. She left two years later and grew up with her Greek and German parents in the Middle Eastern countries of Qatar and Oman, spending a good part of her childhood schooled in the British system. She came back to this country via Boston for college, but didn’t exploit her starving artist talents until after graduation. At the beginning of 2003, she returned to her motherland for the first time since my adoption almost thirty years ago and backpacked solo for two months around the beautiful country with camera in hand. She is currently working on a blog with two fellow Viet adoptees called Misplaced Baggage - http://misplacedbaggage.wordpress.com. For a sample of her personal portfolio, go to www.adkfoto.com.

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Tram Le
Tram Le co-founded Club O’ Noodles (CO’N) which is not only the first Vietnamese-American theater troupe in the U.S., but also a pioneering group within the Vietnamese community that experiments with modern performance including comedy, drama, and performance art. She was the Producing Artistic Director (1999-2001) and a key performer to the troupe from its inception in 1993 to the present. She has produced, written, performed, and/or hosted numerous CO’N productions. In 2002, as a Board member for the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA), she was Project Director and Curator for the multi-art exhibition, F.O.B: A MultiArt Show, an inspiring exhibit with 40 artists of different mediums challenging the different labels, including the pejorative word, “fob,” (fresh off the boat) that are put on Vietnamese artists. This introduced to the community a new way of not only looking at artists, but also artworks and questioning conventional notions of art. F.O.B. II: Art Speaks which she is co-curating will exhibit November 2008. In 2003, she spearheaded the first ever Vietnamese International Film Festival (ViFF). It was a successful event with thousands of people attending 8 days of screenings, workshops, symposiums, and galas to honor over 40 international filmmakers and their works. Tram completed her M.A. in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2007 and is currently the Asian Pacific Islander Arts Coordinator at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood.

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Angela-MinhTu D. Nguyen
Born and raised in Little Sai Gon, California, I didn't know that I wasn't in VN until I started school and was put in ESL. I remain a Southern Californian and a beach baby. College brought me down the coast to another Vietnamese community (Linda Vista, San Diego), where I majored in psychology and minored in Spanish, French, and art history at the University of San Diego. Fascinated with culture, I studied in Guadalajara, Mexico and pursued cultural psychology as a career. After college, I traveled up the coast to Little Phnom Penh, Long Beach, where I received a master's in industrial/organizational psychology (aka fancy word for business psychology) from California State University, Long Beach and worked as a diversity trainer and market researcher. Being farthest from the ocean ever, I currently live in a Taiwanese community (Rowland Heights) and am a PhD candidate in social/personality psychology at the University of California, Riverside. My research interests include acculturation, biculturalism, bilingualism, cultural frame-switching, and cultural sensitivity training, particularly as they pertain to second-generation ethnic minorities (www.biculturalism.ucr.edu). In my spare time, I volunteer as an organizational development consultant for Project MotiVATe: Mentoring Vietnamese American Teens (www.projectmotivate.org).

Christine (Lan Huong) Nguyen Lerios
I was born in Oakland, California, spent my childhood babbling in Vietnamese and singing folk songs, but lost a good chunk of it after learning English (via Sesame Street) and entering grade school. I studied Economics and Human Biology at Stanford University because I couldn't decide whether to go to business school or medical school. It turns out, I chose neither and chased the Internet and high-tech boom to Austin, Texas where I now reside with my wonderful (Greek, but if you have seen "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" you can see the cultural commonalities) husband and three cats. After a few years in tech, I took a sanity break and have been working for a non-profit museum. Currently though, my husband and I are taking some time off to travel, ponder the possibility of children, and plan our next career move. To visit our website, go to www.lerios.org

I have always been somewhat out-of-touch with my Vietnamese heritage, more out of laziness and lack of effort than anything else. Everything I have managed to retain of the language and culture, I owe to my mother. I also owe her a big "cam on" for introducing me to the Vietnamese Women's Forum. Through one of the emails from VWF, I managed to secure a temporary professor position for my husband at the Hanoi University of Technology where he will teach (while I soak up culture) in Spring 2004.

Mai Ly Newman
Born in Oakland, housed in the bougie straits of Kensington, running the mazeways of Richmond, Berkeley and El Cerrito, I decided it was getting too small and left for Vietnam in July of 1999. After clawing my way out of UC Berkeley with a degree in Asian studies, I worked for Le Ly Hayslip in Saigon, helping her start a new NGO. The best thing about Vietnam was the karaoke and hot soup at 2 in the morning. While there, I was featured on a segment for KRON News (channel 4 in the Bay); I'm known as the "Oaklandese" girl. But before I returned home from Vietnam, I stopped off in Kauai where I learned how to relax and started writing a novel. The main character is a half Vietnamese girl who moves to a town in Louisiana. Hope to finish it in a year.

Currently I am working for Wendy Tokuda at KRON and Bay TV, while learning how to make documentaries and other video delights. When I find the time, I travel, paint, photograph life and people, write poetry and short stories, dance both in the studio and the club. Although I can't get down with Vietnamese music, I believe Vietnamese food is the best cuisine on earth.

Khanh Hoan Ngo
I was born in Nha Trang in 1974. At the age of three my family left Vietnam fleeing in the dark of night on a boat heading towards the Philippines. For a year we lived in a refugee camp in Manila waiting to file papers to immigrate to the United States. In 1979 we re-united with my father who fled Vietnam before us and was living in Los Angeles. We lived there for 12 years before moving to San Gabriel Valley where my family currently resides. After attending UC Santa Cruz, I moved to the Bay Area and now live in Oakland, California.

I am the communications coordinator for a non-profit organization based in San Francisco. California Association of Human Relations Organization (CAHRO) is a statewide organization providing training, consultation and technical service to Human Relations Commissions and organizations working on issues of Hate Violence/Hate Crime, intergroup conflict, community-police relations and other human relations issues.

I volunteer with the Asian Women's Shelter in San Francisco where we provide multi-lingual, culturally sensitive services to battered women needing a safe space to transition into a healthier environment. I am also a member of Third Eye Movement, which has been actively organizing in the Bay Area around issues of police brutality and accountability, the criminalization of youth, and the prison industrial complex.

Anne Nguyen
I am currently a sophomore at Harvard University, where I am concentrating in International Relations with focus and emphasis on Southeast Asia. I was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and I have lived in Paris and London before moving to San Francisco. I have returned to Vietnam on several occasions to conduct research for my political endeavors and I also plan on returning to Vietnam to pursue a political career there. I have previously traveled with many nonprofit organizations and NGOs to Southeast Asia, Africa, and East Timor for various humanitarian projects. Currently, I am working with the Boston Refugee Youth Enrichment Organization, a nonprofit organization that cater to the specific needs of Vietnamese Youth in the Boston area.

Chi (Judy) Nguyen
My name is Chi (Judy) Luong. I am in my late 20s. I graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a bachelor degree in biological sciences. I am currently working as a research and drug product development scientist for a pharmaceutical company in Connecticut. I have been doing volunteer work since I was 14 years old. I started out as a candy striper for a local hospital for two years and then volunteered as an interpreter at 17 and 18 years old for the Vietnamese American Cultural Organization in NYC. I continued my philanthropic work throughout college and at my current occupation. Currently, I am participating in the Making Science Make Sense program where I would go around elementary schools to promote sciences. I am also affiliated with Lua Viet Youth Association (www.luaviet.org) in New Jersey. This group does a lot of fundraising to help with flood relief, medical missions, women health, orphanages, and schools in Vietnam. Volunteering plays a big part in my life. I strongly encourage everyone to make time to volunteer to help others. The reward is truly priceless.

Julia Huston Nguyen
I am a native of the south (born in Mississippi and raised in Tennessee). I got a BA in History and German studies at Mount Holyoke College in western Mass., which is where I met my husband. He lived in Mass. from the age of 3when the family arrived there from Vietnam (1975) until I dragged him down to Louisiana. Last year I completed my PhD in American history at Louisiana State University and this summer we'll be moving to Texas so I can begin a position as assistant professor in US history at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. We have two daughters - Truly (4) and Lily (2).

Ly-Huong Nguyen
Ten měnh lŕ Nguyen Ly-Huong. I'm a poetess, wing chun kung fu practioner, self-defense instructor (Ruckus Safety Awareness), API Force organizer, all-round rabble rouser who loves to write prosery & poetry, and when I remember a graduate student at UC Berkeley. API Force and VWF are partnering up to develop "Chuong trinh chi em"--a Vietnamese girls' leadership & empowerment program based in Oakland, CA.

Madison Nguyen
My name is Madison P. Nguyen. I am the first Vietnamese American woman elected official. As trustee, I serve on the board of the Franklin-McKinley School District. I am also a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My primary area of research and interests are community organization, nonprofit management, youth culture and development, deviance and delinguency, and class and identity. I am also one of the co-founders and executive director of a nonprofit organization called Vietnamese American Center (VAC). VAC is a 501(c)3 nonprofit community-based organization located in San Jose, a diverse ethnic and socioeconomic city of Santa Clara County, California. Founded in February of 2000, VAC provides Vietnamese traditional martial arts classes, homework center, parent/youth mediation program, individual and group counseling, cross-cultural/social adjustment workshops, leadership skills workshops, a Vietnamese radio program, truancy intervention services, and information and referral services to approximately well over 1,000 youth and their families in the bay area each year. For further information, please visit our website at www.vacsj.org

Mimi Nguyen
I am PhD. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. My dissertation work focuses on U.S. Vietnamese cultural production and the politics of diasporic citizenship. I also work on projects examining the politics of race and sex in reproductive rights discourse, sex-positive feminisms, digital technologies, riot grrrl, drag and other spaces of performance and performativity. Several of my essays are forthcoming in anthologies about race and technology and topographies of race and gender. I teach feminist and queer theory as well as cultural studies and can occasionally be goaded into delivering monologues on stage or performing in lo-fi queer guerilla pop music videos. I am also a columnist for Utne Readers, 2000 Best Zine, and Punk Planet. My writings on history, memory, and popular culture have also appeared in Maximumrocknroll, Poppolitics.com, and elsewhere. A disaffected grrrl punk rocker, I did a fanzine long before Newsweek discovered the cut-and-paste revolution and I continues to run with scissors and play with glue. www.worsethanqueer.com

Trang Nguyen
I was born and raised in Vung Tau, Vietnam until I was 12. My family was able to fly out of Vietnam in September 1989 because we were qualified to come to the US under the code of immigration authorized by the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) officials. We spent almost 6 months in a refugee camp in Bataan, Philippines (I had a lot of fun) before we arrived to Minneapolis, MN on March 23, 1990 (wow, it's amazing how I could remember the exact date).

So I have been living in Minneapolis since 1990. I am now 24 years old and currently working as an admissions counselor/recruiter for a small private college in Minneapolis. I also work with a lot of students of color around the Twin Cities area to encourage them of the opportunity for higher education. I love my job and I have a great passion for the field of Multicultural Education and Support. I received a B.A degree in Communication and East Asian Studies in 1999 from Augsburg College and I have gone back to Vietnam for 8 months in 1998 as a participant of a study abroad program organized by the School of International Training based in Saigon. I spent the first 4 months to do some academic works (taking classes at the University of Social Sciences in District 1) and also to travel from North to South of Vietnam and have interacted with people of different backgrounds (students, models, actors, prostitutes, child laborer, disable veterans, government officials, artist, expatriates, etc.). It was a fulfilling experience for me to learn more about Vietnamese culture, history, literature and more. It was also a self-searching experience to find my identity; to understand where I came from and to be proud of who I am. I could speak, read and write Vietnamese fluently but not professionally. However, I do have the ability to conduct and teach Vietnamese language to others. So I am hoping one day I could share my knowledge of the language with people who wants to learn.

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Nhu-Ngoc Ong
I am a Peltason Democracy Fellow and Ph. D. student in Political Science at University of California, Irvine. In 1999, I graduated with a B.A. in Psychology with minors in Music and Philosophy and in 2001, I graduated with an M.A. in Psychology as a President’s Scholar of California State University, Fullerton. In 2001, I went back to Vietnam for the first time in nine years to help conduct one of the first scientifically sampled, national surveys on social, economic, and political attitudes of the Vietnamese. My research interests include Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American politics as well as the democratization process in Asia. E-mail: nong@uci.edu. Project website: www.democ.uci.edu/archive/vietnam.htm

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Lien Shutt
I was born in Saigon. Adopted in 1973 at 8. I lived in Thailand and Egypt before ending up in North Dakota; from which, I'm still recovering. I moved to San Francisco in 1995. I studied Literature, Design and Illustration. I live for Visual Art: abstract, with lapses into representational or political. I've had some exposure with both, including publication in social work and Buddhist journals and in Once Upon A Dream: The Vietnamese American Experience. I currently am finishing my MSW. Since June, 2001, I've been in Vietnam (for the first time) and other parts of Asia. I'll roam Asia...as the winds carry me. I'm still looking for contacts and work in Vietnam so any help would be appreciated. lienshutt@hotmail.com.

Linh Thuy Song
I am the Executive Director of the Mam Non Organization, a non-profit based in Ann Arbor, Michigan that supports families adopting from Vietnam. Our goals are to introduce Vietnamese culture to adoptive families, develop race awareness resources, encourage adoption by Vietnamese families, and create ties between both adoption and Vietnamese-American communities. We accomplish this through cultural events, speaker panels, and online forums. More information can be found at www.mamnon.org. I welcome questions and the Vietnamese community involvement.

Personally, I am Vietnamese-American, born in the United States. I'm a product of the Midwest and as a consequence, am a fierce observer (scholar?) of race politics and issues. Currently I am pursuing my Masters in Social Work, focusing on social policy evaluation, particularly in the realm of international adoption policymaking and agreement implementation in Third World countries. I profess to be a devout geek having worked in the software industry prior to non-profit work, however maintain techie tendencies as co-administrator and VWF board member.

Xuan Nguyen Sutter
Born and raised in Vietnam, I became a refugee in 1975. For the last twenty five years, I have worked in refugee camps in South East Asia and with refugee communities in the US and Canada. I am presently the executive director of the Refugee Women's Network, Inc., a national organization of refugee women providing leadership and advocacy training to refugee and immigrant women. I have a Master in Business Administration from New York University and a Bachelor in Economics from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

The goals of the Refugee Women's Network, Inc. are to prepare refugee women with leadership skills and promote them in leadership roles locally, nationally and internationally. For more information, please see our web site www.riwn.org

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Caroline Kieu Linh Valverde
In 1998, along with Xuan Tran, I co-founded Viet Nam Women's Forum, a virtual community with over 300 women globally, www.vnwomensforum.org.

I am currently an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. I received an B.A. in Political Science and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. My teaching and research interests include Southeast Asian American history and contemporary issues, mixed race theory and Transnationalism. My most current publication looked at Vietnamese transnational popular music. http://asa.ucdavis.edu/

I have been working on a manuscript on Vietnamese American community-Viet Nam relations. I was a Rockefeller Fellow for Project Diaspora at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a Fulbright Fellow in Viet Nam. Beginning in the spring of 2004 I will be a Fellow at the Australian National University researching on the Vietnamese Diaspora and gender theory.

More information about my life and work can be found at: www.kieulinh.com

Linda Trinh Vo
I was born in Saigon and lived in Japan, India, Indonesia, and Belgium before moving to southern California in 1979. I earned my B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego. After a fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, I taught at Oberlin College and Washington State University before my current job as an assistant professor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine.

I have published on Asian American women, ethnographic practices, community studies, pan-Asian American mobilization, and Vietnamese Americans. I am working on my book manuscript on Asian American community organizing in San Diego and am working on a special issue of Amerasia Journal about Vietnamese Americans. I co-edited with Marian Sciachitano a special issue on Asian American women for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 21, 1 / 2, 2000 (includes poems by Lan Duong and Nhien T. Nguyen and an article about the Vietnamese American beauty pageant in Long Beach by Nhi T. Lieu). I am co-editing with Rick Bonus, Intersections and Divergences: Contemporary Asian American Communities (forthcoming, Temple University Press). I look forward to teaching a course titled Vietnamese American Women in winter 2001 and one on Southeast Asian Americans in spring 2001.

Asian American Studies Program, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-6900; (940) 824-3003 (office); (949) 824-3885 (fax); volt@uci.edu

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Indigo Williams Willing OAM (Thuy Thi Diep Huynh)
Who's an authentic Vietnamese? Is there such a thing as a real Vietnamese experience and story? When are the boundaries between Vietnam and other/Other blurred? I launched Adopted Vietnamese International (AVI) - www.adoptedvietnamese.org, an online project and cooperative based in Australia, in order to integrate the voices of individuals who are adopted from Vietnam into such discussions. I received a Medal in the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2006 in recognition of AVI's service to the community but would highlight that rather than being something individual, it is the public recognition of what an entirely unique, and dynamic community the adopted Vietnamese has now become.

I am also currently a doctoral student at The University of Queensland. My research interests include transnational families and sociological theories of migration. My thesis focuses on the experiences of Australian parents who have adopted children from overseas countries in Asia and Africa. My MA conducted at UTS, and previous work as a Rockefeller Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Massachusetts, Boston explored the construction of identity of adopted Vietnamese.

Brandy Worrall
I was born in 1975 in rural Pennsylvania, where my dad's family has been for at least six generations. I received my B.A. in English and French from Regis College (near Boston) and my M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA (2002). My thesis research focused on uncanny elements found in mixed race writing. I am currently Associate Editor of Amerasia Journal. I am trying to integrate more community-minded activities into my position. Currently, I am collaborating with long-time participants of my regular writers workshop to expand our mission and activities. Our workshop is called Wide Eyed, and we are currently taking applications for participation. I am also co-editor of a collection of works dedicated to API mixed-race writers called "Mixed Up." We are currently working on our last collection--due out this summer- called "All Mixed Up." (Our first book was “Mixed Up”, second was “Too Mixed Up”). The writings in the chapbooks reflect the regionally and culturally diverse nature of API mixed race individuals and issues. I have never been to Vietnam (though people ask me all the time if I ever "go back") but I hope that someday, my studies and my passions will take me there.

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