10 Things You Probably Didn't Know
1. Easy thing first. I was born and raised in Vietnam. My background and earlier life have nothing to do with where I am living now. I started to learn English in elementary school, because it was required. I swear, I only knew “Hello, how are you?” “I’m fine, thank you. And you?” Seriously, English was a nightmare until I was in 7th grade, when I actually started to care. I didn’t care about the language, I cared about my grade; I didn’t want my transcript to look bad just because of a language. So I studied. It was surprisingly easy. I was getting better everyday.
2. I never thought about leaving my city. I ended up being 7,000 miles away. I googled it, the distance between Hanoi, Vietnam and Pullman, Washington is 11,326 km or 7037.6501 miles.
3. I don’t have a U.S. citizenship, which means I’m studying abroad, I’m an international student. Yup, it’s just like people in the Murrow Backpack Journalism Program who went to Nepal, Guatemala or Greece last year. If you were on Terrell Mall last Wednesday for the Study Abroad Fair, you did the same thing I did four years ago.
4. I miss home a lots. I miss food and the vibes more than I miss my people. I chat with my friends and family almost daily. I video-call them almost weekly. But I can’t get to taste the taste of home. Vietnamese food in the U.S., especially in Pullman, is strange.
5. Moving to the U.S. was like, BOOM, everything changes. You probably understand the homesickness. Try escalate it to 7,000 miles, or 11-hour flight, 4-hour layover and 5-more-hour flight. I never lived apart from my family. I never washed my own clothes. I never lived in an English-speaking environment for more than 2 hours. And I never cooked anything except for instant noodle. Here I am today with cooking/baking being one of my hobbies, and having a food blog.
6. My other (and bigger) hobby is photography. I have a Canon 60D with just a kit and a fixed 50mm lenses. But I don’t use them so often anymore, because iPhone 7+ camera is amazing and light weighted. Right now, my phone has 5,916 pictures stored since 2012. I take graduation photos and have random photoshoot with my friends. Other than that, I take mostly landscape pictures. I use Instagram to showcase them, sometimes along with stories. Check out my feed, http://instagram.com/thisnoisymind.
This is a picture I took last year of Brittany Kreuger, a former student in Murrow College.
7. I went back to Vietnam every summer and had road trips with my family several times. I took so many pictures of every places I visit and along the way. I believe my photos are more realistic than most of them you can find on the internet. I will include them in my blog as much as possible. Gotta showcase the beauty of my home.
A picture I took on a road trip in Vietnam with my family last summer.
8. My home is a small country in the Southeast Asia. Vietnam is the international name. We spell it Việt Nam, with those accent marks and a space between two syllables. If you look at the map, find China, then look down south, then right next to the ocean, my home is there. Some people know China, but don’t know Vietnam, some never ever heard of Vietnam. That’s sad.
9. Vietnamese cuisine is the most popular in Washington state, according to HuffingtonPost. Vietnamese food is also well-known in California and Colorado. Pullman has a Vietnamese restaurant. Though it is not a good one, I'm still proud that Vietnamese food is popular enough to be in such a small town.
10. Popular as it is, but Vietnamese food in the U.S. is not what we actually eat in Vietnam. Our food smells like fish sauce almost all the time. We basically eat whatever provides nutritions, even snails, frogs or snakes, and we eat it to the guts. We don't throw away chicken gizzards, pig brains and fish heads; yes, we eat it all. Vietnamese food is sometimes too exotic that I can't even eat it. I usually joke that the world has two types of people, ones who love Vietnamese food and ones who love Americanized Vietnamese food.