It's New Orleans: VietNOLA itsneworleans.com

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.
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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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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".See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vietnamese Motorbike Culture from Head to HeelsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.