Viet Thanh Nguyen Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/22/pulitzer-prize-fiction-viet-thanh-nguyen-the-sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen became the first Vietnamese-American to win the prestigious literary award and a $10,000 check.  He was born in Vietnam and grew up in San Jose.   He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1992 and received his Ph.D. in literature in 1997.  He is currently a professor at USC while his wife, Lan Duong, is an associate professor at UC Riverside.   His brother, Tung Thanh Nguyen, is a well known professor of medicine at UCSF.

The story he wrote, even though fiction, mirrors the many facets of Vietnamese people and their complex life in the Bay Area during the 1980s.   The unique thing about the Vietnamese-American diaspora is that they always look back to their homeland 3,000 miles away.   Their lives are interwoven with a driven zeal to action to help their homeland be freed of the current communist regime.

Thuy Nguyen Becomes the First Vietnamese-American Community College President

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2016/04/21/foothill-college-names-new-president

Just one additional note to the coverage, Thuy Nguyen is married to the first Vietnamese-American Superior Court Judge in the Bay Area.  He was the second Vietnamese-American to become a judge in the US.  The first was Wendy Duong in Houston in the early 1990s.

LSI had the opportunity to invite her to be a speaker at a conference in Oregon more than a decade ago and she was impressive then at that time as a young community activist and  leader as well as  an aide to then State Assemblywoman Wilma C.