Why I started The Baohouse
As a son of Vietnamese refugees, an engineer of multiple startups, and a loving husband and father of a baby girl, now living in California, I’ve wanted to document all the things I’ve learned about wealth management, community building, the Vietnamese and American cultures, and the social impact of technology.
A Life of Trials
My maternal grandparents arrived as refugees with their 7 children to the United States after South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. My grandfather’s first job in America was being a high school janitor in Indiana. His family moved to San Jose, California in 1980 because of their health in surviving snowy winters, which they were unaccustomed to, but also because they heard fellow Vietnamese friends were planning to move there.
In 1979, my father took a chance to leave Vietnam to Hong Kong, where he captained a motorized boat carrying about a hundred refugees. He had to leave his parents, brothers and sister behind. He would be among the 1 to 1.2 million boat people leaving Vietnam between 1975 to 1995; an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 boat people would perish at sea. While waiting in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, my father was quickly sponsored by his brother in America.
At first my father would crash on the couches of his brother and his friends while taking on odd-end jobs trying to make a living. In 1981, my parents met and got married. As they had nearly no money, their friends did a potluck party and lent their tuxedo and wedding dress. They lived together in a rented-out room at a house. I was born a year later, and three years after that, my brother was born. In 1987 they managed to buy a new house in San Jose. But a year later my parents divorced. I believe my father’s gambling habit ruined the marriage. From then on, I didn’t get to see my father much, perhaps a few times a year. He was working hard at an semiconductor engineering firm, and helped sponsor the rest of his family (my paternal grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins) from Vietnam. But when the semiconductor industry started becoming offshored, he lost his job, and survived on a meager income being a local Vietnamese radio show host and sleeping on the ground at the office.
Meanwhile my mother worked hard as a restaurant waitress. After school I would go to my maternal grandparents’ house, do my homework, and await for mom to pick me up and go home. I remember an episode as a kid where I went to Home Depot with my mother and brother, and as we were about to leave, staff came up to us and escorted us to their backroom. They accused her of shoplifting some faucet connectors for garden hoses, the most petty crime imaginable. When all the kids had video games, I would ask for a Nintendo Entertainment System, but she would rebuff and say no. Over time her career did improve, as she joined a semiconductor company to be part of their quality control team. But as a working single mom, along with my rather shy personality, I didn’t talk with her much. Looking back, my mother’s side of the family had some wins. My youngest aunt graduated from UC Berkeley. But we also had struggles, such as two of my uncles living with my grandparents and growing up to become hoarders.
Thus, I didn’t have too much in the way of mentors or role models. I did a lot of figuring things out on my own as a kid, although my mother did put me through Vietnamese Catholic school, taekwondo martial arts, and swimming, to try to keep me engaged and healthy. I went to UCLA to study Computer Science & Engineering in 2000. But after 3 years, I dropped out due to having to deal with depression for the first time in my life. I moved back to San Jose and lived with my mom, struggling with odd-end jobs and attending community college to try to transfer back to a four-year university. I also volunteered within the Vietnamese American student community, making friends, building organizations, and leading projects. But I was lost, unfocused, and my income level put me in the poverty status.
My first break in my career development would be 2016, where I honed my programming skills, and in 2017, I could confidently say I was no longer relying on my mother’s charity and becoming financially self-sufficient. The year after I joined my friend to start a fintech startup company. In 2021, I bought my house in Sacramento and married my wife. I restored my broken relationship with my father after being estranged for 20 years. And this year, my baby daughter was born.
There’s a lot of stories within my family that I could share for days, but the point I want to make is that in this environment of constant trials growing up within a refugee family adjusting to a new language and culture, I learned a lot of lessons about surviving that I’m only now appreciating now that I’m older, have my own family, and have a chance to reflect on how my family did it.
Philanthropy, Community
I went to San Jose one weekend to catch up with many Vietnamese American friends one-on-one, some of whom I’ve not spoken to for years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the short amount of time, I have a tendency to cut straight into topics that mattered. Are you happy? How is your family? What have you been up to? Why are you involved in this project/startup/charity? Usually they ask me first, and I was just honest, in a way that I felt triumph in having a baby daughter, but also challenges with assuming the duties to help care for my mother-in-law who has no retirement funds and depends on public assistance. I no longer believed in projecting a façade of only success. I enjoy just being human, the ebb and flow of victories and struggles. And when my friends responded, they immediately dropped their guard and did the same. They spoke of wins of getting past the pandemic; of moving to San Jose; of having children. But at the same time, they shared stories of struggle: of feeling like living in a rat race and having no way to respond to family pressure of buying real estate; of nearly dying at childbirth and potentially leaving her child motherless; of working so hard as to burnout and miss out on her son growing up; of arguing with parents and soon-to-be-in-laws on excess wedding spending; of trying to make ends meet after the spouse poured their life savings into a startup venture. Some of the conversations produced bittersweet tears, ending in a smile after affirming their courageous sharing.
I thought, as much as I wanted to give advice, it bothered me to give unsolicited advice. Because I believe that advice only works if there is a sense of support and accountability. I knew what it was like to hear from “wise sages” at seminars, then going home trying to apply their theories only to struggle. I came home processing all the conversations I’ve had, especially reflecting on the root cause of their anxiety and powerlessness. And I concluded that they all had to deal with financial literacy, decision optimization, and personal/family leadership. These themes reveal a thought process I can sense among my friends:
Is this the life I want? What are some alternatives, and what would they look like? What life goals could I fit within my finance projections? If I moved elsewhere, how would that affect my “life goals capacity”? What would I need to change in my life to make my life goals work?
Of the possible lifestyle choices, how can I manage feedback from friends and family? How can I communicate these choices with them effectively so that I don’t feel like battling to defend my choice and risk fraying the relationship? Better yet, how can I have them fully invested in my choice?
How can I move forward with a choice, be realistic about it and at peace with it, and not get into analysis paralysis, second guessing, or be bothered by negative feedback?
How can I execute on my plan, and feel in control of my well-being? How can I reduce the impact of bumps on the road? How can I tweak my goals when unexpected events happen?
How can I spread the good practices that I’ve learned, especially to children and the next generation?
Thus, to help my many friends, what I needed was a framework for advocacy, to direct them towards utilizing services and developing healthy practices as part of their lifestyle and decision-making. What I wanted to do was to pull in the wisdom from various experts from different fields to create recommendations for product developers, program managers, and parents/educators, to steer them into more effective ways of advocating wealth management practices within the Vietnamese American community. This blog is a journal of all my thoughts concerning wealth management, culture, and community building.
A woman asked me, sometime in 2009, Why are you so interested in the Vietnamese community? I didn't have an answer back then. But last year, I saw this photograph by artist Boone Nguyen of Philadelphia who captured it at a bomb-made pond in Vietnam. I can now answer her:
curious to know
how beautiful lotus grow
where bomb shells once blow
The lotus flower is a popular symbol in Vietnamese culture representing optimism, because the lotus grows out of mud, which represents overcoming darkness. And so, I live by this quote by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, pioneer in near-death studies, and author of On Death and Dying (1969):
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.