Dustin Kelley: Hello, my name is Dustin Kelley and I am joined by my colleague, Dr. E.J. Carter, and today is June 2nd, 2021. We are speaking with Tatiana Mac via Zoom. We’ll go ahead and get started by saying welcome, Tatiana. Would you begin by stating your name and telling us a little bit about yourself?
Tatiana Mac: Hello, thank you for having me. My name is Tatiana Mac and I use They and She pronouns. I am Portland born and raised, and I am Vietnamese American. I am first-generation, my parents emigrated here before I was born, and I definitely consider myself a part of the Portland Vietnamese diaspora. In the day-to-day, I am a software engineer, and I try to focus on accessibility and inclusion for ethical products.
DK: Thank you, Tatiana. You mentioned having been a life-long Portlander-- what neighborhoods have you lived in throughout your time in the city?
TM: Yeah, I grew up in Southeast, like Belmont area, and then I went to school out in the suburbs which I know a lot of people do not count as Portland, especially if you talk to people that grew up in the city proper. They will ask you what high school you went to, and if you did not go to one of the high schools they consider part of the city, then you’re not a Portlander. But, that aside, I grew up basically, like I said, in Southeast. My parents had a small business out there and went to high school out in Hillsboro.
DK: What was your childhood like?
TM: Pretty rough-- growing in a predominantly White city where the only other kids of color were primarily Latine kids, many of which were segregated into-- I do not like this term, but what it was called was ESL or ELL programs. It was pretty lonely, kids were pretty mean about anything I did that felt different from what they were used to. Being in Hillsboro, we were somewhat segregated from a lot of the Vietnamese community in my mind. Especially in the time I was growing up, Sandy [Boulevard] was very much a hub for a lot of Vietnamese culture, so when I started going to school, a lot of that time around people that looked like me shifted quite a bit.
DK: Can you tell us a little bit about your family?
TM: Yeah, so, the thing that is difficult about talking about my family is my parents are very private about a lot of what has happened to them. But I know they knew each other in Vietnam-- I am an only child -- and they got married here about a year before I was born. But they had been here since their teens and twenties, essentially.
DK: So you mentioned in your introduction that you feel a connection to Portland's Vietnamese community. Can you talk a little bit about what that connection looks like?
TM: I think that there is... maybe connection is a strong word because it kind of implies that I feel that I am part of the community. But I think what’s difficult about being first-gen is that we are really pressed to assimilate, not only by society but by our parents, because they want us to have opportunities they did not have. My parents were really good about making sure that I spoke Vietnamese and that I could speak to my grandparents and I could interact with a lot of my family members. But a lot of other first-gen friends that I talk to don’t actually know Vietnamese.
[00:05:00]
TM: I was not born in Vietnam, but a lot of them were-- I guess that kind of makes them not first-gen, but anyway, third culture kids, regardless-- they lose the Vietnamese language because they are forced to by assimilation. I think my connection is much more through memories of going to Vietnamese grocery stores and having access to various fruits and vegetables and prepared foods. So growing much food is a huge anchor of community. I know for a lot of folks, religion is another way in which they connect to their Vietnamese community, not necessarily for my family since my parents have very different faiths. I guess that is my connection.
DK: You mentioned visiting different grocery stores and other establishments-- what are some of the names of those establishments that you visited?
TM: Gosh, I don’t remember. Even growing up I do not think if you would ask me I would remember, because my mom never called them what they were actually called. It would just be like “the store owner’s name” and then [laughs], you know, “the one in Beaverton,” or “the one in Hillsboro,” “the one on Sandy,” or “the one on Eighty-Second,” and so it was much more like it is “so and so store.” But I definitely remember a lot of the grocery stores out Sandy that I don’t think exist anymore, kind of where Rose Way is at this point, as well as the ones on 82nd. But I do not think I could tell you what any of them were called, at any point.
DK: You mentioned the importance in your family of speaking the Vietnamese language and that was a way you were able to find a connection. Was there any sort of formal language education, or spending time either with a Vietnamese language school, or with a family member?
TM: No, I did not have any sort of formalized education. I can read and write alright, but I definitely am someone who-- I know linguists have a term for this, I do not remember-- but essentially, can speak it and understand it, but reading and writing is much more difficult for me because I never practiced that side of it. I primarily only really comprehend things auditorily. I think that part of that lack of religion plays into that, because a lot of my friends received formal Vietnamese education through Bible study groups and things like that, and I did not have that. My parents also were both self-employed and either in business and so they did their best, so having time to teach me Vietnamese was not really a thing.
DK: Would you be willing to talk a little bit about the different religions you might have been exposed to or different organizations you may have been part of as a child?
TM: Yeah, my parents did not force any sort of religion upon me as a kid, but from what I understand of my family background, I know my grandma practiced a lot of Buddhist traditions, and then on my dad's side there are some people with Baptist faith. I think that is a huge reason why religion was not a very dominant part of my upbringing. Religion was not a primary part of their relationship for them as individuals, so they did not raise me with a specific religion.
DK: Growing up were there people in your life who really wanted to encourage you to learn about Vietnamese cultural tradition? And if so, what did that look like?
TM: I would say my parents and my mom, in particular, did a really great job at exposing me to Vietnamese culture because otherwise I did not really have a ton of people. When I was a child, my mom's older sister was around and my maternal grandparents lived very close to us and so I was exposed to Vietnamese culture through them. But I felt more exposure through learning throughout osmosis rather than through intentional teaching.
[00:10:00]
TM: My mom would teach me certain things I guess, but I think because our extended family was so fractured-- my grandma had like thirteen children, my maternal grandma-- the age range was really wide in my mom's family and everyone is kind of dispersed. I think that impacted being around a small nucleated group of Vietnamese people for me, which is predominantly my parents, my grandparents, a couple of aunts and uncles.
DK: Thanks, Tatiana. I think we will go ahead and switch to ask you some questions about your career and how that came about. E.J., do you want to jump in?
E.J. Carter: Sure... from one of your presentations online, it sounded like you studied journalism in college. Could you talk about how you first got interested in journalism?
TM: Yeah, so I did not major in journalism but I certainly was really active in our university paper. I got started in journalism in high school. We had a journalism program at the time, it was really great. Our advisor got us connected to a man named Dave Austin who was a reporter at The Oregonian for many years, and he was one of the teachers at the University of Oregon High School Minority Journalism Workshop-- which is a mouthful [laughs] -- and so that was the first thing I ever did that was just for kids of color. That was like the first time I had really been around just other kids that look like me. There were other Vietnamese kids, there were Black kids, there were native kids, there were Latine kids, and we all went down to the University of Oregon and stayed in-- I think the worst room dorm in the United States has been at U of O-- and we spent a week reporting on basically racial inequity. That was in 2003 or 2002, so long before the world we are in today. Specifically the first story I remember writing that went into that paper was-- the story I got, I remember being bitter about it because other people got human-interest stories, just interesting people of color in the Eugene community-- and the story I got was about renaming the street [laughs]. Thinking back now I am laughing at my childhood self-- the story I got was about… I do not remember the name of the street so I will have to look it up, but it is a street where Autzen Stadium is on and they were renaming it to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and it was a very controversial decision. I remember not really understanding why. And so it was a very interesting story to report on. I remember Dave, when I kind of complained to Dave as a very entitled fifteen-year-old or so, “Dave, you didn’t give me the good story, you gave me the boring street name story,” and he was like, “It’s on you as a journalist to find an interesting story.”
So through doing that and I really learned a lot as a high schooler about the many ways in which racial inequity shows up, and talking to various communities members like activists, Black activists in my community, versus a white Mercedes Benz dealer manager, you know, [laughs] and him thinking so deeply like, “This is going to mess up the GPSs in these Mercedes Benzs” [laughs]. Just the dichotomy of a lot of the conversations I had were really interesting. So, that’s how I got into journalism. I loved it. It taught me so much and still until this day is one of the most impactful things I ever did. It allowed me to take over my high school newspaper, redesign it, or redesign my college paper, and I think it taught me a lot about how to see the world, and how to follow the money and to follow the story.
[00:15:00]
EC: You continued working on the student paper when you were in college?
TM: I did.
EC: What were some of the stories that you wrote about in college?
TM: In college, I didn’t do as much writing. I am trying to think of pieces that I wrote. I remember interviewing a New York Times journalist, Philip Taubman, who is pretty critical to the reporting around-- now I’m forgetting all the details-- what are the two super important journalists, I am sorry, my brain is not working today.... the ones who reported on Deep Throat...
EC: Oh, Woodward and Bernstein?
TM: Yes, if I recall correctly he was very pivotal in recording around that, and I remember being so nervous interviewing him because you are basically interviewing someone who does this for a living. And I was a college journalist at a small town paper. He was speaking at our campus. I mostly took on the most boring new stories which is kind of ironic given how much of a hard time I gave to Dave. But primarily, my contribution to the paper was serving on the editorial board as well as being a production manager, and leading the design team.
EC: And you majored in something else entirely? Was that software engineering?
TM: No, my background is a mess. I majored in Mathematics and Environmental Studies.
EC: What drew you to those fields?
TM: You know, by the time I was in my second semester-- so I came into my freshman advising meeting with a color coded spreadsheet that told my advisor how I plan to triple major. I also wanted to be an Art History major so I had color coded the spreadsheet and he just laughed at me because he was like, “I know that you used the course catalog for this, but half of these courses won’t be available...this is so tight.” I also wanted to study abroad so basically an entire semester was swept, so I got laughed at, but I came pretty close to triple majoring. I was only a few credits short for Art History. When I started university, I think I wanted to be-- I left high school wanting to be an environmental lawyer and then I realized that environmental law was also largely corporate law and fighting corporations, and then I did a job shadow with a corporate lawyer where I realized her entire job was being at a desk and reading thousands of papers a day. That just did not seem great. But, I loved the program, I loved my professors. I did not have a single bad professor in my program which is very unheard of, and the program was just really immersive. Kind of like journalism, I just enjoyed it. I enjoyed that they had cross-cultural learning, where one of the courses I had was an economics professor and a chemistry professor, and them talking about the impact of different environmental policies and understanding that from a very fundamental chemical level, and then understanding the social impact. It was a brilliant course. In college I really took courses from professors that I thought were cool and hobbled together my majors [laughs].
EC: It sounds like you graduated right in the midst of the recession in 2008?
TM: Sure did. So I got two useless degrees in the 2008 economic [crisis]. I was actually thinking about how age is arbitrary and years, that is weird, and I know that in the Nordic culture they will count people by the winters they survived. In my mind, I was like, “Oh well, in a Capitalist society I could count my age based on the number of recessions I survived,” and I think that technically I’ve gone through four American recessions.
EC: So, what kind of jobs did you look for?
[00:19:57]
TM: What I did was, when I graduated, recognizing that unless I wanted to teach Environmental Mathematics, and try to get a PhD, that I had really no job prospects based on the degrees I earned. I relied on my design skills which I acquired from-- so, my parents’ business, for context, was pre-press business. That doesn’t really exist anymore, but my dad was very physical when they had it. You were like cutting film, pasting it, you had a camera, that was a very manual process. In my childhood that all became digitized with desktop publishing tools, and so my dad had to go back to school, so he went to the U of O Continuation Center in Southwest Portland, at the White Stag Building. I just went with him because my mom was then having to work multiple jobs-- she’s an interpreter-- so she was just working all the time. My parents left me at home a lot. I am a Millennial by age but I was very much a latchkey kid. I basically went to school with my dad. Professors were like “Well, you can follow along if you want,” and that is how I learned Photoshop and Corel Draw and all of those desktop publishing programs.
So I always had that design skill. My dad would hire me over the summer to do very boring production design work when I was like twelve, thirteen. [He] definitely underpaid me, or not at all a lot of the time. But anyway, those skills transferred into what I did for my high school paper, and then my college paper. I remember designing a poster for a friend for her senior flute recital and her flute professor saw it and asked me if I did design work. So I did press kits for her and then she connected me with other people and when I graduated in 2008 I just emailed those contacts, I emailed everyone I knew and sent them a customized note that was like “Hi, I’m looking for work, I’ll do whatever.” And that is how I taught myself a lot of web design and development and just kind of did it.
I am sure I messed up a lot of stuff. I almost got sued twice, but that’s how I started in that realm. I worked at an agency, I started my own studio in my early twenties, I had a business partner-- he left-- had another business partner. We grew our business and ultimately we decided that we wanted to go back to working full time. I worked full time in an agency for five years. I grew a team from two designers to twenty five other developers, engineers, content strategists, content people, and designers. And then I was really burnt out. In 2017, I had been working at that company for five years, really long hours, really stressful work, and it was all very capitalistic. I decided to just quit my job, pack up everything into storage, and then just traveled for four months living off credit cards and savings. I came back after four months and just continued to keep working independently for various companies. Then this last year, I made this switch from design work to engineering.
EC: What made you decide to make that switch?
TM: I think that with design work, a huge portion of it is playing the politics of your audience. I didn not particularly enjoy that part. I enjoy politics in a different lens, and with software engineering I like bringing the concept from design into real life and then figuring out how do we actually take your vision and make it into something tangible. And then how do we make it work, like browsers, devices, assistive technologies, they’re all kinds of trash and they all work differently. You have this one image that the designer has created for you in this perfect vacuum, and I like the challenge of taking that into reality, stress testing it, and making it come alive.
EC: It sounds like your work has this really interesting combination of technology and activism. How did you get interested in that combination?
[00:25:32]
TM: I think it is funny because this is a fight I get into and tackle a lot, and if you go to any talks I give of anything I write I get-- not as much anymore, I do not know if people are afraid of me or they are over me but I get a barrage of comments from tech bros who are like, “This isn’t a true tech talk, this is not about tech at all, this is social justice warrior stuff.” I think it is interesting because technology was created by and for people. If we want to believe that the clear way in which 2001 Space Odyssey-- I do not know if you both have seen that movie, I try not to make too many movie references because it is unclear when you have not-- the moment when the monkeys use a tool and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” starts playing, that is the moment when technology was created more or less. The idea that we parse technology from people, which is who we make technology for-- technology only improves the lives of humans for the most part-- so to parse those two things is just comical to me. I can’t give it a lot of weight. I guess in many ways yes, I am an activist, but in many ways I’m also just being a good technologist. I think that that should be a core requirement of being a technologist-- is seeing how it impacts the people you are purporting to help.
EC: It sounds like you are really immersed in the work of people like Bell Hooks and James Baldwin, is that something you were always interested in going back to college, or are those more recent interests?
TM: No, I went to a very White college, I went to Willamette University. I always laugh when you think about the African American Studies program or the Women’s Studies program that are White men teaching these topics. It is not to say that they are not great professors but it kind of illustrates the Whiteness at play. I also did not do a very good job of taking classes in the African American Studies department-- which I also think is funny that it is called African American Studies-- but not taking any of those courses in college, I was not exposed to my other lit classes too much writing by Black authors and activists, and it is not something I really started to do until a few years ago. I would say I was in my early thirties-- I am thirty five now, so I would say somewhere around when I turned thirty I was like, “Oh, I am having a racial awakening, essentially.”
EC: And when did you start giving talks and presentations?
TM: My very first big talk was in April, 2019. I wrote six talks that year which I would not recommend to anyone and I think it was something ridiculous. I did like twenty three talks in sixteen cities across nine countries and four continents. It was something absurd to do in a year for someone who doesn’t do that for my main part of my job, but I was supposed to speak even more this past year and we all know what happened so there were not many speaking events.
EC: What are some of the challenges and satisfactions you have encountered in speaking?
[00:29:53]
TM: The satisfaction I think, is in having people come up to me. I will never forget one of the first talks I gave, a very small talk in St. Louis, someone came up to me and said it was the first time they had seen a designer talk about non binary people and about pronouns in their talk, and that they felt seen as a non binary person and that it kind of kept them going because I think that they had been struggling working in a field that erases them. So those are the types of things, when people who are from ignored communities come up to me and tell me they feel seen. The stuff that is not fun to deal with is trolling comments. The first talk I gave in April 2019 is called “How Privilege Defines Performance.” Someone wrote a nineteen paragraph email within five minutes of me finishing my talk. Thinking from a personal standpoint, this is like a monumental thing to me, I just gave a talk in front of hundreds of people, the first time I have ever done that, the first time giving this talk and I open my email getting a nineteen paragraph email telling me I am a horrible person, that I should not be allowed to speak again, the conference organizers should ban me, I am a nasty Socialist, and the email went on and on and on. That is kind of the price that I pay. I also had a huge online situation after one of my talks in April 2019 that sent me into a deep depressive spiral, I got hundreds of death threats via email, DMs from people because I was calling attention to White supremacy in Tech. I was written about-- and I am not saying this boastfully but more so to paint the scale of things-- I was written about it in like Vice, Business Insider, and all these publications for this. It resulted in a lot of online abuse and a lot of death threats.
EC: Are there not other people in the tech world making these points or these arguments?
TM: There are, and they get death threats too.
EC: Oh, really. Wow. Dustin, do you want to take the next set of questions?
DK: Yes, before we shift gears, I am sorry you had to experience that. How prevalent has that been? It sounds like these are semi common experiences.
TM: I am pretty aggressive about blocking and shutting down DMs in general now. On Twitter I no longer allow DMs, but people would always email. They will track down my email address-- not that it is that hard, but to take the effort to track down my email address to send me an email to tell me to kill myself-- and I should have given you a content warning before I said that, I am sorry. It does not happen that often now, but that time period between August and November of 2019 was probably the most morose I have been in one of the three worst memories and time periods of my life. Kind of like I alluded to earlier-- I feel like some of it has been lessened post-BLM, and in many ways worse. Definitely not worse for me because I have a lot of privilege as a Vietnamese American in that regard.
DK: I am curious how you think about the word “community,” and what is community to you?
TM: I think community is when you have the trust to depend on someone other than yourself.
DK: I am curious also, being a lifelong Portlander, when have you felt most at home in this city and also what you like the most about your city and your community?
[00:34:47]
TM: I think connecting with folks of color in the community. [...] Portland gets billed a lot as the Whitest city in America, and I understand that because especially given how many days we have been endlessly protesting. I get it, and also it is really challenging to read that because am I not part of Portland? And I am not White. And so to say that it is the whitest city in America erases all the people of color here. I feel that the times where I love living here, like the other day-- I just moved in, driving through my new neighborhood, I saw this one person standing on the street and they had a sign that said “Indigenous Solidarity for Black Lives'' and we honked at them, and it was just a nice moment, because I think that solidarity is really important. There is so much focus amongst allyship from majoritized and centered people, but what gives me far more rejuvenation and feeling a sense of community is when you do see those moments of solidarity between other communities impacted by systems of oppression. Like Black people who showed up when the Atlanta attacks occurred-- everyone was like “Stop Asian Hate.” Indigenous communities, Black communities and Latine communities showing up for one another. That is when I feel the most part of a community.
DK: Would you be willing to talk about any challenges that you have faced in Portland?
TM: I think that Portland is one of the hardest places-- and I say this not in a monolithic sense, but anecdotally from other friends, especially BIPOC friends-- it is one of the hardest places to live in the sense that overt racism is something much easier to deal with. If you have someone calling you a racial slur, you go somewhere that is more comfortable being overtly racist and not even far... like leaving Portland city limits. I am terrified when I drive to the beach and I have to go through Tillamook and stuff and there are signs that make it very clear that people that look like me are not welcome. I think that it is really difficult to deal with the Neoliberalism and walking around and seeing all these signs that are like, “We support you regardless of your orientation, your ethnicity, your immigration status, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But the posturing sort of ends... a lot of people, whether because they do not know how or they do not care, it does not really matter, to actually affect meaningful change for those communities. They like the idea of seeing people of color in their neighborhoods as they are gentrifying it and they get mad by the gentrification. They are like “Oh, the culture is going away.” I do not know if that makes sense. It is not something that is unique to Portland, I have a lot of friends who live in Brooklyn who have experienced similar things. There is a lot of, “If we all just got along,” a lot of “both-sides-ism,” and a wanting to keep things “nice.”
[00:40:13]
This is sort of unrelated, but I remember a friend posted something-- I am paraphrasing here-- this friend lives in Seattle and posted something about how essentially West Coasters are nice but East Coasters are kind. I think, as anything that is a universal statement where people get mad. The Tweet got viral and the stories that I read, I mean some of them I was crying because they were just so accurate. One person told a story of how in Pennsylvania, they were carrying this very heavy box, this person was like “Hey, you!” I want to say it was in Philly-- they were like, “Hey, you, with the box, where are you going?” And they were kind of being direct and assertive. And the person told them and they were like, “Give it to me,” and they carried the box and helped them get on their merry way. And here, someone in the contrast told a story of how they were carrying a heavy box and someone walked by and they were like, “That sucks, good luck.” Another contrast was at the grocery store-- in New York someone's card gets declined, the person behind them is just like, “I’ll just buy their groceries,” because they want to move on with their day, they are not necessarily doing it to be a feel good moment. They are like “I want to go, and I can afford to pay for groceries so I’m going to pay for them.” But here, someone told the story of how someone's card was declined and the person behind them was like, “It happens to all of us.” I think that those little anecdotes say so much. Again, yes, of course they are blanket statements so caveats ensue, but that is very much in line with my experience. Portlanders are much more concerned of being nice than they are kind. Kindness requires a directness that I think that the current culture that we have now doesn’t lend itself to. I think a lot of the migrations that have happened to Portland have shifted our culture of directness. I think growing up, I think Portland used to be more direct and I have noticed it has become less culturally direct, and I do attribute a lot of that to cultural migration.
DK: In your mind, what role does being Vietnamese American play in your life?
TM: I mean it is the underlying part of everything I do, especially when you parse through the many facets of it. Being the children of immigrants I think is a unique experience. I connected with a lot of friends whose parents are from the Caribbean, or they are from Africa, or even white European friends. Being a child of immigrants is a distinct experience. I was laughing about-- like saving bags is a weird thing that I do and I get that from my parents. I have a horrible bag-- I am pretty much a minimalist in many areas except bags. I hate throwing it away especially if it's like a nice bag. I am like, “I might need that nice bag,” and washing Ziploc bags. There is just weird stuff that you do that’s small. But then also the erasure is really compounding. They see me and they see an Asian American but they are ignoring hundreds of years of imperialism and colonization of the different hierarchies even within the subgroups of Asians. Cultures like East Asians have much more systemic power over everyone else and I think it is a part of my life in a very profound way, but the ways that I tend to notice the most are very small. Like how there are a lot of words for things that we do not use the Vietnamese term, we use the French term. Like a tie is a “cravat,” and growing up my mom would call the closet the “armoire.”
[00:45:15]
TM: There are just weird little ways that I think I am reminded about my cultural history in the context of French colonization. Thinking about how messed up language is, like when we talk about writing, it is absurd that there are so many diacritic marks and the only reason there are, is because it used to be a character language derived from Chinese, and then when the Portuguese came they wanted to able to translate it so they created the Portuguese-Vietnamese dictionary. The French came and they were like, “Well, we really want you to be Catholic like us,” so they basically destroyed a lot of historical Vietnamse texts that were written in the character-based language, so then we were stuck with this Roman language that is pretty difficult to write. There are probably languages that use Roman characters that are tonal, but it’s an absurd amount of diacritic marks, and it makes it difficult to learn to write, and that is because of colonization.
DK: What are some differences that you see between older and younger generations of Vietnamese Americans?
TM: I think one of the biggest, most difficult things to reconcile with my own parents and my friends' parents and with the people who immigrated here is the model minority myth works very well on the people who immigrated here-- because to them, they are comparing America to their experiences in Vietnam which was under war, under Communism, and under a lot of duress that I will never understand. As a result, the minority model myth works on them because they were taught to believe that they succeeded because of their hard work, when that was not the entire picture, and that’s not to discount the extreme hard work that all immigrants-- especially Vietnamese immigrants-- go through in order to succeed here. But that Vietnamese immigrants who came here in the sixties and seventies are now speaking out against immigration policies. I watched this heartbreaking video that was set in Texas, a lot of Texas Vietnamese immigrants were like, “I had to work hard, so you do too, I was able to do it.” What they are missing, part of not knowing the history of model minority myth, is there were actual policy changes that allowed us to make the progress we have that’s historically kept back Black, Native, and Latine communities. That is the fundamentally hardest thing to reconcile, I see that as someone who was born here and maybe thusly much more willing to be critical of American policy, but it causes a generational and ethical rift between your own parents. They chose to come here because they felt it would be better for them and for me, before I existed, and here I am [laughs] Like, is it better? There’s no right answer. They made the best decision they could with the information they had, and I’m making the best decisions I can with the information I have.
DK: We are coming to the end of our time together. I am curious if there is anything we have not asked about that you were hoping we discussed, or anything from your story that you want to add.
TM: I think the thing we didn not get to talk about which I would love to share information about is a colleague and friend-- he has a food cart called Matta-- so he is also a first-gen but he was born and raised in the San Jose area. He and I have had very rich conversations about food culture and about diaspora food versus Vietnamese proper food and then the whitewashing of Vietnamese food by Portland chefs. That is more than we can cover in one minute but that is one of the topics I think about a lot.
[00:50:26]
DK: Well, thank you again for joining us today and sharing so candidly about your own story, your career evolution, and your thoughts on the community at large. We really appreciate your time.
TM: Thank you for having me.
DK: Again, this has been Dustin Kelley and E.J. Carter chatting with Tatiana Mac on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021 via Zoom.
TM: Thank you.