Story

You have to have a story or else you are just a number wandering aimlessly … I realized this after school and working. You can create your own story from the problems you face, your trauma. You can not live aimlessly. You have to crave your own path.

My parents are Vietnamese people from the south (An Giang province: Sino-Vietnamese word: 安江, meaning “peaceful river.”) and grew up during the Vietnam War.

They are Vietnamese Boat People Refugees. They stayed in a refugee camp in Malaysia.

Were able to come to Canada in 1980. St. Marks United Church sponsored them: http://stmarkswhitby.ca/

I was lucky and had a suburban upbringing in Ajax, Ontario in the 1980s to early 2000s. I was born in 1984 in Oshawa.

I went to school at UTSC and learned about the city and the people there.

I thought I had to do health care for a typical life in Canada but I did poorly. I could not get good jobs in healthcare or sciences after school.

I could not process all the sciences and medical and science jargon daily. I did not understand health care goals. I did not understand the pursuit of sciences.

I went back to what I loved which was computers.

I did graphics, content creation, tech journalism, worked in repair and sales and finally did programming.

I met people in computers that I could socialize with and befriend.

After meeting Ben Cybulski everything changed. He created FreeTimeTech.com and then we did programming to create software.

Everything flourished after that.

Ben taught me life was doing what you like and keep on developing and developing.

When we started creating software products and got a good one and I was almost finished school in computer programming, I jumped online to talk to people of my background at my old university. I joined the Vietnamese Student Association Discord at University of Toronto.

I met Tammy Nguyen and she socialized with me.

I grew and grew and grew. I grew with her for years and years 2021 to now.

Then my mom told me later that she gave birth to me as a computer guy. Awkward …

So everything I am doing is because of ‘Mum’ mainly? She born each child different (4 kids) and then all of them went their way and came back … worked together and now we got this? Is this just a natural strategy by parents to prepare their children to live OK in the First World by birthing children that are different by my mum? and striving for independence and recognition with their own talents in wild, wild west survival.

I learned about all things Vietnamese from the Vietnam perspective to the Canadian one.

After finishing school and working a bit, I learned a lot of things.

I learned the world is vast. To work in the real world required extensive learning and experiences 10,000x over what you learned previously.

I grew and grew more and realized, things are much easier if you have programming or engineering.

I went into the world and saw how biased the world is sometimes. Then I started growing my own identity and learning more about being Vietnamese and grew my perspective as a Vietnamese-Canadian. This is on top of being just Canadian.

I never learned my Vietnamese culture and never had a solid understanding what it was like to be Vietnamese. I feel it is important to look at it and learn from it and develop it. You need an identity (sub-identity) to live by against the universal one. Your sub-identity is the one you feel at age 0 without the large big picture. How you feel daily as a minority in Canada. You bounce back and forth from small to big to get grounded.

The universal identity is that I am just a big SEA guy who did not do drugs and cycled.

The other identity is a mixed one. Vietnamese-Canadian who is trying to make sense with everything and trying to cycle.