Blooming in the muddy depths of the Mekong Delta, lotus flowers — the national flower of Vietnam — represent the strength of a people born from hardship. At night, the flowers close and sinks underwater, only to rise and open again come morning. The renowned pink flowers, blooming all across the country by mid-summer, symbolize hope and optimism through another night for a people raised under occupation, persecution, and execution.
Welcome to “From Dirt, Grow Lotuses,” a new monthly column diving into the complexities of our Little Saigon neighborhood. My name is Tony Ngo, and I’m a rookie journalist with, at times, too much excitement for my editor (she gets a lot of emails at 4 a.m). I’m young — turning 25 this coming spring — but as you’ll hopefully see as we get to know each other, the youth behind my ideas (and legs) lay the foundation for my storytelling.
I’m many things: first-generation, a photographer, an aspiring data scientist, and a believer that bún bò huế is the king of Vietnamese soups. Yes, over phó. But perhaps most importantly as it relates to this column, I’m a bit of a different writer than you might be used to.
What informs the direction of my work is exploring where the intersections of compelling research, data, and history (I love history — my 10th grade history teacher, at whom I threw a small textbook’s worth of papers once, might take some comfort in this) overlap with the powerful, moving, and inspiring stories of everyday people.
I aim to do this in a style of factual literary writing, inspired by some of my favorite journalistic magazines and book writers, with a heavy focus on moving ideas, narratives, and characters. I find this way of writing allows me to go deeper on issues, creating depth and nuance, and potentially, to make you, the reader, feel something.
Substance-wise, I am responsible for presenting to you a rigorously reported, researched, and fact-checked argument every month. I’m not here to cast stones. I offer my voice so we can have difficult conversations, not to divide us further.
Though my work in the IE will cover serious subject matters, I hate the formal title “investigative journalist” because I find that solely fixating on harm suggests a faulty sense of purpose and moral superiority. I’ve been there. I prefer just “journalist”— but yes, if you come here looking for that addictive high of holding power to account, those aforementioned young legs will come into play in my reporting occasionally. This series will explore issues and ideas of pertinence to our community through a set of guiding questions:
What is at stake in Little Saigon? And why should the status quo here be of great concern and interest to all corners of our city?
I plan to reexamine mainstream news themes pertaining to Little Saigon — homelessness, crime, drug distribution and addiction, policing, and city policy, among others — whose coverage often overlooks their geneses. Maybe a story about Bruce Lee if we have the time. I’ll also explore larger ideas around identity as well: being Vietnamese, Asian American, and human.
Wait, human? I see lotuses as being emblematic to the spirit of the Vietnamese diaspora, as more than just symbolic. The flowers, survivors in the ugliest of mud and the most unforgiving and unlikely odds, show their true colors not despite, but as a product of their adverse conditions. I see this mirrored in people; and when we’re talking about the heartbreaking sight of Little Saigon today, I recognize that it’s a human problem we’ve become desensitized to.
A big part of this project is me acting as a part-time history teacher, too. History brings about understanding and understanding brings about value. What do I mean? Well, the best example here is my mother, a woman born a year after the French occupation ended. A woman who lived through the Vietnam War in her hometown of Huế, the site of one of the war’s most bloody massacres. A woman who once jumped out of a building in Arizona, pregnant with me and holding my older brother and sister’s hands to survive. That’s a story for another time.
I grew up on stories of family after family in my mother’s village rushing to get underground as alarm bells signaled incoming bombings, of airborne firestorms razing the land around them. My grandfather, staring down a group of Viet Cong soldiers — in the aftermath of Huế’s fall to communist control, though South Vietnamese and American forces would eventually reclaim control after 26 days of brutal fighting — told them: “If you can find any Americans in there, go ahead and kill us all.”
I recall stories of my uncles fleeing Vietnam in the aftermath of the war by boat, out at sea in a crowded fishing boat carrying many children for over a month, before finding refuge in Hong Kong. I grew up on these stories and as a kid, I didn’t appreciate them the way I do now. I feel the same way about the Little Saigon. It’s not the same neighborhood I grew up with.
When I was young, my mother would drag my siblings and me down to Little Saigon every week. We came for little plastic scratch cards to call home to grandma in Vietnam; the latest Paris by Night DVDs; to renew our phone plan in the T-Mobile inside Ding How Center; eye exams above Hau Hau Market; a bánh mì from the old Seattle Deli… the reward of my tiny hands helping to carry a share of the groceries.
I miss this Little Saigon, and I know I’m not alone.
It breaks my heart to tell my mother it’s not safe for her here anymore. The Little Saigon of today, of the last 5+ years, features scenes of human dereliction unlike anywhere in the city. It’s a humanitarian disaster known across the state. Where kids once ran around the neighborhood, men and women now succumb to fentanyl’s grip every day.
Last October, at the inception of the city’s drug and crime-free zoning, a crowd of a hundred or so homeless folks at the mercy of addiction forced two young children and their parents to walk on the open road. They were gathered near a recently closed bus stop on 12th Ave South, stretching out along the full length of the block and overflowing into nearby backstreets; dozens of hands lighting up pipes and foils. I’ve seen shins of pus-filled flesh rotting from fentanyl-mixed drugs like xylazine, what the streets call “tranq” or the “zombie drug.” I’ve seen glassy eyes staring onto the road for hours on end.
I’ve seen people dying in broad daylight here, including my father.
“I’m so sorry,” a man from the Medical Examiner’s Office told me over the phone back in September. I tell him it’s okay, that I hadn’t seen him since I was eight. “Oh,” he responded, sounding off guard. His voice breaking into sadness, “I’m so sorry.” He kept telling me he was sorry. I kept telling him it was okay. It wasn’t.
“How did he die?” I finally asked him. He told me my father died from a fentanyl overdose — the poison still in his hands at death. They found him on August 27, but doctors on scene, observing visible rot, determined that he’d passed three days prior. I don’t know what hurts more; that he died alone, or that I lacked the humility to see this man for more than his worst mistakes. For 16 years I’d wanted this man dead, yet I cried all that morning for him.
One thing I think you’ll find interesting about my column here, is my relationship with the homeless. These are people who I had once seen to be enemies to Little Saigon. But last summer, at the height of my guilt over my father’s death and in the midst of a personal reckoning with my own worst mistakes, including great failures of competency and character throughout my adolescence, I found in the homeless a shared sense of humanity. The conditions of being human.
These are people who have had first loves. They’ve had dreams broken, struggling now with those dreams feeling too far away now. Some tell me they’ve gone to jail or prison. Some tell me they’ve seriously hurt others. Some tell me they need help. Some can’t tell me anything at all anymore. How can I judge these people, when I too have things that keep me up at night? I may not have done the same things they have, but I share in the weight of their remorse.
I see in the black markets, my father. In all of the homeless, parts of our father-son struggle. I see them as playing a role in saving Little Saigon. I have an opportunity here in my work as a journalist to offer what I denied my father. A generous, empathetic, and humble spirit.
When I struggled to live with my own memories of hurting people with my ignorance, my immaturities, my overreactions, my arrogance, my mistakes — the shadow side of my human nature — great journalism mentors, professors, school advisers, my 4th grade teacher, community leaders, people I’ve met through therapy, friends, family, my editor, even random strangers I confessed my sins to. Each person offered me maximum charity and guidance to better myself, in place of condemnation. They never gave up on me.
The beauty of lotuses lie not just in what they grow into, but also in what they’ve endured. Much like the Vietnamese people, the homeless, my father, you and I, lotuses provide us with the hope that tomorrow will be better. That tomorrow, we can and will be better. From dirt, we will grow together for a better Little Saigon, so look out for me in the neighborhood and wider city. I’d love to introduce myself in person. I’m hard to miss. I wear sunglasses rain or shine, even in the dark, and I always have a camera (my journalist uniform) on me.
And please, test my Vietnamese.
