It begins, as many rebellions do, with something small. A kettle whistles. A hand reaches for a ceramic cup. The clink of porcelain, the scent of bergamot, the hum of conversation at a volume that does not require raising one’s voice. Somewhere in Orange County, a grown woman is hosting a tea party, and it is not ironic.

The return of the tea party among adults may seem, at first glance, like an indulgence in nostalgia: lace doilies, cucumber sandwiches, a brief flirtation with the trappings of an imagined Edwardian leisure. But spend an hour in the hushed, leaf-scented glow of such a gathering, and something else emerges. This is not regression. It’s resistance.

Tea parties have always been about more than tea. In the Victorian era, they were a sanctioned space for women to hold court, discuss politics (obliquely, of course), and perform domestic grace with sharpened edges. In today’s iteration, the performance is gentler, less prescribed. The modern tea party trades status for presence. There is no DJ, no signature cocktail, no pressure to network. Just warm liquids, eye contact, and, occasionally, cake. There is definitely no talk of politics. The hostess once said, “If all my friends talked about politics, I would have no friends left.” So… no politics.

This is not to say tea parties are inherently profound. They can be frivolous, even fussy. But that’s precisely their charm. In a world calibrated for optimization, the act of steeping loose leaves, of ironing napkins, of preparing food too small to be practical—feels like a deliberate reclaiming of the inefficient.

There was no formal menu, no spreadsheet or signup sheet, and yet everything arrived as if preordained. A fancy cake from 85°C Bakery with a smooth lavender fondant. A plate of finger pastries arranged like a constellation. Each guest brought a dish—not out of obligation, but out of care, the kind that says: I thought of you while boiling this jam. The host, meanwhile, had conjured a setting so improbable it felt like a dream remembered from childhood. A table in the garden, draped in linen the color of antique postcards, flanked by thrifted chairs and the rustle of nearby leaves. China cups with gold rims caught the sun in uneven flashes. Everything matched, from the china down to the flowers in the garden. This was not a potluck; it was a quiet choreography of intention. The food was imperfect. The setting was curated. The moment—like the tea—was warm, generous, and wholly unnecessary. Which is to say: perfect.

The adult tea party is not a lifestyle brand or a call to tradition. It is, more often, a soft refusal: of noise, of urgency, of the transactional nature that has come to define so much adult interaction. It is a space where stillness is not awkward, where silence can steep.

Whether it lasts an hour or an afternoon, the tea party offers an elusive intimacy—one that asks only that you show up, sit down, and pour.

Note 1: We forgot garden music! I think that would really add to our ambiance. I love the classical takes on modern songs… like the Bridgerton soundtrack!

Note 2: No images are AI-generated. Yes… that’s really our tea party!

Child Wants a Coffee

If I walked into a Vietnamese café and wanted to order, I wouldn’t know how to say, “May I please get one coffee to-go?” I might say, “Child wants a coffee.”

Generations

On average, it takes 2 to 3 generations for a family to lose strong ties to their homeland and cultural identity—unless active steps are taken to preserve them. Cultural loss is not inevitable, but it is likely without intention. 

First-generation immigrants often hold tightly to their homeland. They speak the language, observe cultural rituals, and maintain close ties.

Their children—the second generation—are usually born or raised in the new country. They might be bilingual and bicultural, but they often feel pressure to assimilate. Cultural practices shift. Traditions are selectively passed down.

By the third generation, many speak only the dominant language and feel distant from ancestral customs.

Sociologists often refer to the “three-generation model” (sometimes called the “third-generation rule”) which observes that:

“What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.”
— Marcus Lee Hansen, historian

Yellow-Americans

You know what’s funny? In Vietnamese, a white United Statesian is called “Mỹ trắng.” A black United Satesian is called “Mỹ đen.” There isn’t a word for a Vietnamese or Asian person born and raised as an American. I once asked my mom, “Wouldn’t I just be Mỹ vàng,’ then?” She laughed knowing that maybe I would be the one who coined this word.

In Vietnamese, a white American is sometimes called “Mỹ trắng” (literally white American) and a Black American “Mỹ đen” (literally black American). But what about someone like me—Vietnamese by ethnicity, but born and raised entirely in the U.S.? One day I asked my mother, “Wouldn’t I be ‘Mỹ vàng’ then?” (literally yellow American) She laughed. I might be the first to coin it.

There is actually another word, “Việt Kiều,” which means “Overseas Vietnamese.” I have been told it is an outdated word.

There isn’t actually a term—no tidy phrase for Vietnamese Americans born here— and that says something. It reflects the tension between being “from” somewhere and being seen as always a bit foreign.

I lean just a bit more American than Vietnamese. (Actually, a lot more). My dad once told me, “Your grandma is Vietnamese, you’re just American.” It was in a joking kind of way, but I think somewhere in the back of his mind, there would be some time in my life that I would lose my Vietnamese identity completely.

This search for a word—any word—that captures who I am linguistically and culturally, reveals the bigger question: what happens when language can’t catch up with identity?

Note: “Yellow-American” is not an appropriate phrase in English. 

Hay quá! Hay quá!

Any non-Vietnamese speaker who married into my family would do their best to learn a few polite phrases in Vietnamese. And the response they would always get is “Hay quá! Hay quá!” (“So good! So good!). But here’s the thing—Vietnamese has no exact word for “good” the way English does. A child being obedient, a person doing well in school, a magical performance—these all require different descriptors. When someone says “Hay quá!” after hearing you attempt Vietnamese, it’s like clapping for a great performance. It recognizes effort, not perfection. And it always makes me smile.

Pronouns, Titles and Third-Person

What I learned in Vietnamese is that everyone has a title. I don’t mean for it to sound fancy, but I was never taught to use pronouns. In English, whomever I am speaking to is “you,” and I would always refer to myself as “me.” That really isn’t a part of the Vietnamese vocabulary. There is “toi,” which is kind of formal, kind of informal, but definitely not familiar. And a really funny thing I learned watching Vietnamese Masterchef… “you” is “bạn” …which literally means “friend,” whether or not you’re friends. That’s always bugged me, because being a worldly traveler myself, I’ve come to learn that whenever you start hearing someone call you, “My friend! My friend!” Run.

So, I learned that we speak in 3rd person and everyone has a title (kind of). I don’t mean a title like Sir Elton John. But we all get some sort of title. For example, I am my parents’ child, so they call me “child,” and they would call themselves “mom” and “dad.” There is no “you” or “me.” Here’s an example (if my mom and I spoke Vietnamese with each other):

Mom: Hello, Child! Is Child hungry?

Me: No Mom, Child is not hungry.

Mom: Are you sure, Child? Mom can make Child something to eat.

Me: Child does not need Mom to make anything. Child is not hungry.

Yes… you read that right. No matter how old I get, I will still call myself “child” when speaking to my mom…

It sounds absurd in English. But in Vietnamese, it’s natural. The structure reflects hierarchy, respect, and relationships. You always know where you stand with someone—literally, by the word you use for them.

How Fluent is Fluent?

In my opinion, true fluency in a language goes far beyond everyday conversation. You aren’t truly fluent until you can understand legal jargon, follow a president’s State of the Union address—whether it’s inspiring or laced with propaganda—or make sense of a scientific report or complex medical terminology. By that standard, the only person I know who is truly fluent is my mom.

Generation 2.5

I will probably never be fluent in Vietnamese. I can speak bits of it, but I don’t consider myself bilingual. I can’t read legal documents, I can’t follow debates, and I can’t switch registers the way fluent speakers can. I don’t even speak “Vietlish,” the casual mix of Vietnamese and English some families use. Mine didn’t teach me slang or informal speech. I learned phrases for meals, birthdays, and ceremonies—not for daily life.

So when someone asks, “Do you speak Vietnamese?” I say, “Not really.” I know words. I don’t know jokes. I know titles. I don’t know the language the way it lives and breathes.

And yet, I feel tied to it. I’m part of that in-between generation. Not quite second-generation, not quite third. Maybe 2.5. We exist in a gap—not fluent in the language of our ancestors, and never fully embraced by the country they left behind. But we carry the sounds. The laughter. The echo of what was almost lost.

That’s the funny thing about being 2.5 generations removed: you feel both close and far, fluent and frozen, local and foreign—all at once.

And sometimes, you just want a coffee. Even if you have to ask for it like a child.

*The image of a woman with a coffee is AI-generated

When I first came across Joan Didion’s essay The Santa Anas (1969), something lit up inside me. I have my own memories. It wasn’t so so similar than her experience, wherein people were anxious and even hostile when the winds changed. In my childhood days, the Santa Ana winds arrived not on a schedule, but with an eerie predictability, curling into our Orange County neighborhood just as September bled into October, and lingering well into spring. 

25 years after Didion had published her essay– in the early 1990s– as my students now call it, the late 1900s– Southern California. Our street was lined with one-story brick houses topped with gable roofs, stubbornly pitched despite the absence of snow. The homes stood shoulder to shoulder, but the backyards sprawled wide enough to cradle family-size pools, inflatable or in-ground, depending on your luck. The trees were always slightly out of place—imported, thirsty, and forever straining toward a climate that hadn’t asked for them.

The airport during the Santa Anas is a place of false clarity, where everything is visible and nothing feels secure. The wind arrives not as breeze but as verdict—dry, electric, mean. It lifts the grit from the surrounding basin and sends it spiraling across the tarmac, where it settles on windows, in the folds of luggage, in the mouths of those who forget to keep them shut.

Inside, the glass walls tremble in their frames. The air conditioning hums with the fatigue of long resistance, never quite managing to drown out the low howl just beyond the doors. People sit in molded chairs with their coats in their laps, watching the monitors flicker with delays and revised gates. Somewhere, a child cries. No one looks up. There is a peculiar stillness to the movement—gates open, people board, announcements are made—but all of it feels untethered, as if the planes might lift without instruction, as if the whole place might shake loose from its foundations and drift toward the desert.

It is the kind of day that reminds you that control is mostly illusion, that the sky doesn’t have to be dark to be dangerous.

The dry winds once swept in from the hills behind our house in Newport Beach, carrying with them the scent of sunbaked grass and the unmistakable musk of livestock. In those days, cows roamed freely across the brittle terrain, their slow movements part of the background rhythm of late-summer afternoons. The hills were raw, open, and uncontained—land that seemed to belong more to the weather than to people.

There’s a golf course on top of it now. Pelican Hill’s manicured greens have replaced the dry chaparral, the smell of manure traded for chlorinated ponds and fresh-cut turf. The winds still come, but they arrive tamed, filtered through irrigation systems and clubhouse fences, no longer wild enough to sting your eyes, irritate your nose, or dry your throat.

The winds came down hard from the mountains, dry and deliberate, the kind of wind that doesn’t so much blow as peel something back. In Newport Beach, at The Wedge, where the coastline curls like a muscle under tension, surfers watch the horizon with a kind of reverence and suspicion. Offshore winds can bless the water—hold the wave faces steady, iron the surface to a glassy sheen—but it’s a fragile bargain. The same wind that gives form also takes. When the Santa Anas pick up, too fast, too sharp, paddling becomes a battle. The waves turn mean, the sea restless, and suddenly the promise of perfect surf collapses into something wild, uncooperative. It’s always like that here. Beauty balanced on the edge of undoing.

Back then, my father’s garden was less a patch of soil and more a quiet rebellion. In a suburban Orange County backyard, hemmed in by stucco walls and concrete patios, he conjured a microclimate of his own—a tropical sprawl of guavas, persimmons, dragonfruit, papaya, passion fruit, avocado, sugar apples, grapes, and lemons. Between the fruit trees, he carved out a rectangular bed where basil, cilantro and mint grew in neat rows, their scent rising with the heat. These were not California natives. The garden had nothing to do with drought-resistant landscaping or seasonal planting guides. It had everything to do with memory, with Vietnam, with taste.

Keeping the tropical garden alive took water. Gallons of it. He would drag out the hose, place it at the base of a guava tree, and let it run for half an hour while he inspected the leaves or swatted at a fly. Water waste wasn’t a concern, not then. Not for him. The garden mattered more than municipal warnings or parched reservoirs. It was sustenance and ceremony—a way to preserve the flavors of his childhood.

He loathed the Santa Ana winds. They tore through his garden like a thief, coating the fruit in a fine dust and drying the herbs into brittle curls. Every time they came through town, he would have to fan the dust away with a banana leaf conical hat. It was light but strong enough to rid the dust without blowing over herbs like mint, cilantro, and Thai basil. Eventually, he created a makeshift shelter for the garden out of heavy blue tarps. Like so much else in California, the winds refused to accommodate the delicate ecosystem he had tried to build.

It wasn’t just the trees in my father’s garden it wreaked havoc on. No, the wind did not give a fuck. Down by the beach, the palms bowed low, their spines too proud to bend until they didn’t—until they cracked like matchsticks and collapsed across PCH.

The earth sometimes gave off a strange smell—dry dust and metal. The hills behind our house were still raw, and the winds would rake through them, lifting grit into the sky and dropping it, like a fine coat of ash, over the elementary school playground. We’d squint through recess, dodging the sharp sting of airborne sand. We could taste the dust in the back of our throats when we inhaled the dry wind. There were times when the gust swooped in so strongly, we could spread our arms and legs like a starfish and it would nudge us an inch or two forward. We’re not that small anymore. Sometimes the wind carried the smell of cow manure—thick, sour, inescapable—wafting down from the remnants of farmland bordering our world. That smell, too, is gone.

When it was time to walk home from school, I’d trek through the dust, breathing in the dry air. My brother always got nosebleeds, but I was lucky I never did. When we finally got to our door, a quick walk around the corner from the school, we were tan and dusty from head to toe, from our heads to our feet. It covered our backpacks, and when we got home, we had to empty our backpacks, slamming the textbooks and trapper keepers on the floor before taking the backpacks outside to shake the dust off.

No one walks home from school anymore. The roads have become rivers of Teslas and Range Rovers, navigated by stay-at-home moms and nannies.

Maybe the winds haven’t changed, but everything else has. Back then, the Santa Anas swept through open fields and citrus groves, carrying with them the sunbaked scent of sea water, dry grass, and something harder to name—maybe dust from the hills, or the hot shimmer of asphalt after recess. The air had weight, grit, memory.

Now, the same winds whip through a different landscape—mansions where orchards once stood, drought-tolerant plants in place of thirsty guava trees, stucco walls instead of open yards.

The Santa Anas still blow. If you listen closely, you can hear them swoop in from the Inland Empire. But you can no longer feel them rattle the windows, and they no longer rearrange the patio furniture or fog up our windows with dust. As an adult, I wasn’t the only thing that changed. I never thought I’d miss the smell of dust and cow dung. The new mansions and the mini skyscrapers have disrupted the currents, interrupting the wind’s once-commanding path. The cows are gone, too. The natural world doesn’t disappear—it adapts slowly… quietly, just like we do.

Author’s Note: As of May 2025, Santa Ana Winds season has not yet arrived. In 2024, I felt nothing. It was nothing like the 90s. Nothing like my childhood.