To Vietnam With Love: Meet the Writers

Nha Trang Market, by Julie Fay Ashborn (from "To Vietnam With Love")

View Photos (1) Image © 2008 To Vietnam With Love

Featuring more than fifty expatriates, travelers, and locals writing about their favorite experiences, To Vietnam With Love: A Travel Guide for the Connoisseur invites you to discover the country in an entirely new way. Meet the writers ...

Mark Barnett
Born in the United States, Mark Barnett has lived in Vietnam since 1994. He is the director of Pacific Basin Partnership, Inc., a company that grows and exports spices in Vietnam and China, and the owner and host of Cassia Cottage, a vacation retreat with garden dining on Phu Quoc Island. He and his wife Thuy have two children, Sarabecca in California and Hoang Lawrence in Hanoi.
PBP Spice
Cassia Cottage

Todd Berliner
Todd Berliner is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His articles have appeared in Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Style, Film International, and the Cambridge Film Handbook: Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. He spent the 2005-6 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam teaching American film at the Hanoi University of Theater and Cinema.

Joanna Blundell
Joanna Blundell is a journalist from London. She works for the BBC and The Daily Telegraph newspaper and website, among other media. Her favorite memory of Asia is buzzing around the Angkor temples in Cambodia on a hair dryer motorbike. She’s always looking for the next adventure—at home or abroad.

Adam Bray
Adam Bray is an American citizen and has lived in Phan Thiet, Vietnam, for more than two years. Formerly a primatologist working with chimps, bonobos, and orangutans, he is now a freelance web developer and writer. As well, he is a composer and has informal ties to the Vietnamese music scene.
Mui Ne Beach
Adam at ThingsAsian

Michael Brosowski
Michael Brosowski is the founder and director of Vietnam’s Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. He grew up in Australia, spending some years in Sydney and the rural northwest, before becoming an English teacher and gifted education coordinator. He lives in Hanoi with his extended family of street kids and two dogs.
Blue Dragon Children's Foundation

Charles W. Bruton, Jr.
All his life, Bud Bruton has stepped forward to serve and to lead. After graduating from Washington & Jefferson College with an ROTC commission, he flew in Vietnam as a Forward Air Controller and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with nineteen Oak Leaf Clusters, and a Bronze Star. He has been a trusted advisor to businesses and individuals in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley for more than thirty years.

Michael Burr
A native of New York with a BA in Art History, Michael Burr enlisted in the US Air Force in 1969 and was sent to Vietnam as an English language instructor to the Republic of Viet Nam Air Force. In December of 2003, he returned for the first time, and he now travels regularly to the region. He is a professional photographer and lives in Long Beach, California.
Michael Burr Photography
Michael at ThingsAsian

Tom Chard
Tom Chard is a travel writer, novelist, tour guide, motorbike enthusiast, and general misfit. He funds these hobbies by working as a hospitality and customer service training consultant for five-star hotels worldwide. He has been based in Southeast Asia for six years and has no intention of leaving.

Samantha Coomber
English freelance travel writer Samantha Coomber came to Vietnam in 1998 for a one-month backpacking trip, which turned into more than six years of living, working, and traveling in Vietnam. She is now based in Ho Chi Minh City, and her published credits include updating and researching The Rough Guide to Vietnam and LUXE City Guides; co-founding, co-editing, and writing a governmental tourist magazine based in Hanoi; and writing the first edition Insight Pocket Guide: Hanoi & Northern Vietnam.
Samantha at Travelwriters.com
Samantha at ThingsAsian

Richard Craik
Born in Chester, UK, Richard Craik worked as a truck driver, graphic designer, clothing store manager, sales representative, bar manager, and English teacher, amongst other things, before settling in Vietnam, where he has worked in tourism since 1992. A keen birder, he recently combined this interest with his years of tourism experience to set up Vietnam Birding, which offers escorted birding tours. He lives in Ho Chi Minh City with his wife Lan and daughter Carmen.
Vietnam Birding

Ed Daniels
A retired university administrator, Ed Daniels is also a Vietnam veteran who served in the US Army from 1967-68. Since 1993, he has visited Vietnam numerous times. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Veterans Viet Nam Restoration Project, an NGO program for Vietnam veterans wishing to heal from the emotional effects of the war. Making his home in Chico, California, he is married with two daughters.
Veterans Viet Nam Restoration Project

Jennifer Davoli
Currently teaching world history and literature in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Jennifer Davoli worked with youth in poverty in New York’s South Bronx for ten years and in Hanoi for a year. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Uruguay and pursued her MA in Bilingual/Bicultural Education at Columbia University.
Jennifer at ThingsAsian

Linh Do
Born in Vietnam, Linh Do immigrated to St. Louis, Missouri. She attended Stanford University and worked in management consulting, startups, and nonprofits in San Francisco. She pursued an MBA at Berkeley with the intention to do development work, and is grateful to now be involved in the work she loves and get to kitesurf at Mui Ne. Now living back in Vietnam, she encourages others to consider a profession in development work.

Alice Driver
Alice Driver spent a year working and traveling with her husband Isaac Bingham as he studied indigenous boat building in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, New Zealand (Tokelau), Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Next year she will finish her master’s degree in Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her first academic article appeared in the winter 2007 issue of Romance Quarterly.
Savants of the Sea
Alice at ThingsAsian

Dan Duffy
Dan Duffy is an anthropologist who works with Vietnamese authors. He helped start Harold Bloom’s Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism; assisted Kali Tal with Viet Nam Generation, Inc.; ran Yale’s Viet Nam Forum series; worked in Hanoi as a consultant to The Gioi publishers; and mapped the Vietnamese bookstores of Paris. He now runs Viet Nam Literature Project.
Viet Nam Literature Project

Duong Lam Anh
Duong Lam Anh was born and raised in the city of Hue in central Vietnam. He graduated from the College of Education at Hue University and pursued his graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He likes traveling to explore new cultures and writing for magazines. Proud to be a Hue native, he enjoys writing about his hometown. Presently, he is a lecturer at Hue University’s College of Foreign Languages.
Duong Lam Anh's Blog

Thin Lei Win Elkin
Yangon-born, Saigon-based Thin Lei Win Elkin is a food and travel enthusiast—with a particular interest in sustainable travel—who delights in sharing her latest finds, whether they be shopping tips or NGO adventure trips.
Thin's Website

Stephen Engle
Seattle native Stephen Engle first went to China in 1990 to “fall off the face of the earth for a while.” He’s still tumbling. The charming rust belt of Manchuria was his dumping off spot. He has since lived in Japan, Taiwan, Guam, Singapore, and Hong Kong, where he works as a television news anchor “to pay the bills to be a backpacker.”

Lillian Forsyth
Lillian Forsyth grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and received her BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Barnard College in New York City. She has been interested in Vietnam for several years and conducted thesis research about street children there. For the past year, she has been teaching English in An Giang through an American organization called Volunteers in Asia.

Renee Friedman
Born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, Renee Friedman finally followed her thumb out to an island on the west coast of Canada, where she presently resides and always returns after pursuing her first love—travel. She now teaches and enjoys gardening, reading, hiking, kayaking, and the spectacular view. Most of her time is spent mothering and smothering her daughter. She also occasionally indulges in her fantasy of being a writer, to which the essays in this book can attest.

Dominic Golding
An adoptee from Vietnam, Dominic Golding is a playwright and performing artist based in Melbourne. While he makes his home in Australia, his soul and life’s inspiration are rooted in his birth country. He has worked with the Vietnamese-Australian community in Melbourne on numerous productions. Shrimp, his play, was produced in 2005 for the Big West Festival and again in 2007, for the theatre touring program of Regional Arts Victoria. His poetry/photo blog documents his experiences in Vietnam.
Dominic's Blog

Jeff Greenwald
Oakland, California-based Jeff Greenwald is the author of five books, including Shopping for Buddhas, The Size of the World, and a recent anthology called Scratching the Surface. His work appears in Wired, Tricycle, and Salon.com. He is also the Executive Director of Ethical Traveler, a global alliance of travelers dedicated to social and environmental change. Jeff recently launched his stage career with a one-man show, “Strange Travel Suggestions.”
Ethical Traveler
Jeff's Website
Jeff at ThingsAsian

Nicole Hankins
Born in Vietnam, Nicole Hankins left in 1969 when she was six years old. Along with her family, she lived in Paris for ten years before settling in Southern California. She started traveling back to Vietnam in 1998 for work, and she grew keen to start a business in her birthplace. So she packed her bags, took all of her savings, and moved to Ho Chi Minh City in 2003 to launch Nutrifort, the country’s first health and fitness company.
Nutrifort

Jon Hoff
Jonathan Hoff was born in Bournemouth, England, in 1980. After graduating in 2001, he discovered the joys of travel and has lived and worked in Asia ever since. He now finds himself based in Ho Chi Minh City, where he somehow managed to pick up a wife.
Jon's Blog: The Final Word ... in Saigon

Emily Huckson
After spending far too many winters in her hometown in northern Ontario, Canada, Emily Huckson moved to Ho Chi Minh City in 1995 and has put all her underwear in one drawer. Apart from giving advice to numerous travelers in her “host” city, she is also involved in raising money for disabled children via “treading the boards” in theatrical productions. She has two cats, a fridge, and a hammock, so one can assume she is there for the duration.

Steve Jackson
Steve Jackson spent two and a half years in Vietnam, where he worked as a full-time volunteer for KOTO, a hospitality training center for street and disadvantaged youth. During his time there, he documented his experiences on the website Our Man in Hanoi.
Steve's Blog: Our Man in Hanoi
Steve at ThingsAsian

Henno Kotze
Henno Kotze grew up and went to school in Stellenbosch, South Africa. After graduating with honors in journalism from the University of Stellenbosch and a brief sojourn at a golf magazine in Cape Town, he made the leap to Vietnam in 2006, where he has been plying his trade ever since.
Henno's Blog: Backwater Views

Chris Mitchell
Chris Mitchell is a British travel writer based in Bangkok, Thailand. He edits the Asian travel site Travel Happy and the Asian scuba diving site Dive Happy.
Travel Happy
Dive Happy
Chris at ThingsAsian

Tenley Mogk
Tenley Mogk is named after Olympic ice skater Tenley Albright. Tenley (Mogk) does not skate well, despite having grown up in freezing Michigan. She can, however, soar through the streets of Hanoi—her home for seven years—on a bicycle. Vocation: public health. Fascination: aging. Favorite food: avocadoes. She now lives in California, studying anatomy and selling ornaments made by recovering addicts in Vietnam.

Marc Moynot
Business studies: big mistake. Crash helmet lessons: much better. Marc Moynot considers his best training was as a trekking guide and ski patroller in the French Alps for fifteen years. He moved to Vietnam in 1995 to work as a French teacher, and has been a chocolatier for the past six years. When he finds a little spare time, he goes hang gliding in Dalat.
Chocolats de France
Marc at ThingsAsian 

Jessy Needham
Jessy Needham has lived in Vietnam since 2003. For two years, she worked as a volunteer with Volunteers in Asia, teaching English in rural Bac Giang Province. After her teaching stint was through, she became a program officer at the Institute of International Education, administering scholarships for the Fulbright Program in Vietnam.

Nguyen Qui Duc
Nguyen Qui Duc has more than twenty years of experience in international media. The author, translator, and editor of several books relating to Vietnam, he has lived and worked in the USA, Indonesia, the UK, and Morocco. He now lives in Hanoi, where he is the Asia editor for KQED’s Pacific Time, a national public radio program focusing on Asian affairs.
Duc at ThingsAsian

Kathrine Hee Nielsen
Kathrine Hee Nielsen is a political science major from Denmark. She spends her spare time and money traveling in Asia ... or dreaming of it. She has enjoyed the expatriate life in Hanoi, but is currently based in the lovely Danish capital, Copenhagen.

Kelly O’Neil
Kelly O’Neil lives with her husband and four adopted children in the hills outside of Portland, Oregon. Their household also contains four dogs, two guinea pigs, two gerbils, three hens, one rooster, and a species-identification-confused duck. In her copious free time, she loves to read and sleep.

Iris Opdebeeck
Iris Opdebeeck was born in Mechelen, Belgium, where she worked and lived until the age of thirty-five. In April 2004, her husband Jan took an assignment for Procter & Gamble in Ho Chi Minh City, where they stayed for two and a half years. They then extended their adventures and moved to Chandigarh, India. Sharing a passion for travel and new cultures, she and Jan are now back in Belgium.

Pham Hoai Nam
Pham Hoai Nam was born in Hanoi in the late 1960s and moved with his family to southern Vietnam almost thirty years ago. After working as a Russian language interpreter for twelve years, he tried his hand at pantomime, theater, music composition, painting, dancing, literature, and DJing. His most recent interest is photography. However, he does not intend to stop there. He lives in Ho Chi Minh City with his wife and daughter.

Hal Phillips
Hal Phillips directs his media firm which serves clients in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Hal reckons his barn, from whence he writes on sporting and travel matters, is the most cosmopolitan out-building in the Great State of Maine. Raised a Boston suburbanite, he never dreamed he’d own a barn, much less make his living in one, often dressed in nothing but a pair of Bermuda shorts. Said barn sits at the terminus of a long dirt road, where he resides with his wife Sharon and their two children, Silas and Clara.
Mandarin Media
Hal at ThingsAsian

Jan Polatschek
Jan Polatschek was married before the Vietnam War began in earnest, so he received a deferment from the Selective Service System. In addition, his mother persuaded him to be a teacher, and she may have saved his life. Teachers were also exempt from the draft. He was apprehensive about his trip to Vietnam in 2003, but to his surprise, he was greeted with warmth and hospitality. From his new home in Bangkok, he plans his travels and edits his letters and photographs.
Travel With Jan

Preyanka Clark Prakash
Preyanka Clark Prakash is a high school English teacher and graduate student living in Colorado. She is of American and Indian heritage, has lived in Thailand and India, and attended the United Nations International School of Hanoi for eight years until her graduation in 2000. She blogs about her experiences at Dreaming of Hanoi.
Preya's Blog: Dreaming of Hanoi

Nick Pulley
Nick Pulley’s love affair with Southeast Asia began while traveling in the region during the early 1990s. Now suited and booted in his London office, he’s almost unrecognizable from the Thai-dye days when he launched the first half moon parties on Koh Phan Ngan and went round saying “man” a lot. His passion for travel has taken him from the deserts of Namibia to the frozen tundra of the Canadian Arctic, but his heart has always remained firmly in Asia. In 2005, he founded Selective Asia, which offers privately guided, customized holidays.
Selective Asia

Elka Ray
Born in England and raised in Canada, Elka Ray has spent the past eleven years in Vietnam, working as a freelance writer and editor. Elka now lives in Ho Chi Minh City with her husband, baby son, and two cats—both of which have fallen six stories and survived.

Graham Roemmele
Fuelled by a trip through Southeast Asia, Graham Roemmele left the blighted shores of Wales and moved to Thailand in 2002, searching for new adventures and experiences. Currently working as an English teacher in Bangkok, Graham often escapes the city to photograph and write about his travels throughout the region.
Graham's Blog

Dana Sachs
Dana Sachs is the author of The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam and the novel If You Lived Here. She co-authored Two Cakes Fit For a King: Folktales from Vietnam. Her articles have appeared in many publications, including National Geographic, Travel + Leisure Family, and The International Herald Tribune. In 2006, as a Fulbright Scholar in Hanoi, she conducted research for a book on Operation Babylift, the US-sponsored evacuation of displaced children at the end of the war in Vietnam.
Dana's Website
Dana at ThingsAsian

Simone Samuels
Simone Samuels has journeyed and lived abroad in many places, but no place has captured her heart as much as Vietnam. Originally from Brisbane, Australia, she now makes her home away from home in Hanoi, where she and her partner regularly update their blog, Vagabonding. Simone has a journalism background and became a dedicated English teacher and teacher trainer as a way to fund her even greater passions for traveling, writing, photography, and studying languages.
Simone's Blog: Vagabonding
Simone at ThingsAsian

Margaret Scott
Margaret Scott attended UC Berkeley during the height of the war in Vietnam. That experience led to her lifelong interest in cultures and a commitment to seeking a just and equitable world. She spends her time reading, writing, hiking California trails, and planning her next adventure.

Antoine Sirot
Since 1993, Antoine Sirot has managed hotels for the Accor Group in Indonesia, Thailand, and as of 2002, Vietnam at the Sofitel Dalat Palace. The history of former colonies is not well taught in France and is even still a taboo. Having to answer many inquiries on the history of Dalat, Antoine has undertaken in-depth research, mostly through French writings from various historical works, but also by gathering testimonies of elderly hotel guests who lived in Dalat in the old days.

Marianne Smallwood
An American raised by a Vietnamese father and Filipina mother, Marianne Smallwood left the corporate world in 2006 and moved to Vietnam to reconnect with her paternal roots. Currently working at an NGO in Hanoi, she plans to continue her career within Southeast Asian economic development. Marianne can be regularly seen at Cafe Mai.

Joe Springer-Miller
A native of Vermont, Joe Springer-Miller moved to Japan in 1993 to teach for the federal government there. In the same year he made his first visit to Vietnam, and he moved to Ho Chi Minh City in 2002 to start and coordinate a bilingual program for the Korean consular school. He also worked for International SOS; has been involved with the local arts, business, and consular communities; and is a founding member of Saigon Players, a local theater group

Lorene Strand
As the stepdaughter of a Vietnam veteran, Lorene Strand has always been captivated by Vietnam; she first toured the country in 1998. In 2001 she moved to Vietnam, first living in Dalat and later Ho Chi Minh City. Returning “home” to the States in 2006, she is currently on a quest to find the best Vietnamese restaurant in America. She welcomes your suggestions.
lorene_strand@hotmail.com

James Sullivan
James Sullivan is the author of Over The Moat, a memoir of courtship in Vietnam that The Boston Globe celebrated as “near-perfect” and the Washington Post hailed as “an essential entry in the canon of expatriate literature.” After graduating from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with a James Michener Fellowship in 1992, he bicycled without escort up National Highway 1 from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. He has written travel features for National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, and other leading publications. 
James at ThingsAsian
Over the Moat at ThingsAsian

To Hanh Trinh
Born in Hanoi, To Hanh Trinh earned a BA in teaching English at the secondary school level. From 1985-1999, she worked for the Department of Mining and Geology, PetroVietnam, and British Petroleum. In 2002, she opened Wild Rice restaurant with two longtime friends and partners. This venture was followed by Moon River Retreat in 2003 and Wild Lotus restaurant in 2005. Painting, photography, and decorating are among her hobbies. Married with two daughters, she lives in Hanoi.

Jan Vail
An international bon vivant, raconteur, and man of mystery, Jan Vail has traveled the world in first and business class, stayed in five-star hotels, and wined and dined in the finest restaurants on the globe ... all under the guise of work. As the old saying goes, “Someone has to do it.” Whilst pursuing these worldly pleasures, he has managed to have sufficient success in enough endeavors to convince others to perpetuate his lifestyle with a succession of consulting projects around the world.  

Vu Kieu Linh
Born in Hanoi, Vu Kieu Linh left for Europe when she was eleven. She moved back to Vietnam in 1996 to undertake her BA and then went to Singapore for her MBA from 2003-05. She is currently working as a Public Relations Manager for a multinational corporation in Vietnam. She admits that she didn’t realize her love for her hometown until recently, when she returned for a business trip. She writes her own blog, and some of her entries are published in Vietnam’s well-known magazines.
Linh at ThingsAsian 

Christine Thuy-Anh Vu
Christine Thuy-Anh Vu writes and edits work about the arts, culture, and science. Serving as art advisor to several international collections, she has also been an executive director to a Vietnam-based international arts organization. A Fulbright Fellow in Contemporary Vietnamese Art, she has received other honors and fellowships for her research in Europe and the USA in psychology, gastronomy, and contemporary art.

Ray Waddington
Ray Waddington is the president of The Peoples of the World Foundation, a secular, apolitical, non-profit organization based in the USA. He established the foundation to fund educational scholarships for indigenous people after witnessing their lack of educational opportunities and the negative impact this has on political representation. He recently celebrated his one-millionth kilometer of international travel and is preparing a travel/humor book based on his experiences.
Peoples of the World 

Tyler Watts
Tyler Watts is currently participating in his third year with the California-based volunteer organization Volunteers in Asia. He lived in the Mekong Delta region for two years, teaching English language and literature courses at An Giang University. He now resides in Hue, but his heart remains in the south of Vietnam.
Tyler at ThingsAsian

Sue Wise
After working for a company for fifteen years, making profits for the owners, Sue Wise decided it was time to give back and is now working as a volunteer for the non-profit organization Vietnam Quilts. She has recently moved to Hanoi to set up the organization’s second retail outlet. After realizing that a little help goes a long way in less developed countries, she will find it hard to return to Australia and resume working for someone else’s benefit.

Paul Young
Paul Young has spent the past few years living and teaching ESL in South Korea. When on holiday, he can be found either back home in his native Canada or exploring Southeast Asia looking for some fun in the sun on the beach with a bottle of sunscreen. He currently maintains Oriental Tales, an online travel magazine featuring stories of travel and adventure in Asia.
Oriental Tales

EDITOR: Kim Fay
Pacific Northwest native Kim Fay first traveled to Southeast Asia in 1991. Since then, she spent four years living in Vietnam and has traveled back frequently, writing about the region. She is the creator and series editor of the To Asia With Love guidebooks, and the author of Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. She resides in Los Angeles.
Kim's Website

PHOTOGRAPHER: Julie Fay Ashborn
Julie Fay Ashborn's travels through Southeast Asia inspired her photography in To Asia With Love, The Little Saigon Cookbook, and Communion: A Culinary Journey through Vietnam. Other favorite subjects include architecture and retro motel signs. As well as being a photographer, she works in the film industry. She was raised in the Pacific Northwest and now splits her time between Los Angeles and London with her husband Clive and daughter Charlie.
Julie's Website

Samples Essays from To Vietnam With Love
To Asia With Love: New and Noteworthy 

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Published on 7/15/08