- I guess I never really thought of myself as really a storyteller.

I would say that poetry isn't my only mode of storytelling.

I think my fashion and designs and just all that stuff is also very much influenced by my mom specifically.

Each piece that I try to create, whether it's a poem or whether it's like a top or a skirt or something like that, in the back of my mind always, you know, I think about my mom and she was always fashion forward.

Never skipped a beat.

I guess what type of storyteller I am is taking, remixing maybe, taking the stories and experiences that my parents went through and then mixing my perspective into them.

I feel like my whole life has always been about translation, but feeling lost in the translations almost, and feeling like you're being misunderstood by the people who I care about the most.

So people outside of that, like in the nail salon, clients would understand me very clear.

But when I would translate back into being Vietnamese sometimes it would just be lost in translations, because some things that you say you can't string together in a Vietnamese sentence.

It doesn't make sense.

(pensive music) My father stares as I'm reading my world politics textbook.

An air of admiration.

(speaking Vietnamese) English is good.

There's a ticking bomb that forms at the back of my throat.

I can't carry a fluent conversation with the very people that look like me, yet his smile is the widest one.

I speak to him in a tongue he can only comprehend half of.

I want to say (speaking Vietnamese), it's bigger than this.

So I started doing nails at my mom's nail salon the LA Nails on Grand.

She had a hope when I was in college that maybe I would, you know, be a doctor or a lawyer or, yeah, some stereotypical- - Yeah, an immigrant parent that wants you to be- - Household, yeah.

- Oh yeah.

I know that all too well.

- Yeah, so, that was that.

But she, you know, would have me..

So I started out working at the nail salon when I was 13.

And that nail salon she had owned since I was 13.

- What were you doing?

- When I was 13?

I would just do like phone calls, I would talk to the customers, I would clean the pedicure, like sets.

The pedicure little water bowl- - The station things?

- Yeah, and I would clean up the spaces.

I would just, after school, I would be there.

Weekends would just be there.

- [Client] So tell me about how you got into poetry.

- Oh, I got into poetry through YouTube actually when I was like 15, 16.

My cousin actually started showing me videos on YouTube of this New York poetry group called The Strivers Row.

- This is an elegy for all the things that we become before we're done becoming women.

- I will not believe that to be housed in a body that is black is to be always dressed in black for the funeral.

Even when we die, we live forever.

(vocalizing) - And then I never really, I always journaled my emotions out.

I went through a lot of like family trauma growing up.

A friend in high school just told me, you know, there's an open mic that people host every Thursday.

Did you wanna come with?

And I think at the time we were just really into poetry.

So she took me and then I just kept going.

And it was memorable for the night.

Chapter three.

My father speaks with the tongue of Vietnam.

See the American flag has been dragging his mouth around, he has no time to fix his accent.

Chapter five.

Equality to them is like spitting the word in my face while simultaneously choking the air out of me until my eyes widen, my hair died blonde, my mouth silent, my mind nothing but an empty nest for them to try to empower me in a room full of them with the word diversity.

See, I don't just speak two written languages, I speak two cultures that never seem to quite fit right on my feet.

And I am tired of trying to wear shoes that seem too big or too small.

Balancing between two countries that always seem to crack if I walk too far off because they'll never be mine anyways.

- [Client] So you think the way that you write your art is your way of showing them your way of fitting in?

- It is, it is.

But it's tough because even our loves are lost in translation, and how we show our love is lost in translation because of the language.

And so working in the nail salon, you know, it was helpful to like get more of a gauge to learn how to speak Vietnamese more and to learn how to be more quick on my feet in talking in Vietnamese and all that stuff.

But on a deeper sense... 'Cause I think I am very much like a deeper, like needing deeper relationships.

(speaking Vietnamese) Can't you see it's bigger than this?

He's still staring.

Distaste clicking on his tongue.

(speaking Vietnamese) Child, just speak English.

(somber music)