Trish Le

Carmen Acevedo Butcher

R4B Meme & Human

1 October 2022

R4B Project 1: To Move Around Without Losing My Roots

I. THROUGH MY EYES

Having gone to Vietnamese school in a temple for eight years, I grew up closely

connected with my culture. As a child, I was left in the care of my grandmother who practically

lived at the temple. This served as an agency of socialization for me. I befriended the kids whose

families came from different cities to visit our temple’s beautiful shrines. I indulged in gossip

overheard from the cooks making our vegetarian dinners. I found a family within the Buddhist

monks and nuns living there.

This environment that I grew up in strongly shaped the lens through which I view our

world. I saw everyone I met as a new friend, with the potential for lasting relationships. I viewed

society, or at least the beautiful parts of it, as a result of organic connections. In my Buddhist

home, I was taught that life was endless. That meant nothing was ever fixed nor permanent, for

everything was ever changing.

Through melodious worship and mindful meditation, I deepened my understanding of

patience, compassion, and peace. Although, as a squirmish seven year old, it was difficult to get

me to sit still and meditate for an hour, given my body was just as hyperactive as my mind.

Before I knew it, just as my grandmother had driven me to the temple when I was little, I

now was the one driving her and my younger brother there. The classroom full of friends that I

once took religion classes with were now replaced by a new generation of elementary-age

children who seemed like they couldn't be any more disconnected from Buddhism and their
mother tongue. Although some of their parents gave them no choice but to be there, I didn’t want

their relationship with Buddhism to feel like a chore to them.

As an attempt to make the temple community more engaging to younger students, I

proposed the nuns in charge of the youth programs to give me a position where I can create

“entertaining” opportunities for students to deepen their faith and express themselves spiritually.

My responsibilities ranged from choreographing Vietnamese traditional dances for them

to perform at monthly Buddhist festivals to writing campfire-style songs about mindfulness to

sing at the end of the school day. Although these dances and songs are far from perfect, they

serve as a creative way for these restless seven-year-olds to experience religion and embrace

their culture.

My Myers-Brigg personality type, ISFJ,

provides insight into how I interact with these

students. ISFJ is referred to as the guardian or

defender type. The Myers-Brigg website describes

ISFJ types as “tending to feel especially fulfilled by

careers that allow them to facilitate others’ growth,

healing, and progress” (16personalities). This can

be seen in my efforts to foster a vibrant youth

community at my temple, helping my younger

peers strengthen their faith through different

mediums. This nurturer side of me now manifests

itself through my academic and career ventures.

Because my values lie in lifelong learning and advocating for those I care about, I find myself
wanting to research elements of youth in this course, specifically girlhood. In this R4B class, I

hope to research how girlhood is sensationalized in the media and the implications of this on

younger audiences, who tend to be very impressionable. My research interests lie in knowing

how to best serve the young students of today. Career-wise, this translates to wanting to be a

teacher or working for an education initiative. I’ve always been tentative to pursue this path,

despite having been drawn to it for the longest time, because of the stigma that it’s not a lucrative

career. According to a TIME Magazine article about teaching in America, “the country’s roughly

3.2 million full-time public-school teachers (kindergarten through high school) are experiencing

some of the worst wage stagnation of any profession, earning less on average, in

inflation-­adjusted dollars, than they did in 1990, according to Department of Education (DOE)

data”. However, if I’m going to be spending 70% percent of my life working, I’d rather it be

doing something that I really love. One of my favorite NPR podcast episodes, titled “How To

Build a Better Job”, convinced me to believe that having a greater purpose for working (beyond

money) will make the financial aspect seem trivial in comparison. I don’t know how true that is,

but I’d like to believe it. And I think that believing it for now will really push me to study and

pursue what I’m interested in and at least try it out to see if my calling for education rings true.

My high school AP Research teacher, Kate Flowers-Rossner, would be the first to agree

that I am all for doing what I love, even if it’s not traditional. In the letter of recommendation she

wrote for me during college application season, she confirms this by saying, “Trish has learned

how to hijack work to make it deeply interesting to her. Her current AP Research question is this:

How does Taylor Swift utilize satire to address media criticism and to what extent is it

representative of fourth-wave feminism? I have no doubt that this will be a fascinating project.

The final 5000 word academic paper and presentation, I know, will be among the most
beautifully written and presented projects of the year. Trish would settle for no less.” That being

said, I will continue to chase after what I love and “hijack work to make it deeply interesting” to

me. I’ll do it in this class, in my career, and beyond.

The Senior Superlatives that I Won in High School, both of which I plan to achieve someday

II. THROUGH THEIR EYES

I grew up in San Jose, California, which is highly regarded as a Vietnamese culture hub.

With a Vietnamese population of around 120,000, San Jose is the city with the largest

Vietnamese resident population in the world, outside of Vietnam itself.

List of U.S. Cities with Large Vietnamese American Populations

 I’ve been fortunate enough to have my culture represented in the city I live in, the

supermarkets my family shops at, the schools I attend, and the streets that I walk. I’ve never felt

more at home than I do when I visit my hometown of San Jose. Pulitzer Prize winning author

and USC Dornsife Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen describes San Jose as a generally welcoming

place for Vietnamese immigrants and residents.

“David Siry: Okay. Did you feel welcomed into the community you were in, in San

Jose?

Viet Nguyen: Yes. Growing up in downtown San Jose, it was a neighborhood

primarily composed of Vietnamese refugees, Mexican Americans, and what was

probably the white working class, or lower middle class. I wasn’t totally cognizant of

class distinctions at that age. I knew the neighbors on either side of our house, for

example, were white. But we lived one house over from the freeway entrance on a

major street. It was not a nice neighborhood. So to be living in that neighborhood

probably meant you were working class at that time. And so there was never any

sense of hostility from our neighbors who were white, for example. And these were

people who were of the World War II generation. They treated us quite nicely and

had us in their homes, if necessary.”

Transcript of Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen, conducted by Lieutenant Colonel

David R. Siry, Director of the Center for Oral History at the United States Military

Academy, West Point.

 This kindness and sense of community that Nguyen speaks of is only one side of what

it was like to grow up in San Jose. There are also parts of the city that have a reputation that

some impressionable citizens, me being one of them, feel pressure to uphold. Insider author,

Michal Kranz, gives his own take on what it was like for him growing up in San Jose. His take,

although highly different from Nguyen’s, is one that I also resonate with. To describe the “tech

culture” in the San Jose Silicon Valley, Kranz writes, “With stories of wildly successful tech

executives and brainy kids who make millions on ‘unicorn’ startups’, Silicon Valley has often

been talked up in the media as a dazzling place where dreams come true”. This is what many

people think of San Jose and its surrounding area. Kranz shuts down this assumption and reveals

that “home to a number of prestigious universities, top-performing private and public schools,

and some of the highest rates of education in the country, the pressure to succeed in the Bay Area

is very real. Yet such an environment has a dark side — this pressure had detrimental effects on

many people around me growing up, and I witnessed many of the negative mental health

consequences that accompanied it. In addition, because STEM fields reign supreme in Bay Area

culture, other disciplines sometimes fall by the wayside, making holistic education difficult”.

This is a part of my hometown that has followed me all the way to Berkeley. It’s a part that I

can’t seem to escape but am hoping to dismantle through my interactions with my peers and my

ambitions as an aspiring educator.

When marketers target me, it is not the Vietnamese culture hub part of San Jose that they

see. Instead, they see the product of growing up in the Silicon Valley tech hub part of San Jose.

To algorithms, I am the Berkeley student, Bay Area born-and-raised, who is meant to aspire to

more and expected to change the world someday, the next intern for big tech (despite me not

being all that interested in tech). To them, it matters more where I’m currently at, rather than the
experiences and upbringing that has even made

it possible for me to get here. To demonstrate

the successful industrial reputation that precedes

U.C. Berkeley, Business Insider tech

correspondent Melia Robinson writes, “An elite

university located on the outskirts of Silicon

Valley has proven itself as a pipeline for tech

talent. Silicon Valley hires more alumni from

University

of California, Berkeley, than any other school, according to

a new analysis from online recruiting company

HiringSolved”. The school’s proximity to headquarters of

top tech corporations as well as its extensive alumni

network of CEOs puts me in a position where I am expected

to give in to the products and services that will facilitate my

path to tech success. Being from the heart of Silicon Valley

and now attending “the #1 public university in the world”,

my customized media feed includes ways to break into the

tech field and tech internship tips, putting me in occasional

fits of existential crisis where I wonder if that is what I

should be pursuing instead. As a result, I’ve recently quit

using most social media apps, out of the desire to figure out

who I am outside of being a student in this college town

where sleepless nights are so normalized and six-figure success is expected.

When the tension gets heavy, I go back to my roots and do what I grew up doing in the

temple: meditate. It is during these moments of mindfulness that I feel most human and

self-aware. During these moments, I remember what I was constantly reminded of in my

Buddhist home: nothing is ever fixed nor permanent, for everything is ever changing. With that

in mind, I embrace that there’s no predetermined career path I have to pursue just because of

where I’m from or where I go to school. My interests may change and the best way I can view

this is as a result of lifelong learning.

 Works Cited

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Orange County Register, Orange County Register, 12 May 2011,

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“Defender Personality.” 16Personalities, https://www.16personalities.com/isfj-careers.

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Le, Trish. Senior Superlative Awards Email 2021. Personalized collection. Screenshot.

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