I grew up behind the counter of my family’s restaurant, drawing on receipt paper and menu pads while listening to adults talk about sacrifice, money, and survival in incomplete Vietnamese. I learned how much people carry and how rarely they say it out loud.

I tried to take a practical path by pursuing medicine. But the science didn't stay, the human behavior underneath did: how memory forms, how pain lingers, how silence gets passed down. I kept returning to the same instinct: to notice and to make meaning out of what’s felt but unspoken.

Art direction became where that drive finally found a home, it taught me how to hear, how to speak truth, and how to respond.