About Me — Albert Le
Curious observer with an occasional good idea
I write this from my one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a disaster with the rain outside, postponing my plans to go to a trivia night with some friends. Instead, I’m writing while I wait for my food to marinate before I cook dinner — it’s thinly sliced, soy sauce and gochujang marinated beef with some onions and bell peppers, with soon-to-be pan-fried gyoza on the side.
Second Gen
The food is probably a giveaway that I am an Asian American. Vietnamese-American, to be exact. Something like 97% with 3% being Japanese, thanks to my older brother’s 23AndMe results.
Being a second-generation immigrant has been a never-ending comedy-drama that I can’t stop watching. I recently traveled to Vietnam for the second time. The first time was in 2013 when I was 25 years old, and it was such an eye-opening experience. For the first time, I felt like I could understand why my parents were the way they were — from the small plastic stools that we always kept all the way to the way they thought about family.
Coming into this second trip I had high expectations. Unlike the first time where I traveled to the south, this time I visited the north and central regions. And this time I came equipped with a 3-month crash course in beginner’s Vietnamese.
I never grew up speaking Vietnamese; at least from what I remember. My mother claims I spoke when I was very young, but they eventually decided to only teach me and my siblings English to better assimilate. A good idea overall, given that the ’90s in Texas weren’t exactly known for embracing diversity. A side effect of this was that I couldn’t properly communicate at home with my relatives who spoke mostly Vietnamese. The most I could say to my grandfather was hello. What I wish I could say to him now.
In Vietnam, I brokered a meeting with some relatives through my mother. It was my grandfather’s sister’s son and his smattering of relatives. It’s obvious that most of them only spoke Vietnamese. However, the daughter, 17, and son, 24, studied English and it was decided they would serve as my decoder for our interactions.
I arrived before most of my family for the first dinner we had together in Hanoi. The restaurant served cuisine from Sapa and the tables were set up to mimic their traditions. We all sat cross-legged on too-thin fabric pads around a large wooden, rectangular table while small fans oscillated above us. It was hot. My uncle (not really my uncle, but that’s how it works), the tribal leader, decided I would sit next to him.
It began cordially with my uncle giving a speech about how no matter where we were all from, we were still family. My girlfriend and I felt right at home, with my aunties (not really aunties) telling us stories of my family that I hadn’t heard before.
My grandfather was never supposed to flee Vietnam. It was only because the eldest child out of 4 couldn’t be found the day of the departure, that my grandfather was given the once-in-a-generation opportunity to look for a more stable home with his father. My great-grandfather, aside from having to only choose one child to bring with him, also couldn’t take his wife along. Although he tried, after he left he never spoke to her or saw her again. Those are sacrifices I hope I’ll never have to make.
And so the night went on, with me pouring drinks out for the uncles and them returning the favor. A tradition that I’ll keep with me is to shake hands with every person you take a shot of alcohol with.
After one particular handshake, the baijiu we were drinking decided to breathe some chaos into my uncle. To the other uncles he loudly declared, he’s Vietnamese on the outside, but on the inside, he is an American. He doesn’t even know his own language.
A fun jab at my expense. Shake it off. Locker room talk. But he was right. And I only knew because my cousins awkwardly delivered this message to me. I just nodded and smiled. As much as I came from the same family, and as much as I felt more Vietnamese than I ever had in my life, I was still a half step out.
Being raised to only speak English didn’t mean that I was American. At least, that much was apparent growing up.
I was born in Tennessee in a town divided in half with Virginia. My family moved to Texas before I remember.
Growing up in Houston I was surrounded by people that mostly didn’t look like me. The elementary school I went to had 2 Asian boys and 1 Asian girl — me, my brother, and my younger sister. I was so exotic that I was given the exclusive opportunity to join an ESL class. I tested out pretty quickly.
In middle school, my family moved to the suburbs, where I first saw other Asian kids outside of my family. There were a few factions of Asian friends that I became a part of. One group, throughout the years, only wore Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch, watched the O.C., and called themselves bananas. Yellow on the outside and white on the inside.
If I didn’t know Vietnamese before, I definitely didn’t want to know it at the time.
It was only through travel, and ultimately moving to New York, that I began to become comfortable with my background and wanted to dig into my past. New York was the place you could be anything because to everyone there you could be who you wanted as long as you didn’t get in anyone’s way. And that was liberating.
Profession
Today I commuted to my job where I go into the office 3 days a week. I prefer it that way. I work at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., as a product marketer in the payments division.
Product marketing has a strong influence on what you see on product boxes when they’re sitting on the shelf — for physical products at least. Everything on the box we either directly determine or influence — the name, price, description, benefits, images, box dimensions and materials, where and how it’s sold, etc. Underneath all of those elements is a gigantic web of processes buried inside an organization that’s fun to dig up.
I wasn’t always a product marketer. I didn’t even want to be one, once. Growing up I was never sure what I wanted to be. My father was a hyper-smart-but-a-little-awkward electrical engineer with a Master’s Degree in solid-state physics (???), and he heavily influenced us.
On the weekends, dad would take me and my older brother to Fry’s Electronics (RIP) to scour the discount deals. After studying the weekly flier we’d go through the aisles and turn over motherboards, GPUs, HDDs, RAM, floppy drives, and more just for the fun of it. And I loved it. I remember building my first computer with a 2x compact disc burner that took about an hour to burn the 8 songs that I would download from Limewire onto a CD-R.
And seeing my brother go to the University of Texas at Austin for a mechanical engineering degree pretty much locked in the belief that I would also go to school for engineering. And I did. For a while. For aerospace engineering.
For a few different reasons, I changed my major to undeclared. I wanted to be involved in technology, but I didn’t think I could build it. So rather than building it, I decided I would help sell it. I joined the Advertising and Public Relations College and minored in business. I’ll be the first to say there were regrets along the way. Years after I graduated I was even accepted into a software development bootcamp that I ended up turning down for a job offer.
I worked for several years at technology companies and tech start-ups and climbed to become a senior member of a customer success team. I was great at the role, which entailed getting to know senior leaders to understand their business and selling custom technology solutions. The next logical step was to become director of a team. However, there was always a voice in the back of my head. As much as I loved the role, I felt both a grind and a limiting factor in the direction I wanted to take my growth.
I wanted to build but I wasn’t able to. After several back-and-forth conversations with my company’s leadership, I decided to make the jump to product marketing. It had enough of a blend of my background in business strategy, customer empathy, and direct customer interaction, with product creation and roadmapping for me to feel comfortable.
Now I work for the largest bank in the U.S. building and launching payment solutions.
Why you should follow me
My job requires me to write a lot. I’ve written copy for endless email campaigns, whitepapers, solutions guides, digital ads, printed pamphlets, landing pages, and more.
I’m here on Medium to extend my writing into fiction, and to create fun stories — for fun. To me, that means exploring characters and what they learn through the adventures they go on. I’ve also felt that writing can connect people to situations that are entirely foreign yet realistically plausible to them.
Recently, I’ve come across a few stories of historical Vietnam I’d like to re-imagine. Eventually, I’d like to write a short novel with enough time and focus.
I hope to learn from the amazing writing community, and hope to have you along for the ride.
Get fictional short stories delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.
