Most of my life I’ve had somewhat of an obsession with the United States of America. I’ve always felt as if I was destined to go there to live my own version of the American dream.  As I got older, my obsession narrowed to the San Francisco Bay Area. To me, the Bay Area was [...]

Danny (Dandiggity) Le is a Vietnamese-American shop owner by day, entrepreneur by night and incredibly gifted poet, no matter the time of day.
I was born in Oklahoma in 1981 and didn’t move to Silicon Valley until 1989. My parents came to America with less than a hundred dollars in their pocket, not knowing English or [...]

I’ll let you know secrets about India, I mean, have you ever wondered why there are so many Indians in Silicon Valley? It’s not a freaky coincidence that a hundred thousand students pick engineering as their lane. How does a country mint so many techies and engineer guys? I come from Bombay, in the Indian [...]

My mother, a Sicilian immigrant who came to the United States before World War I, moved to the Silicon Valley and worked in Sacramento at the canneries for many years. My mother had a very tough time in this area as my grandmother was Sicilian and my grandfather was Albanian. At that time, it was [...]

When I first came to California [from the Netherlands] in 1957, there were orchards everywhere and the Valley Fair shopping center had just opened. Valley Fair was the only major shopping center in the valley. The only other place to purchase clothes and shoes was downtown San Jose at Macy’s or Penney’s, along with a bunch of smaller [...]

I grew up in Mexico City. Mexico City, as you might know, is one of the huge cities of the world. What comes from that? Good things and bad things. Good things if you’re born in the rich areas or in the middle class areas. But I was born in the lower income areas close [...]

“Papa,” Juliaa Anne whimpered as she rubbed my shoulder to wake me up from my slumber. “Wake up Pa. Sariah and I will be late for school,” she said in a somber tone. Life has been really hard on all of us ever since we moved here last October to the quiet suburb of Milpitas [...]