Today’s guest is Nguyen Khac Giang, a Visiting Fellow at the Vietnam Studies Programme of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He’s a repeat guest as well and joined me for a similar year-end conversation in 2024.

We covered the administrative restructuring and its broad impacts, increasing private sector involvement in the economy and infrastructure, General Secretary Tô Lâm’s foreign policy and the move away from ‘bamboo diplomacy,’ the rise of the military and police in business, and the upcoming National Party Congress.

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Today’s guest is Chris Tran, a content creator, a Vietnamese language educator, and more. We discussed the storm relief fundraising campaign he is a part of, how such campaigns are perceived, the resilience of people here, his work with The Ba Lô Project supporting Vietnamese deported by the Trump administration, the importance of preserving the Vietnamese language, and more.

Donate to typhoon relief efforts here.

Learn more about The Ba Lô Project here.

Follow Chris on Instagram to see more about his community work.

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Today’s guest is Anaïs Ca Dao van Manen, author of ‘Vietnam: The Cookbook,’ which features 445 recipes from across Vietnam, including dishes from ethnic minority groups. Phaidon is releasing the book this Wednesday, October 22. She’s also the founder of Yeshi, the casual Taiwanese restaurant with two locations in HCMC that some listeners are likely familiar with.

We talked about Anaïs’s culinary background, how she came to work on the cookbook, learning over 400 recipes while traveling across Vietnam to access the country’s incredibly diverse cuisine, splitting time between working on the book and running a restaurant, and more.

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