Events

By Sharon Simonson SAN FRANCISCO—Vivekanand T Choudhry arrived early June 21 at Marina Green Park in San Francisco for International Yoga Day. It was a milestone for the 38-year-old Silicon Valley resident and Bihar, India, native. Something in him changed when he heard Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s maiden speech to the United Nations in September and Modi's call for the global embrace of yoga as a force for good, Choudhry says. He has dabbled in yoga for many years. His wife, grandfather and father-in-law are dedicated to it. But he has never been able to practice consistently, until now. Though he started in earnest a mere 10 days earlier, he admits with a laugh, his life’s trajectory has changed, he insists. “(Yoga) was not a priority; now it is,” he says. Ap...

By Sharon Simonson EAST SAN JOSE — Quyen Mai admits the insanity of trying to create and organize a two-day Tet Festival for more than 12,000 people, starting from nothing only four months before the event date. When he agreed to lead the effort for the most important Vietnamese celebration of the year, the 31-year-old immigrant and self-proclaimed community-builder was not thinking about practicality: “People know the Vietnamese culture because of pho noodles,” he says. “We have a lot more than that.” The Viet Nam Project Forty years after the fall of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists and the arrival of the first refugees to American shores, San Jose’s Vietnamese-American population owes itself — and the community at large — a Tet Festival wo...

All Together Now

Chair Mai Has A Dream: San Jose Vietnamese Tet Festival 2015