When we are in touch with our roots, we know what direction to grow in.
~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

works

Alda is a Vietnamese Canadian writer and emerging oral historian based in Edmonton. Her work moves among literary nonfiction, oral history, contemplative writing, audio and visual narrative, installation, and community-based cultural practice. She is drawn to questions of memory, ancestry, displacement, intergenerational relationship, belonging, and spiritual lineage, often through Vietnamese diasporic experience.

selected works

Alda’s Altar (Bàn Thờ), 2026

Cultural installation presented in Where We Came From (and Where We Go From Here) at the Bowladrome Gallery in Edmonton. This offering was about recreating and interpreting a traditional Vietnamese ancestral altar as experienced within a Vietnamese diasporic home. The work placed ancestral remembrance, domestic ritual, and living Vietnamese cultural practice within a contemporary gallery setting.

Dear Tien, 2025–2026

Presented at Chúng Ta Cùng Nhau (We Are Together) Vietnamese-Edmonton Cultural Society event. A creative nonfiction video and photographic adaptation in the form of a letter to Alda’s son, tracing her family’s history from wartime Saigon. This work is a weaving of personal narrative, family photographs, wartime memory, refugee displacement, and Vietnamese Canadian inheritance.

Ancestral Roots, 2024

A personal essay published in The Mindfulness Bell, reflecting on ancestry, Vietnamese Buddhist practice, and continuity across generations.

current project

The Stories We Carry: Gathering Order of Interbeing Voices in Vietnam and Across the Diaspo ra

An in-development book-length literary nonfiction and oral-history project gathering Vietnamese Order of Interbeing voices across Vietnam and the diaspora. Through culturally grounded, trauma-informed story gathering, the project traces histories of war, displacement, spiritual practice, cultural rupture, and continuation across generations.

community & cultural practice

Her creative practice is informed by long-term work in Vietnamese Zen, mindfulness, and cultural-community spaces. She facilitates and helps develop gatherings grounded in listening, relationship, choice, and collective care, Vietnamese Roots and Heritage initiatives, and Vietnamese Canadian cultural programming.