Windy Pham

One of my favorite things about this community is how many of us started the exact same way: As parents searching for books where our children could see themselves, their families, their language, and their culture.

And when we couldn’t find enough of those stories, we decided to create them. That’s why this community feels like family to me. We may tell different stories, but we’re all working toward the same goal: helping children feel seen, valued, and proud of who they are.

I’m so grateful to be building alongside these incredible creators and sharing this journey together.

Who are your favorite diverse children’s book authors or creators? Drop their names in the comments, I want this list to keep growing. ❤️📚

This might be an unpopular opinion, but forcing a child to speak Vietnamese is one of the fastest ways to make them reject it.

I’ve watched too many parents use shame, pressure, and constant correction in the name of preserving the language, only to wonder years later why their teenager refuses to speak a single word.

Language is more than vocabulary. It’s emotion. It’s connection. It’s belonging. When a child associates a language with criticism, they’re not just avoiding the words, they’re avoiding the feelings attached to them.
Raising my daughter bilingually has taught me that the approach matters more than the number of hours.

Children learn best when language feels joyful, meaningful, and part of everyday life.
That’s one of the reasons I write bilingual books. I want children to see their heritage language as something to celebrate, not something to fear getting wrong.

What do you think? Agree or disagree? I’d love to hear your experience in the comments. 👇❤️

I knew my life would change when I became a mom. What I did not know was that I would change too, not gradually but all at once, and that I would spend a long time figuring out which parts of the person I was before still had a place in the person I was becoming.

Nobody prepares you for that part. I love being her mother. I also miss that woman sometimes. And I used to feel guilty admitting that, like missing her meant I was not grateful enough, not present enough, not doing this right.

It took me a while to understand that those two things can be true at the same time without one canceling the other out. You can love the life you have built and still mourn the version of yourself that had to be left behind to build it. That is not a contradiction. That is just what honest motherhood actually looks like.

If you have felt this too, you are not alone in it.

There are two middle names that appear in millions of Vietnamese names and most of us grew up never questioning them. Văn for boys. Thị for girls. But those names were not random. They were a reflection of exactly what that society believed about who deserved an education, who deserved a public identity, and who belonged to someone else. The history inside a name runs deeper than most people realize. Swipe through and tell me in the comments whether you carry one of these names and whether you ever stopped to wonder why.

I spent a long time looking for the perfect bilingual routine before I realized it was never coming.
The perfect one was not going to happen. The real one just needed to be consistent.
These five things are what we actually do in our house. Not what I planned. Not what looks good on paper. Just what stuck.
My daughter is four now. She reaches for Vietnamese books herself. She sings along to Vietnamese songs without being asked. And sometimes she corrects my tones, which is both humbling and exactly everything I hoped for.
If you are trying to figure out where to start, pick one thing from this list and do it every day for a month. That is it. That is how it begins.

I am from the North. Some of my closest friends are from the South. The dinner table is honestly where I notice our differences the most.

When a Southern friend drops by at mealtime, they mean it when they say stay and eat. Pull up a chair. Whatever is on the table is yours.

When someone shows up at a Northern household mid-meal, the host will warmly invite them to stay. But the real expectation on both sides is a polite decline, because a Northern host who truly wants you there wants to prepare something proper for you first.

Same hospitality. Two completely different expressions of it. It took me a while to understand that neither one is more sincere than the other. They are just different.
Every family has their own version of this too, so if yours looks nothing like what I described, I genuinely want to hear it in the comments.

After my daughter was born, there were days I felt completely hollow inside a life that was supposed to feel full.

I did not have a word for it at the time. I just thought I was failing at something everyone else seemed to do naturally. In our community, you do not talk about that. You push through. You are grateful. You hold it together because that is what the women before you did.

What I know now is that nearly one in five new mothers experience postpartum depression, and more than half go untreated, not because they do not need help but because asking for it feels like admitting you are not enough.

You are enough. What you are feeling is not a character flaw. It is one of the most common complications of childbirth and it gets better with the right support.
If you are in it right now, please say something to someone. A doctor, a friend, anyone. You carried a whole life into the world. You deserve care too.