Welcome Staff Writer Amanda Nguyen
Former Irvine resident and current pre-dental first-year at the University of the Pacific Amanda Nguyen joins The Pacifican as a Staff Writer! Amanda is an emotional, sentimental, deep-feeling nonconformist. She is adamant about how the film Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of all time. As a second-generation Vietnamese-American, Amanda recounts how she bawled at the movie’s portrayal of intergenerational trauma in the complex relationship between an Asian immigrant mother and her teenage daughter as it reflected her own loving, imperfect relationship with her mom. Amanda argues that the movie hits (un)comfortably close to home but does a decent job of shattering Asian stereotypes in Hollywood that misrepresent Asian Americans in Western media as overly passive pushovers and sidekicks. Amanda’s schema of an Asian American involves an empowering and worthy individual who has conquered adversity just as everyone else has and who deserves to be represented. Amanda believes that everyone has valuable stories to share, and she wants to work to share them!
Amanda draws great inspiration from her friends and community, often in secret, collecting quotes that she felt were significant or heartfelt. For example, a quote one of her best friends told her has been integrated into her personal philosophy, “An enemy is a person whose story you do not know.” Amanda interpreted that we need to be vulnerable by telling our own stories while being willing to listen to others’ stories because, to Amanda, meaningful interactions all come down to empathy and a thirst to understand and learn. Being intellectually stimulated and empowered by the people she surrounds herself with, Amanda unironically refers to herself as her friends’ “biggest fan”.
In twelfth grade, she took AP Literature (her favorite class) and was enrolled in a period with an English teacher notorious for being the most challenging but involved teacher at her school. Amanda believes that it was in that particular class that she reclaimed meaningful face-to-face conversation after the pandemic. She would do anything to recreate an environment similar to that in her AP Literature class, where everyone was gushing about discussing, learning, and sharing what was inside their minds and hearts. Amanda also jokes that her greatest craving (cold white peach slices served at a kitchen island) is the secret to being her best friend. And if she were interrogated, she would immediately crack once offered that ambrosial fruit, which she claims boasts an elegant, floral sweetness. She also loves matcha, pandas, and cherry blossoms, an interesting combination that appears over and over in all her Daiso stationery and dorm room decor. In her free time, she journals and has been journaling for almost a year now every day. All her journals are saved on a Notion page that also houses her to-do list, planner, course catalog, and a master database of all her assignments. Amanda draws inspiration from pieces she has read in AP Literature (like Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior) and outside of AP Literature (like Bell Hook’s Feminism is for Everybody, Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises).
Having encouraged girls to persist in male-dominated fields through Girls Who Code, led her school’s peer tutoring program, coordinated meetings for her high school’s future health professionals club, and directed the education-based 501c(3) nonprofit LOT Foundation, Amanda has manifested her personal philosophies into action, developing a love for creating change, service, and learning others’ stories while being empathetic. To overcome the fear of putting herself out there and being judged, she tells herself that all publicity is good publicity and that the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference, meaning she’d rather be hated after making herself known than not ever having been known at all. Despite being afraid, she joined The Pacifican because she wanted to continue adding to and drawing from other social and humanistic perspectives. Diversity in experience and exposure is integral to a multifaceted and holistic education. At UOP, Amanda hopes the community nestled within Stockton, the most racially diverse city in the United States, can be a part of the educational experience Amanda is creating for herself.