All About Chung

What's Led Me to This Very Point In My Life, In One Paragraph:

I was born in Vietnam on October 23, 1981, the youngest child of six. Our family emigrated to the Bay Area, California in 1989, where I have resided ever since. While I live in San Francisco, my family - both parents, five siblings and their spouses, and 10 nieces* and nephews - all reside in the Silicon Valley. I went to school at UC Berkeley and got a B.A. in English, which means I'm well-versed in writing long prose about absolutely nothing. In 2006, I briefly worked at Google and my contract was terminated. During that period of unemployment, I had a lot of free time on my hand so I pursued a personal photo-a-day project that really ignited my love for photography. I bought my first DSLR shortly thereafter, found some gigs on Craigslist (thanks to Chung Photo and Ziba Studio for showing me the ropes!), and starting in 2007 up until this point, I've been photographing weddings, families, and just people in love. And I love it. So the moral of the story is... thank you for laying me off, Google**. xoxo

What's With the Bloggity Blog?

I love the blogging format. It's easy to update and it encourages regular updates, both of which are not so true about a regular website. I think the photography profession is a very intimate one, so I figure a blog would be a nice way for you to read up on who I am and keep up-to-date with all my random, sometimes stupid, sometimes inane, oftentimes BRILLIANT (ha!) thoughts.

Nine Pretty Random Things You Might As Well Know Now:

1. I make a lot of jokes, especially if caught in an uncomfortable situation. I'm like Chandler Bing without a team of extremely well-paid writers to back me up. Oh, and I love bad puns. And randomness. Picachu! He doesn't live in the pineapple under the sea. No, no he does not.
2. I love random acts of kindness. No act of kindness is too small. I read this in Zig Ziglar's book and believe it to be quite true: "You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough people get what they want."
3. The cavity on my sweet tooth has its own sweet tooth. That's how much I love sugary goodness. I hop from one hip dessert bandwagon to another (cupcakes, cake pops, yogurt shops, boba drinks, macarons, ice cream, etc.). However, I refuse to hop on the whoopie pie bandwagon. Mark my words.
4. When you get those email forwards that try to scare you with some unbelievable "fact," be sure to check out snopes.com before forwarding that thing around. You don't want to spread hearsay and untrue rumors now, do you? Leave that job to cable news programming. Zing!
5. The croissant is, without argument, the best vessel for all your sandwiching needs.
6. I cook a mean bowl of cereal with milk. Just kidding! I can also make sandwiches using croissants. Mmm... croissant sandwich.
7. List of games I love to play: Uno, Taboo, Scattergories, chess, Scrabble, Rummikub, Dr. Mario. Favorite sport: tennis.
8. I consistently have trouble spelling the word "occasion" properly. After admitting this publicly, I vow to not forget how to properly spell it (two c's, one s) going forward, thus rendering number 8 moot. Moot is an awesome word!
9. Finally, while I may seem loud and outspoken, I'm incredibly non-confrontational for the most part and prefer to keep the peace, oftentimes even if it means that I have to bite my tongue (not literally, of course; that's painful!). I suppose a part of me feels that sure, we can hash it all out and let the hurt feelings happen and then we'll be better people afterwards even if we're a little bruised and broken by the whole experience. And then the other part of me thinks, "This is stupid and is not a big deal at all in the big scheme of things. I will let this slide. Hell, I'm pretty sure I won't remember this in 10 minutes." Argument avoided, people continue to be happy, and, once again, I confirm why I'm well-suited for a job in customer service.

Photos by Gary Kaplan

Do you have questions for me? Send me an email at chung.nguyen(at)gmail.com. Or, if you're cool-school and prefer to hear my alto voice, call me at 408.532.5880 (Google Voice) or 408.387.2118 (cell, and text-able, which defeats the whole voice-hearing but, you get the point).

Thanks for reading. That's it. Stop reading. I'm done with this blog entry. Oh, wait, footnotes....

* I should note that one of my nieces is now living in Japan and working as an English teacher, and another is a student at USC, so they're technically not living in the Silicon Valley at the moment. I'm tremendously proud of both their various adventures.

** I love Google! No joke. I love a lot of the products that they offer. I worked on the Gmail team so, if you have questions about Gmail, I might still be able to help answer them for you. Unofficially, of course.

Wow, you're at the end of the footnotes and you're still reading? Commendable! In closing, I suppose, I would like to say that I'm the kind of person who strongly believes that at any given moment, you can work toward becoming the person that you strive to be. The past is gone, the present is fleeting, so have faith in yourself. Go forth and be awesome, friend!