When the Tea Cools Slowly: A Vietnamese Memoir of Distance and Becoming

By Kenny Nguyen

When the Tea Cools Slowly: A Vietnamese Memoir of Distance and Becoming is a deeply personal, poignant, and often quietly humorous memoir about one Vietnamese immigrant's journey to build a life-and an identity-on foreign soil.
From a childhood shaped by family duty and hardship in Vietnam to the bewildering first years in America, this book traces the path of a young man learning to navigate culture shock, language barriers, and the silent weight of expectations. Through years of working, struggling, and slowly rising in the beauty industry, he eventually opens his own salon-not just as a business, but as a space of healing, connection, and quiet resilience.
Along the way, he reflects on loneliness, unexpected friendships, love and loss, the duality of identity, and the small, sacred rituals that kept him rooted. With tender honesty, he explores the complicated ties of family, the sharp ache of distance, and the slow art of self-discovery.
This memoir is more than a story of immigration-it is a story of becoming whole. A story of one person who, through hair, heart, and hard work, found his voice, claimed his space, and built a life of meaning across cultures and generations.
It is an offering to anyone who has ever felt like they were living between two worlds-and a quiet reminder that you can belong to both.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FGNMQHBK
• ISBN13: 9798289717382
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"