Two of my uncles had strokes within months of each other. They lived - I want to say that first, because what follows is not a story about dying.
I watched men who had carried our family’s history, who knew the names and the reasons and the way we got here, struggle to find words that had always come easily.
I had never thought to ask.
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I did not know how my grandparents met. I did not know what my uncles had been afraid of, or proudest of, or what they would have done differently. I am a finance researcher. I had spent years learning to understand systems, without turning that same attention toward the people who made my life.
So I started building A Story: someone to ask, time to listen, and a place for a family to keep the answers.
A note from Bao Vo
In my family, a story rarely belonged to one person. Someone would start telling it at dinner. Someone else would interrupt, because they remembered it differently. A name would get corrected. Most of what we heard stayed in that room.
Both of my grandfathers were soldiers during the Vietnam War. My parents built a life in Saigon from almost nothing.
I knew what happened. I didn’t always know what it felt like.
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I want A Story to keep all of that without asking a family to become archivists. My parents should just be able to talk.
A family is not a résumé. A life shouldn’t become one when we preserve it.
Everyone on the dock saw a different jump.
A family archive is never finished.
What began as a way to preserve older stories became a place for the whole family’s memories.
