Hello! My name is Bea (they/them). I'm a second-generation Vietnamese American, a member of Generation Z (2001!), and a recent college graduate from Stanford University with a degree in Comparative Literature and a minor in Creative Writing. In school, my coursework was geared toward modern East Asian literature, as well as literatures pertaining to the crisis of modernity faced by the onset of the twentieth century. Some of my favorite authors are Mieko Kawakami, Sayaka Murata, and Han Kang.
For the last few years, I've had the pleasure of working in several literary and arts spaces, including the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Plympton, the Creative Writing Program and Comparative Literature Department at Stanford University, and currently Poets & Writers. In many of the places I've worked, I've had specific roles as a proofreader, copyeditor, production editor, and fiction editor. As of now, I'm currently based in Minnesota, where I grew up.
Right now, my current interests on Wikipedia are copyediting and contributing to pages involving Asian and Asian American literature, as well as K-pop and broader twenty-first-century Korean pop culture. In particular, I'm a huge fan of NewJeans, Le Sserafim, and Aespa, and I hope to regularly update those pages as their careers continue. I'm also immensely grateful to be a part of the WikiPortraits project. For November, the month of the National Book Awards, I'm also creating pages for notable National Book Award–nominated works.
I'm also trying to learn Japanese both for real-world purposes as well as for the sake of eventually reading Japanese literature in the original. For now, however, I'm using my grasp of the language to work on and research articles that may benefit from a bilingual perspective, specifically articles regarding Japanese books translated to English. I also spent about a year learning Korean, a language which I now solely use on Wikipedia for the same purpose.
I've only been an editor on Wikipedia since early 2024, which means I presumably have a lot to learn! Please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page if there's something that I'm doing wrong—or if there's a better way for me to be doing something.
My goal for Wikipedia was established when I realized that no one had made a page for Ocean Vuong's Time Is a Mother after two years of its publication despite Vuong being one of the most prominent poets working today. Upon further investigation, I found that many seminal books to Asian and Asian American literature—such as Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel or Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony—didn't have pages either! From then on, I've set out on a journey to add some of the books, past and present, which have certain significance to these formations.
As part of my goal to expand Asian and Asian American literature on Wikipedia, here are the book pages I've created so far toward that end. (Author pages I created are denoted with a *.)
