Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sophie Tran. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sophie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Working in media for decades, I have had many opportunities to do fun and exciting things from meeting celebrities, traveling, getting special access to amusement parks to tasting food from top chefs around the world. Yet nothing compares to the way Mommy & Me Vietnamese fills my heart.

It all started 35 years ago when I was a baby, my parents could not find Vietnamese nursery rhymes for me to listen to and so they created their own. Like many immigrant children, I grew up heavily involved in my family’s small business. I watched my parents build an empire from scratch. Their Vietnamese children’s educational programming company became globally known and our entire operations was located in our family home: film sets in our living room, editing bay in our guest house, VHS tapes packaged in our garage, bedrooms turned into a distribution call center and back yard was a loading dock. Being the center of all this and helping out daily was my childhood joy. My favorite memory was going out to our iconic store at the Asian Garden Mall in Westminster, CA on holidays to cover for the employees who got the day off. That was what the 90’s looked like for my family.

In the 2000’s the need for Vietnamese bilingual content grew as many people yearned for the music of their homeland and wished for their children to grow up with the same songs they grew up with. As my parents’ company grew in popularity globally my mom had a dream of providing free resources around the world in libraries so that when kids were asked to write and research about their heritage, that they would find more information than just the Vietnam War and jungles. She went on to distribute her content about Vietnamese traditions, cultural celebrations, dances, music and food to public libraries around the world. To this day, that is my mom’s most meaningful project and she still keeps the thank you notes from Austrailia, Europe and US libraries for her contribution that not many people know of.

I tell this back story because my parents are my inspiration and how I define “meaningful project” for myself. I always knew that I wanted to follow in their footsteps by continuing their work. Unfortunately in the 2010’s, due to their popularity and the advancement of technology, so many bootlegs and pirated DVDs were sold everywhere. Even after our family won in court, the other side would file for bankruptcy and we would never be compensated for our work and we lost a lot in years and legal fees. After many years of continuing to invest in Vietnamese bilingual children’s content my parents finally decided to let go, leaving nothing but memories for me to inherit.

I spent years after going to film school, working in media, building connections and dreaming of one day continuing their legacy. The constant questions from parents asking about where to buy our old DVDs, music and lessons made me feel so uneasy as I could see a whole generation of kids growing up without our learning content. I was scared that once we lost the 2nd generation of Vietnamese Americans they would no longer speak enough Vietnamese to teach their own children and our beautiful language and culture would die out. My parents feared that if I followed in their footsteps that I would encounter the same disappointing result they got. Instead of investing their time and energy in real estate, businesses, things that would get them rich, they put their heart and soul into educational programming for kids and they were scared that I would do the same. Instead of listening, I lingered in the media field for years, enjoying all the travel documentaries, all the interviews I got to produce for TV stations and even all the kids content I got to create for others.

It wasn’t until 2022 when I had my daughter Aria, that my life’s purpose realigned and everything truly clicked. She was my reminder of why my parents’ company was so successful at one point and why parents needed bilingual Vietnamese learning content for their children. As a parent myself now, I knew what kind of content I was looking for and with a husband who speaks limited Vietnamese, I was able to recognize that this is the reality for many parents of Vietnamese children. I realized that it’s ok that many parents don’t even speak Vietnamese fluently now and that doesn’t mean our language and culture is lost. As a matter of fact, I found that these parents who don’t speak Vietnamese may even want their kids to learn even more because they know first hand how it feels like to feel disconnected from the community and yearning to know more about our heritage. So many new parents start off saying that they want their child to speak Vietnamese but as life’s distractions and time quickly flies by, their teenager grows up asking why their parents didn’t try harder.

That’s why I finally created Mommy & Me Vietnamese, a free Youtube learning channel serving families with limited Vietnamese by guiding them with bilingual educational content to help children AND parents not only learn about language but culture too. While our productions are not as grand and frequent as my parents’ generation due to budget limitations but it is truely a passion project and the most meaningful project that I have worked on. Although we are still new, our work has already touched countless families and already means so much to my family personally. This passion project that I do along with my sister helps me feel connected with my roots, my family, my community and especially my daughter.

Sophie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Mommy & Me Vietnamese is a passion project created by my sister Jennifer and I with the help of friends like our music & technical director Cao Ba Thong and our muse Aria, my daughter. Our hope is to help guide families in their journey to learning about the Vietnamese language and culture together through songs, music and fun content on Youtube.

Our show is released by episode, each episode focusing on a specific topic such as numbers, body parts or different Vietnamese cultural celebrations like Tet or the Mid-Autumn Festival. Individual songs, stories and clips are also released separately for those who prefer shorter content for their children. Our show is also available on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts for those who prefer no screen time or listening in the car.

Our volunteer-based team is working on creating a library of bilingual songs, whether it be Vietnamese Nursery Rhymes translated to English or American Nursery Rhymes translated to Vietnamese or even original music written and composed by my talented sister. We believe that our focus on music, our experience in teaching kids, our innate ability to produce content as well as Baby Aria’s silly relatable moments will all help make learning Vietnamese fun for everyone.

It’s only been a year and a half since we started Mommy & Me Vietnamese and our Youtube has already gained over 80,000 subscribers, our Instagram already has over 20K followers and we see this interest in our content as motivation and a signal that we are serving a large group of people that have the similar desire of gifting our children knowledge, appreciation and pride of their Vietnamese heritage.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Our ultimate goal is to create more quality content, faster. At this moment our team is volunteer based, that means as a full time toddler mom, I’m also working on many other projects outside of Mommy & Me Vietnamese in order to pay for the bills, my sister and technician also have full time jobs, therefore our time and resources are limited to pour into the projects.

My goal and dream is for the channel to be able to be self-sufficient financially so that we can hire editors to help us release more videos frequently as well as help us improve our quality and content. At this time we are happy to work with whatever help we can get but one can dream, right?

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

The best way to support us is to tell your family and friends about our channel. While we have grown in popularity substantially over the past year, many people still do not know about us. The more people who, subscribe, follow, watch and support us, the more we are able to continue the work that we do.

Unlike in my parents’ generation where physical products needed to be purchased and subsequently pirated, we do not charge our viewers for watching our free content on youtube. Supporting us can be free for you but will help us so much in making it possible to reach our goals.

My sister Jennifer said it best, “Even if I won the lottery I would still just take all that money and continue the work that we’re doing with Mommy & Me Vietnamese”. I couldn’t have said it better myself. We both had the amazing opportunity to grow up creating content and we will continue to do so not for money but because we are extremely passionate about continuing the legacy of teaching kids Vietnamese.

If you would like to donate funds to help us make more content, please email [email protected] or follow us on Instagram @mommyandmevietnamese and by purchasing our recommended Vietnamese learning resources in our bio using our discount code, you can save money while also supporting our cause. Thank you!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: mommyandmevietnamese
• Facebook: MommyandMeVietnamese
• Youtube: TheHeTreTV