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Every year for 7 years now, the Vietnamese-American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA) has been holding a Mid-Autumn Festival Painting Contest for kids.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, probably originally a harvest festival, has evolved in tradition to become the Vietnamese day for kids.

Since 2003, VAALA (web site here) has been holding the annual painting competition for kids. As a measure of how strong the tradition has been going: Some kids who participated in the first competition are now in college; and some babies born in the year of the first competition are now participating in it.

This year’s competition took place on Saturday October 3, with the award ceremony the day after.

Enjoy the photos of people enjoying themselves.

Photos from the day of the contest are by Nguoi Viet reporter Ngoc Lan, used with permission.

The floor is as good a space as any to create art.

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We’re given fingers for a reason…

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(Photo by the New Haven Register)

Yale’s Graduate School and School of Medicine released this statement on 25 September, the day before Annie Le’s funeral in California:

The Graduate School, the School of Medicine, and the entire Yale community are deeply saddened by the tragic death of graduate student Annie Marie Le, 24, on September 8.

Annie was born in San Jose, California, and spent most of her childhood in Placerville, California. She graduated from Union Mine High School at the top of her class of 362 in 2003. She matriculated at the University of Rochester, in New York, where she majored in bioscience and met her fiancé, Jonathan Widawsky. Jonathan is now a graduate student in physics at Columbia University.

Annie came to Yale University as a graduate pharmacology student in 2007 and would have earned her doctorate in 2013. She joined Anton Bennett’s laboratory, which focuses on a specific family of enzymes that are involved in controlling important biological functions, with emphasis on the role that these enzymes play in human disease. Annie studied how certain types of fatty acids regulate an enzyme believed to be involved in controlling cellular metabolism and the development of metabolic disease. She discovered that certain metabolic stresses could influence the activity of an enzyme believed to be involved in controlling mitochondrial function in muscle cells. She had several other exciting research projects in progress, in collaboration with other members of the Bennett lab.

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In honor of Finals Week - which Professor Bolsavik survived without losing life, limb, or sanity, thank you very much - here’s a heartfelt congratulations to all graduates of the Class of ‘09.

And, let’s take a look at local valedictorians.

“Local” means near the Bolsavik’s house in Little Saigon (he’s just parochial that way). The Bolsavik’s house is located in the Garden Grove Unified School District, which is the principal district serving the Little Saigon area.

There are 8 high schools in the Garden Grove USD, and from those schools 5 valedictorians and 6 salutatorians have recognizable Vietnamese family names.

Congratulations to all grads, and a special shout-out to the valedictorians and salutatorians for your achievement.

The list of GGUSD valedictorians and salutatorians follows the jump.

(If you’re not on the list - and not to take away anything from the top students or anything - don’t sweat it. You know the vast majority of successful people were not valedictorians or salutatorians of their high schools, right?)

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A Viet student has been arrested in the death of his girlfriend, found strangled in her own appartment near Cal State Long Beach, according to the Daily 49er here and the OC Register and LA Times here and here.

The victim, 20-year-old CSULB nursing student Kate Sue Yi (pictured), was discovered dead last Thursday by her roommate Kim Ryman. Paramedics pronounced her dead on the scene.

On Saturday, her boyfriend Jonathan Huynh was arrested in Orange on suspicion of murdering Yi.

Neighbors interviewed by the Daily 49er stated that they had not heard or seen anything until police came to their doors. “This place is quiet. Not a whole lot goes on here,” one is quoted as saying.

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A strange turn of the event, hinging on a stranger pageant rule, caused a Viet who had been crowned Miss Garden Grove Outstanding Teen just six months ago to lose her title, reports the OC Register here.

Emily Nguyen (center, when she won the pageant), now a senior at Sunny Hills High School, was beauty queen for six months, until a casual lunch conversation with the pageant’s executive director disclosed that she was too old to qualify for the competition.

“Too old” is relative. Emily was 16 at the time she applied for the pageant in the summer of 2008. That was the summer after her junior year in high school. She’s still 16 now.

Nonetheless, “according to the pageant rules, that meant she was already a senior,” the executive director Stacy Margolin said. Margolin called the problem a “technicality.”

As it turns out, a teen-ager’s senior year in high school (the one year where extracurricular activities are least likely to affect her schooling) is actually also the one year where a girl is too old to compete for Miss Teen and too young to compete for the regular Miss title.

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Vietnamese-American students in the Midwest are getting ready for a large annual conference of fellow leaders from all over the country, to be held the week-end of April 3 to 5, 2009

Called the “Vietnamese Interacting as One” conference, the event is in its seventh year. Despite its age, the conference will forever be called “VIA-1″ and never “VIA-2″ or “VIA-3″ or whatever. As organizer Thục Nguyễn told the Bolsavik,

“Each year the location and theme of the conference change, but the Conference Name will always be Vietnamese Interacting as One (VIA-1). This year’s theme is ‘come together’. Each year there are around 200 attendees that attend the conference.”

Thục Nguyễn’s official role is Advisor and staff to the VIA-1 conference, which was started seven years ago by Bao Nguyen and a few Viet students from the University of Cincinnati. Two years ago, Thục and Bao joined forces and co-founded the Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of the Midwest.

The UVSA of Midwest shall, as Thuc says, “be an independent organization and shall not be governed or controlled by any other organization. UVSA of Midwest is committed to empowering emerging community leaders within the Vietnamese community in the Midwest United States.”

The goal of VIA-1 is to “get Viet students in the Midwest to interact with each other.” Participants come together to collaborate in workshops, make new friends and see old ones, and to just have fun.

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A Viet graduating senior at a prestigious public prep school in Metairie, Louisiana is facing criminal charges for lacing 22 cupcakes with a laxative, and leaving them in the teachers’ lounge, reports the Times-Picayune here.

Jeannie Nguyen, 17, an honor student, was suspended for the rest of her senior year at Patrick F. Taylor Science and Technology Academy, effectively being expelled. Also expelled was her honor student and partner in crime, Kamrin Kennedy, 17, of nearby Marrero.

The two were not just expelled — they were also arrested and charged with mingling harmful substances, a crime punishable by up to two years in prison and a maximum fine of $1,000.

No teachers were harmed in the making of the prank, however. Other students warned one teacher, who then relayed the information to the principal.

Nguyen and Kennedy admitted buying cupcake mix and adding MiraLAX, an over-the-counter laxative and stool softener. The laxative was also added to the icing.

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A Viet teenaged student is among four who raised more than $20,000 for the homeless in Minneapolis-St. Paul, says the Star Tribune here.

The four students at Johnson High School spent the summer working on a fundraiser they started for Catholic Charities. Described by the paper as students who “have experienced poverty themselves,” the four are: Pang Lor, 17; Jayvin Miller-Murphy, 15; Sompos Mhul, 15, and Arthur Nguyen, 15.

Over the summer, the students spent days knocking on doors and carrying groceries to earn donations for St. Paul Project Homeless. They held a benefit dinner in late July, with the help of guidance counselor Dan Kennedy. By the end of July, they had raised more than $10,000.

Would you wear undies that tell your partner “You need a ticket to ride this ride” — and by ticket, the undie means “condom”?

That’s exactly what Tina Nguyen, a graduating high school senior from Pomona, California thought you’d want.

Or at least that you’d want if you care about safe sex and STD prevention.

On that idea, Tina won the Grand Prize in a competition entitled “InBrief: What if Ur Undies Had the Last Word” (feel free to groan at the pun) hosted by Brickfish, a social web site and Internet Sexuality Information Services, Inc. (ISIS) a nonprofit organization promoting sexual health.

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The agreement for the Tet Festival for the next 5 years, between UVSA and the City of Garden Grove, went up for a vote before the City Council last night, and it passed unanimously.

Before the meeting, there were some rumors (including in comments on Bolsavik.com here) that back-room deals being worked to cut short the students’ renewed contract. They brought volunteers and activists to the meeting in force, to show widespread and massive support for the UVSA to get another 5 years of the Tet Festival. UVSA, short for Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California (Vietnamese: Tong Hoi Sinh Vien), is an umbrella organization of Vietnamese Student Associations at 12 Southern California colleges and universities, and another 20 Vietnamese Clubs at local high schools.

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