If you listen carefully, New York City begins to hum differently in the weeks leading up to the Lunar New Year. Storefronts are papered with red envelopes, subway riders carry bags laden with fruit, and the multiple Chinatowns across the city’s boroughs have a renewed, bustling energy.
Photographer Anh Nguyen recently trailed six Vietnamese American creatives as they made arrangements for Tết, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year and the most important holiday in Vietnam. Between busy days, deadlines, shoots, and sets—not to mention Fashion Week this year—they build altars, steam sticky rice, phone family across time zones, and rehearse traditions learned at their parents’ elbows. Some 23,000 New Yorkers are of Vietnamese descent, a relatively smaller community compared to places like San José and Orange County in California or Houston. Plus, “the New York put-your-head-down-and-hustle mentality can be isolating,” as artist and actor Lynn Kim Đỗ puts it. “We’re missing the community here, so we gotta make it our own.”
For these stylists, chefs, DJs, actors, and designers, Lunar New Year is not a pause from creative life but an extension of it: vibrant arrangements of fresh yellow blooms across a cozy apartment; an elaborate spread of food, and even some records, to celebrate with your ancestors; cherished memories of falling asleep in the kitchen next to your parents making bánh chưng. Preparation is less about spectacle than intention: a recalibration of space, spirit, and self. And with it the deep understanding that readying for the new year means honoring the old one—and making space, deliberately, for what comes next.
