500 episodes listed below
Vietnamese culture, argued and remembered aloud.
The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen treats Vietnamese identity as something argued over, cooked, filmed, joked about, built, inherited, and revised. Recent episodes move from Little Saigon culture work and Vietnamese food branding to comedy, aerospace engineering, patriarchy, and films about artists living through wartime history.
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The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen works like a long table conversation about Vietnamese culture, with enough space for memory, disagreement, jokes, grief, and theory to sit near each other. It is patient. Recent episodes use specific guests and projects as entry points: Saigon Bonbon becomes a way to talk about food, branding, and cultural export; Y Van opens onto art, war memory, lost music, and generational homage. The show is especially interested in how culture survives contact with business, comedy, gender roles, migration, and public taste. Food appears again and again. Hue family cooking, weekend soups, Vietnamese restaurants in Little Saigon, gummy candy, and family-made dishes are treated as social language, not just flavor. The conversations can turn blunt quickly, as in episodes where comedians move from childhood, trauma, sexuality, grief, and bathroom humor into broader reflections on performance. Other episodes stretch the frame. Kevin Quach discusses aerospace work through testing, risk, snap decisions, and the pressure of being the human backup system inside experimental flight. Mia from Viet Boss Babe brings patriarchy and masculinity into a joint conversation about Vietnamese women, men, family hierarchy, and changing expectations. Little Saigon Official and Discover Little Saigon pull the show toward public culture, asking why identity angst matters and why some people spend their lives trying to move culture forward. The show does not sand off contradiction. It often lets a guest start from lived experience, then circle through pride, discomfort, aspiration, and responsibility before landing anywhere firm. That looseness is part of the point. It makes the show feel less like a packaged profile series and more like an archive of people working out what they owe to family, language, place, and each other. The result is thoughtful without being distant. It can be funny, sentimental, argumentative, and grave within the same stretch of audio. Listeners looking for clean conclusions may find it meandering. Listeners drawn to Vietnamese diaspora life in its ordinary and unruly details will find a show that keeps asking what should be preserved, what can be remade, and what still hurts.
Made for: For listeners interested in Vietnamese diaspora life, Little Saigon culture, family memory, food, film, comedy, gender, and identity. It especially suits people who prefer reflective, lived-in conversations over quick interviews or polished cultural explainers.
What sets it apart: The show connects personal history to public culture without forcing a single lesson. Its strength is the way guests move from concrete work, meals, films, jokes, and careers into larger questions about pride, belonging, preservation, and authenticity.
Being part of a culture of almost 100 million Vietnamese people living in the world today has its pain and challenges, but it comes with plenty of history, privileges and honors. Join Kenneth Nguyen as he spotlights Vietnamese excellence from around the world. Each episode explores the creative process of individuals shaping the diversity of what it means to be Vietnamese--as a local, born and raised, or as a third culture kid, and even the divisions that separate us politically and culturally. This show can take multiple directions, but what it will do is show Vietnamese from a transpacific lens, in all its facets and complexities.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Kenneth Nguyen makes Vietnamese identity legible through searching guest conversations that connect personal experience with history, culture, and public life.
Kenneth Nguyen turns questions of Vietnamese identity into candid conversations about how culture is inherited, contested, and remade. The guest mix gives those questions unusual reach, moving from a Blue Origin aerospace engineer's flight-testing experience to writers and…
From experimental helicopters to dinner-table dissent, Kenneth Nguyen gives your curiosity no tidy lane.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A warm branding conversation where Hue family meals and Haribo memories carry Vietnamese culture into everyday life.
The episode frames culture and branding as something personal, then follows that idea into the everyday places where identity often gets learned: family meals, childhood snacks, and the simple act of eating together.
Khoa Ha reflects on wartime artists, cultural memory, and the question of Vietnamese belonging across countries.
Khoa Ha opens a thoughtful path into artistic lives during the Vietnam War and the harder work of carrying identity across countries. He describes why the film's team wanted artists and creators at the center, rather than letting war-film politics set the frame, and he leaves…
A park-side comedy conversation turns toilet habits into a messy argument about health, shame, and cultural change.
A park-side Los Angeles conversation starts with a late arrival, a coffee stop, and a bathroom detour, then settles into exactly the kind of bodily comedy that works best when nobody tries to tidy it up.
A grounded aerospace episode about test work, machine judgment, and experience under pressure.
The episode grounds aerospace in Kevin Quat's day-to-day engineering experience, moving from his work at Blue Origin to almost eight years at Sikorsky as a test flight engineer.
A candid, searching conversation about Vietnamese American belonging, cultural work, and the pull of preservation.
This episode sits with the identity pressure many Vietnamese Americans carry when belonging starts to feel split between culture, appearance, and daily life.
A dinner-table argument opens into creativity, language, and the family rules that shape a life.
The episode circles a rich question: what happens to creativity when family history, cultural memory, and the freedom to argue all sit at the same table.
A textbook account of civilization opens into a thoughtful discussion of hierarchy, democracy, and freedom of thought.
Why would some books be treated as dangerous to traditional values? The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen uses that question to open a broader discussion about civilization, hierarchy, and freedom of thought.
Systems change, told through community experience.
Australian history, heard from the street up.
Host Kenneth Nguyen and guest Kevin Phan explore the Tonkin Free School, a short-lived Vietnamese institution from 1907 that promoted modernization and nationalism.
Professor John Phan discusses the historical development of the Vietnamese language and its relationship with Chinese, exploring pre-modern Vietnam.
Lynda Trang Dai discusses the Gucci scandal and her recent personal struggles, including her mother's death, in an interview on The Vietnamese Podcast.
Host Kenneth Nguyen gathers authors Christina Vo, Kyu Ling, Andrew Lam, and artist Jung Chung to debate whether Vietnamese creativity can exist without war trauma.
Tracy La says Viet Rise's 2025 account of Vietnam's 1945 August Revolution drew accusations that the group was “glorifying Ho Chi Minh.” Kenneth Nguyen and La connect those accusations to “red baiting,” which La defines as labeling someone communist to push them out of Little Saigon politics.
Kenneth Nguyen talks with Thi, Bao Han, and Michael Le about Saigon Bon Bon, a gummy brand built from Vietnamese memory, family duty, and branding.
Khoa Ha tells Kenneth Nguyen that he started the project by archiving rare sheet-music covers, album art, and family photos after finding old recordings online at age 17.
Kenneth Nguyen and Thuy Vo turn a park interview on The Vietnamese into a specific discussion of comedy, bilingual performance, and the way childhood bullying in San Jose shaped her voice.
Mia from Viet Boss Babe explores how self love and patriarchy intersect in Vietnamese culture, with a focus on men's roles.
Ken pays tribute to the late comedian Alex Jung and interviews fellow comedian Will Pepper about the comedy scene.
Kenneth Nguyen asks Kevin Quach, a Blue Origin aerospace engineer, how moon-landing skepticism fits with 1969 technology and Apollo 11 planning.
Dana says Little Saigon became a place where people who "were removed from the motherland" could rebuild identity and community.
Viet Nguyen discusses scaling culture without losing authenticity, touching on his James Beard semi-finalist award and economic shifts.
Ken and Dr.
Professor John Phan discusses the origins of modern Vietnamese writing and its colonial influences.