Clunk Clunk - Woken by a metal spoon

Tap tap - dark liquid dripping

Ba ơi, Ba đang uống gì đó?

"Cà phê"

This cup is a roof

This cup is shelter

This cup is bulletproof.

This cup provides

This cup contains the drips of a 20 hour shift

This cup sacrifrice

This cup is a gift

This cup is drank once at 10am

And twice at 10pm

Because of this cup

I am full

I can sleep

I am educated

For the second part of my project, I decided to churn some Vietnamese Coffee ice cream. Vietnamese coffee is a stable in Vietnam and has been popularized in the United States. I decided to combine this strong rich coffee flavor with some sweet condensed milk to represent the bittersweetness of the journey coming from Vietnam to the United States.

This project gave me the opportunity to take time to appreciate the little things in life as well as learning to be vulnerable. I choose coffee as the main object of my poem because it represents many things in my life as well as the Vietnamese community. In my family coffee represents strength and prosperity. Coffee is an agent used to stain long hours of work as well as a way to keep focus. In my poem, my father drank coffee daily to help him work the long hour shifts to provide for our family. It is because of the coffee that allow us to live and survive in this new country. In a way, the coffee is the one sustain that connected us to our cultural history. It is also a story that shows how hardworking the Vietnamese refugees had to work to barely get back in the United States.