Our lunar year 2025 was off to a sad start. On its first day, and hours after we sent the previous family letter, our Chihuahua, Peanut, passed away. Although he was less than twelve years old, he had chronic health issues, and we had just had him neutered on the advice of the vet. With the children grown up, after having raised a hamster, turtle, chickens, and countless fish, we thought that Peanut would be our last pet. Vi-Van had been interested in cats for a while, but Lanchi didn’t want another charge. Fate decided otherwise.

In August, Lanchi found a weeks-old black kitten hiding near her workshop in the yard. Her woodturning generates a lot of sawdust, which has to be vacuumed out continuously. As she was preparing for her year’s main event, the Kings Mountain Art Fair on Labor Day weekend, the noise may have scared the mother away. Vi-Van named her Soy Sauce, and we began to feed her by bottle. She is much more playful than a puppy and purrs a lot. Everyone in the household, and particularly Lanchi’s mother, grew quite fond of her. Having been played with roughly while growing up, she has quite an attitude. Lanchi had to relocate the plants on the windowsills because she can climb anywhere.

Although in his younger years Minh-Dan only reluctantly joined us outdoors, he found a new interest in it with friends. Traveling farther, he spent a few days around Lake Tahoe in winter, and a week in Arizona in the spring to visit places like the Grand Canyon and Antelope Canyon. However, his new passion is for cars, and he moved well beyond his driving computer games. He drove to Southern California on two occasions: first to attend a private collector car show hosted by a YouTuber, and then to try his hand on a race track. At the end of October, he bought a Honda S2000, a two-seat roadster with a high-revving engine, despite not knowing how to drive a manual-transmission car. The car was quite expensive for a 2003 model, but Minh-Dan thought it was a bargain—even after serious repairs were needed, for which he resourcefully found parts on the Internet.  Besides a loan from us, he was able to afford it by working two jobs: event security guard and restaurant host. All the while, he continued at SJSU, where he switched his major back to marketing. Earlier in October, shortly after his 20th birthday he underwent surgery to realign his jaws and fix an air-channel issue, the aftermath of which required him to eat only liquid foods for weeks, resulting in a dramatic weight drop.

Besides hanging out with her partner, Omar, and sometimes inviting friends home for baking, Vi-Van became confident enough with driving that she took frequent outings to Santa Cruz and San Francisco with friends. It helped that Brent gave us his 2008 Prius, so Vi-Van didn’t have to drive the minivan as she did before. She even went on a summer camping trip on the shores of Clear Lake in Northern California with her friends—the first time she went camping without us. Going further, in April and in August, she flew to New York City by herself to spend time with her cousin Nhu who is attending art school there.  She continued majoring in art at Evergreen College, with a full schedule that included some tough science classes such as astronomy. Having resigned her job left her more time for creative pursuits. Using clay, felt, metal, acrylic, resin, and paper, she created all sorts of cute designs for pins, hair clips, button badges, keychains, stickers, and prints. Tuan printed more pieces for her than for his customers. Instead of struggling to sell online on her Etsy shop, she began vending at art fairs with success, even setting up a booth next to Lanchi at the surprisingly large Lynbrook High School Craft Faire in San Jose, which is well run by students.

Between gardening and growing rare specimens for resale, Lanchi keeps busy with plants and her weekly shipments. She also joined her sisters, Fi and Ti, to volunteer at a Cistercian monastery in Aptos run by Vietnamese monks, where, among other things, they helped make the banana leaf-wrapped cake of glutinous rice, mung bean, and pork that is boiled for hours and traditionally eaten for Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year). In the process, they befriended a Vietnamese woman who invited the three of them on a summer trip to San Diego. In the spring, finding it too time-consuming to drive to the trailhead, they started replacing our weekly hikes with daily neighborhood walks. Although introverted and not political, the excesses of the new U.S. administration pushed the two sisters and their brother Y to join the No Kings protests, for which Tuan—who keeps informed by reading daily excellent the analytical politics blog electoral-vote.com and the popular Letters from an American newsletter—was all in.

In January, Lanchi and Tuan joined a Southern California trip organized by Lanchi’s brother, Bi, with many friends and family members, visiting Joshua Tree National Park and also trying to surf an (expensive) artificial wave in the desert. In the newly designated Chuckwalla National Monument, which is almost as large as the national park it abuts to the south, a rough road shook loose our Prius Prime skid plate, which was further damaged by Minh-Dan (who also managed to blow out a tire three times and wear the others within a year). After that, we installed a metal skid plate and a lift kit, which, despite its height of 1.5 inches, makes a difference because the vehicle starts with such low clearance. In February, Tuan went to Yosemite not to photograph, but to reconnect with various friends on the occasion of a Yosemite Conservancy speaking engagement. In September, after attending Tuan’s nephew’s wedding in Portland, Maine, Lanchi and Tuan took a four-state New England trip, where Tuan enjoyed taking Lanchi around beloved places such as Acadia National Park and the White Mountains.

Tuan continued daily exercise and a low-carb diet, and after more joint issues started weekly ping-pong and lap swimming for variety. After more than 150 visits in running shoes, he wrapped the first part of his project The Trail, which examines the tension between displacement and environmental restoration along a San Jose recreational trail shared by wildlife, trail users, and unhoused people. He focused his efforts as much on getting the work out in the art world as on making new photographs. In that pursuit, and in other areas of interest, he began to rely on ChatGPT to the point that Lanchi calls her his new mistress (superseding the tripod). At least, she says that he is the most prominent photographer of America’s national parks. But shifting from that storied career in nature and conservation toward social landscape photography meant trying to reach a new audience from scratch. He entered dozens of open calls and absorbed plenty of rejection, but ultimately placed in four juried group exhibitions, attended more art events than in the previous five years combined, and took steps into the fine-art/documentary ecosystem through attending the Trespasser workshop in Marfa, Texas, and Review Santa Fe in New Mexico. In the course of those travels, he happened to visit quite a few national parks and monuments, although the most memorable trip of the year was not his usual solo photography trip, but rather leading a workshop group on a ten-day rafting trip down the Grand Canyon, one of the most extraordinary wilderness journeys to be experienced anywhere. 


We wish you and all your loved ones a lunar year 2026 of the Horse full of happiness, health, prosperity, and success, and hope to hear some news from you.
Tuan, Lanchi, Vi-Van, Minh-Dan, Soy Sauce
3373 Meadowlands Lane, San Jose CA 95135 (+1) 408-706-0894