Well, since I wrote a whole memoir about myself, it seems weird to write a short version of it, but here goes (and since the memoir is in the first person, I don’t think that I should refer to myself in the third person—Phuc would find that so pretentious).

I was born in Sài Gòn Việt Nam, my family fled to America in 1975, and I grew up in Carlisle PA. Reared on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, John Hughes, Star Wars, Bones Brigade videos, and bootlegged cassettes of Minor Threat and TSOL, I graduated high school in 1991. I majored in Classical Languages and Literature at Bard College—how did no one talk me out of that?—got my Master’s Degree at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then moved to New York City in 1997. There I apprenticed to be a tattooer while teaching Latin during the day, and I’ve been teaching and tattooing ever since. I’ve never been good at staying in one lane—ask my wife about my driving.

Following in the footsteps of E.B. White (who was neither a tattooer nor Latin teacher), my wife and I left the city and moved to Maine in 2003 (she’s an honest-to-goodness Mainer) where we opened our shop, Tsunami Tattoo.

In 2012, I delivered a TEDx talk which was highlighted by NPR’s TED Radio Hour. The TEDx talk and its reception planted a seed in me for sharing more of my story as a refugee (of which I’d shared very little). I embarked on writing my memoir in 2016, and in April 2020 SIGH, GONE was published by Flatiron Books. You can read the memoir to get all the gory details of my childhood and adolescence, but spoiler alert: I do somehow survive.

And here I am at present, deeply grateful to be following this brambly path to its unknown destination.

As Joe Strummer said, the future is unwritten.

FUN FACTS:

I’m a Scorpio, I ride a Triumph Thruxton, I love boxing movies, and I’ve broken the same pinkie TWICE in exactly the same spot (my own pinkie, not someone else’s).

I pronounce my first name like Luke.