Why this place exists

When you are small, home is everything. School ends and you go home. There is nowhere else.

Then home gets further away. In high school you are back on weekends. At university, on holidays. Once there is work and a family of your own, some years the only days you get are Tết.

So Tết became the one time of year when those who left can stay a while, and those who stayed can see everyone at once. People clean the house, wrap bánh, light incense, say the same wishes they said last year. As a child I thought that was just custom. Later I understood it is how a family tells each other: we are still here, still waiting for you.

But Tết is getting thinner. Some Tếts now happen only through a phone screen. Some children grow up never having sat by the pot of bánh. Some things our grandparents did every year, and by the time we want to tell our own children, there is no one left to ask.

This place was made to keep those things. What happens on which day, and above all why. Told in the voice of someone in the family, in Vietnamese and in English, so a child can read it, someone far from home can feel it, and someone who has never had a Tết can step in.

Every family has its own way, and no Tết is more correct than another. One person remembering keeps a little. Many people remembering, and Tết stays.