When Mai Truong became a mother, her perspective on everything shifted. It was 2020 when she first became a parent, and anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise in the U.S. “My friends and I were constantly on edge,” she recalls. The racism that was causing the hate crimes in New York where Truong lived, was making her reevaluate the shame she’d felt about her Asian identity throughout her life. “I felt like I had overcome some of that shame but I realized I hadn’t really done a lot of reflection as to where that shame came from.”
Growing up in America, Troung says that she often wanted to hide her cultural identity due to feeling embarrassed about being different. She knew she wanted her daughters to feel proud of their heritage—even as hate made being loudly yourself scary. “It’s impossible for people of colour to hide our identity,” she says. “And people will define what [our identities] mean for us if we don’t do it ourselves.”
At the same time, she was away from her family while starting her own. In hopes of proudly passing on her and her husband’s traditions, Truong started a journey of reconnecting with her Vietnamese culture and learning more about her husband’s Chinese culture. When Lunar New Year rolled around, she was excited to introduce her daughters to both Vietnamese and Chinese traditions but struggled without her parents around to know what to do, what to cook, what to buy and how to decorate. On top of that, she was unfamiliar with the Chinese customs—so visiting shops in Chinatown was overwhelming. “I didn’t even know how to celebrate properly, because I was always celebrating with family,” she recalls. “I took it for granted, it was like a passive celebration for me.”
After having conversations with her family, her husband and her Asian American friends, Truong realized that lots of people were in her position, feeling “ill-equipped to carry on these traditions.” In response, she founded Bo and Mei, which sells Lunar New Year kits to give people a one-stop shop for everything that’s needed to ring in the new year.
The company, named after her two daughters, sells decorations designed by Truong, along with togetherness boxes for filling with treats and book boxes to help children learn about and appreciate Chinese and Vietnamese culture and customs. Notably, the decorations have a modern spin to them, aligning them with Millennial and Gen Z aesthetics while maintaining the structures for traditional decorations. Additionally, some of the decorations feature Chinese characters on one side and Vietnamese on the other, which Truong says makes them more inclusive and “represents the new generation of Asians in western countries.”
“People will define what [our identities] mean for us if we don’t do it ourselves.”
For now, Bo and Mei only sells items related to Chinese New Year celebrations and Tết, the Vietnamese New Year. But Truong says that there are plans to expand and include other traditions and even other holidays in the future—like the Mid-Autumn Festival. She also says that there are plans to create gifts around other celebrations like weddings and hundred day celebrations for newborns. “I thought a lot about how we could embody both our Asian and our hyphenated identities,” she says. “I asked, how we can really embrace these traditions and customs while making them our own so that we can help them endure.”
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