I’m back from Boston now, after my second Nieman Conference. Overall, another really impressive, well-run event. Kudos to everyone at the Nieman Foundation for putting on a fine conference.

A few quick closing thoughts:

Books I want to buy now, based on what I saw in Boston:

• D.C. Comics Guide to Writing Comics. Tom French swears its the best book on narrative structure he’s read. Plus it’s got Batman in it. Sold.
• One Person/Multiple Careers by Marci Alboher. I already have a “slash” life; I’d like to manage it better.
• The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin by Adam Hochschild. I’m already a big fan of Hochschild’s work, but the more I’ve heard him talk about this book, the more I can’t wait to read it.

A few overall impressions from the conference:

• Journalists are in a rough spot right now. Issues involving the collapsing newspaper business and the seemingly shrinking prospects for good, meaningful journalism kept coming up. It was the elephant stomping through the Boston Sheraton. I will remember Connie Schultz‘s words to the people in the hall: “The business model is broken. You are not broken.”
• I’m an experienced, professional web and multimedia designer who wants to do more writing. I found myself surrounded by lots of experienced, professional writers who want to do web and multimedia. Maybe we can meet in the middle someplace?
• Most journalists and writers seems to genuinely love what they do. Often, they make financial sacrifices to stay in their careers, but few seem to regret it. A lot of conferences feel cold and formal, with people milling about, shaking hands, handing out cards, trying awkwardly to seem excited to be there. Not here. Most of the people I met were passionate and excited about their work, getting better, and learning from others. That’s the kind of people I like to be around.

I hope to be back in 2010…

I kicked off day three in the session on “Animating History,” featuring a panel including Adam Hochschild, Jane Kamensky, Isabel Wilkerson, and Scott Martelle.

I loved the idea from Isabella Wilkerson that an important part about figuring out who to focus on for a book (or story) is the process of “auditioning” subjects through interviews, trying to find the right characters that will help carry a strong story. The interviews with the people you wind up not focusing on isn’t wasted; you often learn a lot about the background of the topic that you can later use. It’s still great research that can help shape your work.

Adam Hochschild

Hochschild made a simple point that when choosing a subject for a big piece of historical writing, you need to “fall in love” with the topic. If you aren’t fascinated by it, passionate about it, it will be a lot harder to commit the long hours (maybe years) it will take to complete the work. “It has to obsess you,” Hochschild says.

Random side note: Hochschild is everything I’d like to be when I grow up… He writes, speaks, and teaches for a living. More fundamentally, he’s eloquent, graceful, passionate about his work…

From the world of exploring history through writing, I moved on to the session on modern-day writing for profit: “Freeing Your Inner Entrepreneur: Learning survival instincts in the freelance world” with Larry Habegger, Jennifer Kahn, Marci Alboher, moderated by Christine Larson.

The panel was very strong. All four speakers brought different perspectives to the business of freelance work. Kahn, a former astrophysicist, does long-form freelance science writing for major publications like Wired and New Yorker, often having months to work on each publication. Larson seems to have a more varied set of freelance clients, and does a lot of shorter pieces; her ideas focused more on the practical side of drumming up and sustaining business, as well as facing the cold, serious numbers involved in making a living as a freelancer. Habegger and Alboher were the entrepreneurs of the panel, each juggling multiple projects and ventures as freelancers. The panel showed that if you want to be a freelancer, there are a lot of different approaches.

Marci Alboher

Alboher’s idea of “slash careers” is an interesting concept, especially for someone like me, who does both freelance writing and design. One of my goals leaving the conference is to read her book, One Person/Multiple Careers. It’s refreshing to see someone embrace the idea that some of us aren’t crazy for feeling strange doing just one thing. Alboher also mentioned how invaluable having a small, regular “freelance group” was to her earlier in her career. She and some likeminded writers met weekly, swapping ideas, reading each others work, providing edits and suggestions. Seems like another great idea I want to run with after the conference.

Gwen Ifil was the closing keynote speaker for the conference. She seemed just as polished as she does on TV, but also showed more of a sense of humor than comes across on Washington Week in Review. One fun anecdote; She described how earlier in her career, she would typically be assigned to whichever candidate was doing the worst in the presidential primaries. If a candidate saw her at their event, they knew their campaign was in big trouble.

Following the official end of the conference, there were a series of “master classes.” I’d gotten into a session on writing profiles. The master class had a nice format: only about ten people, with one instructor, for a 90 minute session. Our instructor was Rose Moss. At first, I was a bit puzzled with her leading a session on profiles, since she seems to be primarily a fiction writer. Moss spoke slowly, but had some insightful things to say. When doing a profile, she advised, ask yourself “what does this person do that expresses who they are?” Following on that idea, she showed us a selection from a Tracy Kidder story in which Kidder walks along a cliff with his subject, who stops and says:

From here the amount of land the dam had drowned seemed vast. Still gazing, Farmer said, “To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Boston, identity politics, Sri Lanka, and Life Savers, you have to be on top of this hill.”

Moss suggested that when we write profiles, we try to find a similar spot for our subjects. As she put it, “Every person has something that crystallizes how they see the world, the lens they use to see the world.” The key to a great profile, she suggested, was finding that lens and writing about it.

Over lunch, a bunch of strangers and I tried to figure out how to save the newspaper business. We didn’t succeed in finding a solution, but the brownies were quite tasty.

For the first afternoon session, went to “Conversation on Craft” on Magazines. The conversation focused on this powerful feature story from the New Yorker: The Last Tour by William Finnegan. Interesting session, from which my biggest take away is that William Finnegan is a hell of writer.

The second afternoon session was a tough call. I wanted to attend five of the seven sessions, but ultimately wound up in Tom French’s talk on “getting organized, mapping a story, finding a structure.” This handout is a great summary. Again, I was really impressed with Tom French. A few interesting tidbits you won’t find on the handout:

• The best book on structure, according to French, is the D.C. Comics Guide to Writing Comics. Seriously.
• Readers are smarter and more open to new approaches than we think. Reader are often ready for a lot more than editors and writers expect. The conventional wisdom about what they read or won’t read is often wrong. Sometimes, you can bury the lede and the world wont come to the end…
• Even great writers often think their work sucks, especially when their working on it. It is common, he says, to be frequently “fighting off panic and terror.” “It’s good to be scared,” French says. “That means that you’re pushing yourself.”

After two days, it seems clear some attendees are a little hazy about questions. A question, as I understand it, is supposed to be a brief query directed at a speaker or a panel. They aren’t:

• Long, rambling speeches with no clear purpose
• “Observations”… followed with a faux question like “what do you think about what I just said?”
• Three or four questions that take two minutes to unravel

Seriously, people… (You know who you are!) Let others have a chance to ask a question. Save the storytelling and contemplations for your writing…

The Keynote session to kick off Day Two was a discussion with author and writer for the New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson.  To me, it seemed like a little too much fawning over Anderson.  Felt like I was watching “Inside the Actor’s Studio”…  Despite that, I did take away a few morsels of value from Anderson’s talk.  

First was the idea that he often learned a lot about the meaning of his own life’s experiences through the act of writing itself.  

Second, he talked about “going the distance” as a reporter.  By that, he meant that you have to keep researching, keep interviewing, keep talking to people, even when you’d rather quit and take a shortcut.  If you feel like there is still more to try and unearth, you have to pursue it.  His example was illustrative:  when researching his book on Che Guevara, he almost didn’t bother to interview an old Bolivian military officer, but dragged himself over to do it.  That man, at the end of a long interview, admitted to Che’s murder and revealed the fate of his body, which had long been a mystery.

Following that, I sat in on “From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary: Mining narrative gold in the everyday” (perhaps the longest title for any session at the conference).  Interesting, well-organized panel on how three writers — Katy Butler, Louise Kiernan, and Victor Merina — developed feature articles, selecting scenes, developing structure, and spending time with their subjects.

Moderator Christine Larson kicked off the discussion with a great analogy comparing the writing process to romance. You fall in love with an idea, and fall even deeper in love with the story as you report it and talk to people and collect material for it. But then when you take it home to try and write it up, the romance fades away and you’re stuck in a troubled relationship with something that drives you crazy. I’m not doing justice to Larson’s entertaining set up, but you get the idea…

Some important ideas I took away from this session:

• Kiernan talked about the importance of being “willing to embrace the gray” in our storytelling; that is, be willing to accept and write about complexity. It’s easy as writers to try and tidy up reality into a nice package, but sometimes, reality is ambiguous and unresolved, and our job is to present that in all it’s maddening grayness.
• Merina described his process of visualizing his stories on paper and mapping them out, literally, so that you can step back and look at them, seeing where themes and content overlap, and where there are clear holes and missing spots that need to be filled.
• Butler explained the idea of looking for turning points and key moments in your stories, then walking backward from those spots to construct a compelling narrative structure

During Tom French’s session yesterday, he mentioned a Washington Post story by Anne Hull as an example of fine narrative journalism. It was about about a woman and her grandson walking down a road in the days after Katrina. I read it this morning and couldn’t agree more.  I doubt that many of the countless stories written about Katrina did a better job than this short two-page feature at showing the impact of the storm on the people of New Orleans.  Take a minute and read “Hitchhiking From Squalor to Anywhere Else“

At the Nieman Conference, everyone talks about “storytelling.” It’s what most writers here aspire to, rather than everyday news journalism. So when I walked into the main hall for the Connie Schultz keynote address, the story of the state of the journalism industry was told in the size of the room itself. The welcome and keynote was in the same hall as last year, but a room divider had been added. There were still hundreds of people, but by the looks of it, about half as many as in 2008. Schultz’s speech was great, but the welcome session felt, at times, like a funeral.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Schultz shared some inspirational stories and encouragement for writers. “Being scared,” she said, “sometimes is a really good thing.” I wasn’t familiar with Schultz, a Pulitzer -Prize-winning columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but I’m a fan now. She blended personal stories with professional insights and humor. She talked about her father, a working-class man who hated his job and once said to her “you could teach a monkey to do what I do,” and how he dreamed of giving his daughters the life he didn’t have. I almost teared up. (Being a new father tends to make me a sucker for fatherhood stories). She closed with a word of encouragement to the audience, some of whom lost their jobs in the past year: “Every narrative has a beginning, middle, and an end… including yours.”

The fact that I’m here, at this conference, trying to reinvent myself as the writer I always should have been, is a testament to that idea.

Tom French

The first session I attended was “Narrative Archaeology” with Tom French. As I expected, having seen French last year, it was a great session, filled with practical tips and techniques for doing narrative journalism. French, another Pulitzer Prize winner, recently left the St. Petersburg Times to take a job teaching journalism at Indiana University. His departure from daily journalism is sad, but also makes sense: He’s a natural teacher, with a tremendous conversational style and a wealth of experience as a feature writer and editor.

His handout, “Hunting and Gathering” (PDF) covers some key ideas about the how to report for good featuring writing. Here are a few of the best gems from his presentation that didn’t make the handout:

• When trying to do narrative on deadline, “choose a scene and zoom in tight
• When in doubt, under-explain” (let your readers put the piece together; they’re usually smarter than we expect)
• French says that after reporting for a story, he typically has ten times as much content as he can use. How to select what makes the cut? Make a “greatest hits” list: quotes, scenes, details that you would “die” if they didn’t make the story, and start from there. Most likely, he notes, even all of those won’t make it.

Next, I attended Walt Harrington’s session on “Intimate Journalism: How to go from “sources in a story” to characters who reveal the human condition.” While I have tremendous respect for Harrington as a writer, this session was disappointing. Harrington was the opposite of French: formal, scripted, and, it seemed to me, somewhat aloof. For the first half of it, Harrington basically read from a prepared speech on the merits of deep, sophisticated narrative journalism and how hard it is. It was an interesting piece that I’d like to read, but I’d rather he had talked more informally about his process and how he learned to do his work. The Q&A that followed his speech was a little more interesting.

Harrington is skeptical that anyone can become a good narrative journalist by taking workshops and reading about techniques. Instead, he argues, you have to “learn to do it only by doing it.” His other simple suggestion, other than years of experience and hard work, is that if you want to be a good nonfiction writer, you need to read a lot of good nonfiction. I think he’s right on all of this, of course, but it still would have been helpful to hear more stories and examples of the lessons he learned along the way of becoming a great writer himself.

After that, I roamed around the reception for a bit (I’m terrible at these things), ate crackers, and met Modou Nyang, who came all the way from Gambia to attend the conference. Very nice guy. Made the trip from D.C. seem like a short walk…

Tomorrow morning I’ll head up to Boston to attend the Nieman Conference on Narrative. I attended last year and was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the panels and speakers. Roy Peter Clark, Adam Hochschild, Tom French, Lane DeGregory, and Jacqui Banaszynski were all amazing. Most of the attendees at the conference are working journalists. A few, like me, are students or freelancers. It was both inspiring and humbling to attend.

This year, the climate may be a bit different, with the seeming implosion of the newspaper industry. The theme of the conference this year, “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times,” dives right into the fact that the nation, as well as the business of journalism, faces a daunting, uncertain future.

Grim as it is out there, I’m excited to be going back. I hope to post a few thoughts from the conference along the way. This year, I’m going to try and be a little less introverted and force myself to network more. It’s a conference full of writers, after all. No one should be at a loss for words…

Author’s Note: This story was written in 2007 for a Nonfiction Techniques class. It hasn’t been submitted for publication. When I first when to the city dump, I got kicked out for walking around, taking notes, and trying to talk to people. I had to go back and make a formal request with the city to do some interviews. When I finally got that sorted out, I was lucky enough to to meet James and John, two men who I think made for an interesting profile.

Five miles northeast of the Washington Monument, the National Mall, and the U.S. Capitol, a narrow, garbage-strewn road leads to a place that resembles the end of the world. It looks like the aftermath of a tornado, a hurricane, or a Godzilla attack. On an open dirt field behind a barbed-wire gate, dozens of crushed refrigerators, some still adorned with magnetic calendars and pizza delivery numbers, lay stacked on top of each other like dominoes. Black birds hover over a mound of demolished bookcases, smashed cabinets, broken office chairs, and metal desks with dented, mangled legs. This debris sits in the shadow of a twenty foot pile of cracked bed frames, unhinged doors, stained couches, shattered television sets, collapsed wheelchairs, splintered coffee tables, and crooked, rusty bicycles. And within a few days, everything here — these heaps of once-valued relics from homes, offices, backyards, and bedrooms — will be gone, shipped off to be buried or incinerated. But in their place, new mountains of garbage will rise up and fill this landscape again.

The Fort Totten Waste Transfer Station, hidden half a mile behind Catholic University, serves as a central hub for solid waste in Washington. Garbage trucks haul 1,500 tons of trash in and out of here every day. Residents also come here to drop off bulky, oversized junk. Dozens of city workers man the trucks, scales, grapples, and loaders that keep the endless flow of trash moving out of the city. If the Capitol and the White House are the heart of Washington D.C., then Fort Totten Station is its stomach. And the people who work here — who see every day what Washington consumes, uses up, and throws away — may know the city better than anyone else.

Few people have seen more garbage in a lifetime than James Riggans, a 65-year-old operation foreman who has worked here for 41 years. It’s hard to tell if James is short, or just stoops a bit. Brown-tinted glasses partially hide his eyes. His face is lined with age, roughened with stubble and a salt and pepper mustache. He wears two things that declare his loyalties: a burgundy Redskins baseball cap and a blue D.C. Government sweater.

In 1966, James got his first job with the city, “throwing trash” as a sanitation worker, before being assigned to Fort Totten. “Back then, you had to have muscles,” James says. Looking out his office window at sanitation workers one-third his age, he shakes his head. Workers today, he points out, use trucks with mechanized lifts that do most of the heavy work. “They’d never make it back in those days,” he says.

James worked here in the 1960s, when the place was just a massive incinerator. He endured long, sweaty days, throwing garbage into blazing furnaces, breathing in smoke and ash. Many old friends and co-workers, perhaps not coincidently, have already passed away.

In his five decades at Fort Totten, James has seen people throw away almost everything. He’s watched people abandon boats, broken-down cars, and mobile homes. In a city where one in five people live in poverty, Washingtonians routinely discard perfectly functional computers, printers, kitchen appliances, fans, heaters, exercise machines, televisions, and bicycles. Department stores used to dump truckloads of overstocked bedding, power tools, and appliances here to clear warehouse space.

James was here the night three inmates from Lorton Prison were dropped off among with the trash. They escaped the jail and climbed into a garbage truck stopped at the adjacent waste facility. But their getaway was short-lived. The truck left Lorton and came to Fort Totten, only to dump them into a trash pit, along with a truckload of garbage collected along the way. Workers noticed the fugitives in their orange jumpsuits, screaming for help as they struggled to climb out of the pit. D.C. Police arrived minutes later to help them out.     

John Carter, 43, the other operation foreman at the station, stands at the entrance of a storage bay — known as the “tipping floor” — joking with a few of his workers before sending them off to load their trucks. His job is to make sure everything passes through the station smoothly. Having worked here since 1984, there are few problems he hasn’t already seen.

The tipping floor is longer than a football field and looks like an airplane hangar. Massive yellow Caterpillar loaders, industrial machines straight out of a science fiction movie, rumble slowly across the floor of the bay past two stories of cardboard, paper, and collapsed boxes, a thirty-foot high pile of assorted bagged trash and loose garbage, and a massive stack of metal furniture, bed frames, and construction materials.

To John, getting rid of these towers of trash is a day’s work. At 4 a.m. every morning, trucks arrive and drop off tons of new garbage from around the city. “The challenge for me,” he says, “is to get rid of it”

John, once a running back for the Cardozo High football team, looks more like a lineman now, tall and heavy, with thick arms from years of physical labor. He wears a black skull cap, an inside-out black sweatshirt, dark jeans, two small silver hoop earrings, and a huge skull ring on his left hand, where he used to wear wedding rings from two failed marriages. His round, boyish face would make him look younger than he is, if not for the mustache and chin-beard, peppered with gray hairs.

In 1972, environmental regulations mandated that the station stop incinerating garbage and be re-tooled to serve as a transfer station. Until the station was fully rebuilt to better handle the storage, loading, and processing of trash, it wasn’t very efficient, smelled terrible, and sent foul odors into surrounding neighborhoods. Scattered garbage attracted unwelcome insects and animals. “We used to have seagulls as big as pit bulls around here,” John says.

John often gives a speech to his staff, especially the new employees, a pep talk where he hammers home the idea that their job is adversarial — it’s them against the garbage. “I tell the guys: ‘you’ve got to hate the trash!’” Trash is the enemy. If it isn’t gone by the end of the day, trash wins.

There’s no small irony that the man who gives speeches about hating trash has inherited it as a family business. As a boy, John often came here with his father, who worked at Fort Totten for thirty years. His mom used to warn him that if he wasn’t careful he was going to wind up at the dump like his father. She was right.

But John seems content with this fate. He doesn’t envy friends who hate their jobs, who toil away bored at keyboards all day. “This job,” he says, “you see where you make a difference. You see point A to point B. I know people that talk about their work, and they just feel like they’re going to a job every day, just to do time. I don’t feel like that. It’s always something different.”

In the corner of the office John and James share — a small gray room with phony wood paneling, cold fluorescent lights, and two metal desks littered with papers — several bright, abstract paintings lean against the wall. The canvases, salvaged pieces of wood cabinets and doors from entertainment centers, explode with splattered bursts of crimson, gold, and lime paint. They look like something a young Jackson Pollock might have done. John creates these paintings when work is slow. He calls them “recycled art.” Sometimes, when there are a few moments to spare from the business of getting rid of everything, it feels good to create something worth keeping.

Author’s note: I wrote this for a class assignment in fall 2007. At first I tried to interview the guys in the “fish cleaning” shack, but they refused to talk to unless I paid them something. I still think I missed out on the best characters at the D.C. Fish Market. Still, I soon after met Donny Pham, who turned out to be a pretty interesting guy. A few weeks ago, I was down at the fish market with my wife and baby and we saw him, still there, still working hard, still trying to snag a few more customers…

Wisps of silvery steam rise up from below hundreds of orange-shelled Maryland crabs piled in front of Donny Pham. Standing next to his co-workers, two middle-aged men with deep wrinkles and tobacco-roughened voices, soft-spoken 36-year-old Pham, clean shaven except for a thin mustache and goatee, could pass for a crab-selling intern. That’s not far off, actually, as he’s only worked at Jessie Taylor Seafood for six months, a blink of an eye compared to some of his co-workers who have spent decades here, steaming, seasoning and selling hundreds of thousands of local blue crabs. Donny, wearing a black Yankees cap over a jumble of medium-length black hair, a frayed beige sweatshirt, and yellow gloves, fills a sack with a dozen crabs and hands it to a college-aged woman in a Redskins jersey. As she walks off, Donny rests his elbows on the counter and sighs. It is one of his first sales of the day, and just the start of a long weekend.

October is always slow at the D.C. Fish Market, but rain has been falling on Washington almost non-stop since Tuesday, so business is unusually light. The market consists of a square of asphalt the size of a baseball diamond, surrounded on three sides by massive floating barges that rise and sink with the tide. Right now, the tide is high, and fish mongers and crab sellers alike serve customers at eye level. The barges face the dock with overloaded storefronts that showcase huge bins of fresh seafood: live, wriggling crabs, tidy lines of tilapia, cod, and salmon fillets stacked on top of crushed ice, and massive piles of translucent pink shrimp, oysters, clams, prawns, and squid. On this murky, wet Saturday morning, only a few scattered customers, bundled in overcoats and clutching umbrellas, roam around the storefronts. Despite the weather, the market is ready for business.

“How you doin’, buddy?” Donny shouts, with a thick southern accent, trying to get the attention of an old man shuffling by. “Got crab sale here! Some shrimp? Hot soup!”

The man eyes Donny for a split-second, glaring at him as if he were a potential mugger, jams his hands deep into his coat pockets, and keeps walking. Donny isn’t offended — he’s used to being ignored. It’s part of the business. Some customers are friendly, he says, but others show up certain they are being hustled. “Some people just come up here irate,” he says with a shrug. “In their mind, you’re just trying to screw them over.”

Donny doesn’t have time to ponder the hostility from some customers, because a young Hispanic couple, huddled under an umbrella, walks by the storefront.

“How y’all doin’?! Crabs here! Hot soup!”

They look at him blankly, so Donny adjusts his pitch.

“Hola, Amigos, Hola! Camarones! Sopa Sopa!”

Despite Donny’s energetic attempt at bilingual salesmanship, the couple keeps on walking.

Donny works 14-hour days at the fish market every weekend. Rather than make the four-hour drive back to his home in Accomack County, Virginia, to be with his wife and kids, he stays on the boat overnight. And while some might not envy working elbow- and knee-deep in seafood all day, then sleeping on a barge that sways and bobs with the changing currents of the Potomac River, Donny counts his blessings. He has lived through far worse.

When he was two, Donny and his mother were among millions who fled Vietnam at the end of the war. His recollections are murky, but he remembers fragments. They sat on a beach for nearly a week, waiting for rescue boats to come. The boats arrived and they were squeezed on board with other scared, hungry, desperate refugees. Soon after the overcrowded boats motored out to sea, he says, the ships came under attack. He remembers chaos, mayhem, and screams.

“They started bombing, shooting people like crazy,” Donny says. “We were the only boat that made it out of there. Two of them got blown up.”

Damaged during the attack, overloaded with refugees, and ill-equipped for the journey, the boat took a month to sputter north to Korea. Many of Donny’s fellow refugees didn’t survive the trip.

“We were out of food. They were just throwing bodies overboard,” he says. “You remember stuff like that… you can’t help but remember something like that.”

Donny and his mother moved to America as migrant workers, settled in Virginia, and became naturalized citizens. He trained and found work as a heating and cooling technician. He married “a typical Eastern shore American woman,” had three children, and eventually moved into a house built by Habitat for Humanity. For Donny, everything seemed to be falling into place, until last spring, when he was laid off.

Donny and a friend, who had also been laid off, drove up to Washington, looking for work at the fish market. The uncle of Donny’s wife has sold seafood at the market for nearly 25 years and encouraged them to come up. Donny’s friend took one look around — overwhelmed by the noise, the shouting, the haggling over prices, the wafting stench of crab and fish and shrimp — and bolted back to Virginia. But where his friend saw long hours, sore knees, and headaches, Donny saw opportunity. He stayed.

Donny was terrible on his first day — he bungled orders, didn’t understand what people wanted, and had a hard time handling cash exchanges. “I didn’t know nothing from nothing.,” Donny said, laughing. “I didn’t know nothing about seafood. But I tried.”

After more than a decade spending his days working with pipes, furnaces, and thermostats, crawling under buildings and into heating ducts, it took a while for Donny to learn the tools of “a people business” — talking to customers, engaging them, and making sales. It isn’t a perfect job, he says, but it’s steady cash, something to pay bills while he tries to build his own business as an independent heating and cooling contractor.

Donny hasn’t told his children much about what he went through before coming to America. He’s relieved that they have the safe, stable childhood he missed. He shares with them a little about Vietnamese culture, but encourages them to think of themselves as Americans. “I tell them, be proud of your heritage, but you’ve got American heritage, too. Be proud of that.”

It seems he has given himself the same advice. Donny Donny’s life embodies the classic American story: an immigrant who works hard to build a life, a family, and a better future. It’s not always easy, or fast, or glamorous, but in his case, he works towards that dream, one crab at a time.

Donny notices a short, middle-aged woman in a zipped up puffy red jacket, standing about ten feet away and squinting at the steaming mound of crabs in front of him.

“How you doin’, miss? Help you today? We got a crab sale going on today!”

The woman scowls at him. Donny pretends not to notice.

“Give you a good deal… Two and a half for fifteen dollars?”

She turns and walks the opposite direction, but Donny doesn’t give up. He calls out to her, one more time, even though the sale appears hopeless.

“Well, what are you looking for, miss? I can help you out! Got a full barge here!”

Donny shakes his head and smiles. He doesn’t mind a challenge.