Hello there

I started this publication because I want to be a writer and I don’t have a better plan for getting there than writing.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who’s been writing online for years. I’ve done travel blogs. I’ve run social media accounts. I built a career in marketing and grew an audience on LinkedIn writing about it. I went to school for political communications. I have a master’s in professional writing. On paper, I should already feel like a writer.

I don’t.

LinkedIn taught me how to write things people read. It didn’t teach me how to write things that would earn the respect of readers. Social media in general rewards what’s digestible, what’s scannable, what performs in a feed and then disappears just as quickly. I got good at that, and getting good at it made me worse at the other thing like the slower, harder kind of writing where you sit with an idea long enough to actually find out what you think about it.

TheseChapters is where I practice that. It’s selfish, honestly. I want to write a book someday. I want to publish something real and respected. And the only way I know how to get there is to keep writing essays that force me to go deeper than a LinkedIn post allows—about my career, my kids, my marriage, my family, what it means to be a first-generation Vietnamese-American woman trying to work through all the generational unlearnings.

I’m Christina. I’m a Head of Marketing at a Slate. I’m a mom to three kids. I grew up in a house where quiet meant respect and intensity meant love. I’m still figuring out what all of that made me.

Everything here is practice. We can call it practice in public. Subscribe if you’d like to the full essays sent to your inbox once a month.