
First Place | “Living Among the Mountains” | Sa Pa, Vietnam
As we hiked through the rice fields of Northern Vietnam with Cha, a Hmong woman who lives in the mountains of Sa Pa, a question popped into my head: “How many rows of rice do you think I’ve eaten in my life?” Coming from a Southeast Asian immigrant family, I couldn’t even begin to guess how much rice I had eaten. She looked me up and down, laughed, and said matter-of-factly, “Fifteen.”
Photo by Raymond Tu ’21