THE TRAILBLAZER: Justice Ginsburg is gone

FAREWELL TO JUSTICE GINSBURG: This is a major election issue -- appointment of U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

FAREWELL TO JUSTICE GINSBURG: This is a major election issue -- appointment of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. A personal note: IN RESTROSPECT: VIETNAMESE WOMEN IN THE LAW -- CAREER MISTAKES VERSUS CAREER OPPORTUNITIES As the country mourns the trailblazer Justice Ginsburg, and I, as an individual watching this beautiful country, my home away from home, before the 2020 Presidential election, I couldn't help making notes of my own life as a refugee airlifted to America in 1975: I was in law school, second year 2L curriculum, when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed. My law school moot court partner, today a law partner in NYC, told me to write the new female justice of the highest court to tell her about me, one of the first Vietnamese woman refugees in a U.S. law school, in order to submit an application to clerk for her. I did not, not being accustomed to self-marketing or self-initiation of such a kind. At that time, my mother had been under chemotherapy, and my father had to fight his own nervous breakdown as a result. He still went to work as a model teacher everyday. I was the oldest girl of the family, holding an executive job for the Houston Independent School District with a budget under my signature of $6 million dollars including the procurement of local and national contracts, plus compliance with EPA mandates for school asbestos removal, supervising safety engineers and statistics personnel, all of that while attending night law school (U of H and Georgetown were the only two law schools in the country at that time with an ABA-accredited evening program for full-time working people). I could not even participate in law review or continuing with national moot court competition, let alone thinking that far ahead about contacting the new Associate Justice and submitting a clerkship application... Come to think of it: the real reason I did not go out of the way to market myself for the law career was because deep down inside, I was an artist. Yet, I must have been the only Vietnam-born writer of novels and poetry who never sought a publisher or literary agent, or even submitted my work to literary magazines (except for two NYC agents per personal recommendation, one of whom was Sandra Dijkstra, who represented Aimy Tan. Yes, I did seek her representation and sending her my sprawling 700-page manuscript (which today is the trilogy of Vietnamese American resettlement published and sold by LakeUnion). Sandra, who has since retired from literary agenting, advised me to rewrite the draft of what is known today as my Daughters of the River Huong into a Vietnamese version of Memoir of the Geisha). By that time, I had resigned from my local municipal judgeship in Houston, which made me the first Vietnam-born woman to sit on an American bench. In 1992, I did the judgeship under state law's statutory exemption while continuing to practice law in the 9th Circuit for NYC-based Weil Gotshal & Manges, making my work life a routine of some 60 plus work hours a week, i.e. combining municipal bench duties and federal law practice out of state at the same time. Perhaps I should have listened to advice, in law and in art: first, writing Justice O'Connor in the 1980s, and second, changing my River Huong into "Memoir of a Vietnamese royal concubine," in the 1990s...Not writing Justice O'Connor, I ended up working for Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, Washington, D.C., in the company of former U.S. Supreme Court clerks, and finally meeting Justice O'Connor in person at the University of Denver law school where I taught full time. My right decision in the law was to go to work for Wilmer Cutler. My biggest career mistake whether in law or in art was to withdraw from the White House Fellowship competition, having participated as the final regionalist representing the Southwestern States (although the same dossier earned me the judgeship in Texas, something I did for the sake of the Vietnamese community in Houston in the early 1990s, making me the only "sitting judge" at New York-based Weil Gotshal & Manges. Now, on the eve of my early retirement, after 45 years life in America, Justice Ginsberg is gone in the final months before the controversial 2020 Presidential election, and guess what? I am about to look for a literary agent and/or publisher, for the first time, as I have turned 60+, finally getting to the point of writing full-time, a product of the decision to retire from the law... I would say that my biggest mistake in the art so far was to undertake Fulbright teaching in 2011, without seeing to it that Mimi and Her MIrror had a chance to be read and considered by the community of the literary mainstream in America.