Beloved Blurb

05/15/2020

[Corona Courtship]

Perhaps the most overused word for the past almost four years, but 2020 truly has been unprecedented. A global pandemic literally shut the world down and closed its doors as shelter-in-place ordinances were implemented from country to country worldwide and by the time it reached the United States, state by state.

COVID-19 turned our everyday reality into an eery movie. People stayed indoors and hardly anyone was out unless they were deemed essential workers like the grocery store workers and truckers and especially the doctors and nurses who were fighting on the front lines against the Coronavirus. We were all encouraged to practice social distancing if we needed to be out in public.

Someone tweeted: “You know who’s really gonna suffer during this social distancing? Dudes on dating apps. Welcome back to courtship, Brad.” There are a myriad of dating apps and I jumped online to try out a few and these were the results.

Tommy Tinder was HOT. That much he had going for him, but he wasn’t exactly the sharpest crayon in the box. We messaged right away. Spoke on the phone the next day and by the third day, we were already on our first date. Kept it simple. We went to a sports bar. He ordered wings. I wasn’t too hungry so I ordered guacamole and chips.

“What’s that?” Tommy Tinder asked.

“You’ve never had guacamole before? It’s just avocados with some tomatoes and onions and other stuff. It’s a dip. It’s yummy,” I said.

“What are avocados?”

Our conversation continued about places we’ve been to. He was eager to tell me about taking a trip to the Bahamas since that was the only place he’s visited. I told him about my first ever flight was a 24 hour flight to Vietnam and the different places I’ve lived.

“I lived in New York City when I was in my early twenties,” I said.

“Wow, I’ve never been to New York City,” Tommy Tinder said.

“You should go!” I said. “Maybe we should go! I haven’t been back in a while. It would be a fun trip.”

“I’ve never been on a plane before,” Tommy Tinder said. “But I have my passport from going to the Bahamas. Do you need a passport to go to New York City?”

Um, NEXT! I should have known when in conversation, he texted me “verys.” For the life of me, I didn’t understand him. It took a minute for me to realize that he meant “varies,” as in his knowledge of certain food groups varies.

Then there was Marcus from Facebook Dating. Which is basically Tinder on Facebook. Marcus was also pretty hot. We messaged back and forth for about a week, first through the dating app and then progressed to Messenger. We decided to meet up and I knew it was already going to be a fail the moment he picked me up and I got in his big white truck. But I didn’t want to be rude, so off we went.

He had mentioned a few times that he really liked chocolate frostys from Wendy’s. There was a brand new Wendy’s down the street so I suggested we get some chocolate frostys. We went to a nearby park and walked around the pond. There were families with kids fishing, and ducks and turtles to be seen. It was rather pleasant but I wasn’t at all interested. I cut the date short and thanked him for a lovely time.

He messaged later that night.

“It was really nice to meet you. I hope I wasn’t a disappointment,” Marcus said. “I’d really like to see you again tomorrow if that’s ok.”

I politely declined and he took it pretty well. Didn’t ever hear back from him except when his WIFE messaged me a few days later via his account.

“This is Marcus’ wife. He has been incarcerated indefinitely and will no longer be in contact with you.”

She also attached a link to a news article that included his mugshot along with 24 other men who were all caught in “Operation Spring Cleaning” for trying to meet up with underaged girls for s*x.

There he was. Mugshot Marcus staring right back at me on the screen. I was unnerved and felt icky. Haven’t heard from husband or wife since.

You’d think that I would have been dismayed enough with online dating that I’d delete all the dating apps from my phone. But no. I forged on ahead with another gentleman. He wasn’t hot. That didn’t seem to be working. Patrick was older and he was attractive. He looked like a dad because he was a dad. He was nice. And educated. And could spell. That makes a big difference if the main mode of communication is via text.

We chatted through the dating app. Which progressed to Messenger. Which then progressed to exchanging phone numbers and texting. I even called him a couple of times to verify that he was a real person. I’ve been catfished too many times. Maybe more on that later.

He was ex military and worked in Special Ops. He’s served and traveled the world so I was pretty certain he knew what an avocado was. He posted daily on current political issues. We were both anti-Trump administration so there was another positive tally mark.

We communicated every day for about a month. He told me about his sons. I talked about my kid. He was a PK, a Preacher’s Kid. We had a lot of the same interests and he was just NICE. Intelligence, check! Politics, check! Religion and Jesus, double check!!

By this time, the shelter-in-place ordinance had been implemented in Georgia. We kept trying to meet up but for one reason or another it kept getting pushed back every time. We were going to meet when the lockdown was lifted but instead, it got extended. I didn’t really care. I was having a nice time getting to know this man and about his kids and his work. We seemed to really get along. I was quite enjoying the Corona Courtship. It felt simple. Not pressured.

Georgia was the first state to reopen and we made plans to meet that weekend after he dropped off his sons. They had other plans that he wasn’t aware of so we rescheduled for the following day. I was disappointed but I understood. Boys will be boys. The next day, he texted with the same plan:

“I’ll drop off the boys soon and then come pick you up,” Patrick said.

Hours went by and he finally texted saying he was done and headed my way. I got excited again and waited outside. I sat and waited. And waited some more. Over an hour passed by and I finally received another text.

“I’m going home. I’m having a panic attack.”

“What?!? Are you ok?” I texted back. “What’s going on?”

“I just need to get home. I’ll be fine after I take my Xanax,” he texted.

Um, ok. I went back inside the house and checked in on my social media. He had not only unfriended me but also blocked me. All our conversations had been deleted and I never heard from Panic Attack Patrick again. He just ghosted. Maybe I need to look for Brad.

05/13/2020

[Refugee]

Here’s the story that I was asked to write for that Special Fourth of July Issue. This is the second version of that story as I had to revise it when Donald Trump winning the Presidency made the country so divisive and people started seeing who their friends really were on the Facebook.

I felt compelled to update my story to this one when someone on my friends list posted a meme about refugees in reference to the Syrian Refugee Crisis. There was an outcry to take in the refugees as a humanitarian effort but this meme in particular made me mad.

It showed a picture of a soldier and words to the effect that we should be more concerned with our own veterans before coming to the aid of so many refugees seeking refuge in our great country. I took offense to it because it implied that “Make America Great Again” shouldn’t include foreigners. I was once a foreigner. I was once a refugee. Needless to say, the “friend” got deleted and unfriended.

This version was also published in a local Atlanta magazine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Coming to America
By Nhi Ho

With the new administration in office and in particular, President Trump's stance on refugees and immigrants, we hear about refugees and immigrants on all news media platforms daily. The refugees and immigrants issue is just one of a long list of political topics that have divided not only the country but coworkers, friends and even family members. Everyone has their own reasons and opinions for which side of the debate they support. But I can only speak on my behalf and here is my story:

Most people, when they first meet me, automatically assume that I was born and raised here in America because I do not speak with an accent. I always pause when someone asks me where I am from, not knowing if they’re inquiring about my origins or my ethnicity and nationality. So then, I usually break out into the Cliffs Notes summary of where I was born and how I came to Atlanta. Then the usual response in return is, "Oh. I was just wondering if you’re from Georgia. That’s all...”

I knew bits and pieces of my personal history growing up but only in recent years have I learned of how truly remarkable my boat story is.

My Ong Ngoai (maternal grandfather) apparently built the small boat that my family used to escape from Vietnam. The first attempt to flee was in 1978 after my older sister was born. That attempt was unsuccessful because my family was afraid we were would be discovered and caught by the Vietnamese communist government.

Shortly after I was born, my mother, father and sister once again got into that small craft along with 13 other people and tried again to flee in 1981. The voyage from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Thailand took three days at sea. While I was interviewing my mother, she said, “God really loves you because you could have died.” She said that although we weren’t caught in a sea storm, it was an overcrowded and small boat in rough waters. A big swell almost took my life.

Three days later, we arrived safely in a refugee camp in Thailand where we stayed for six months. From there, we left Thailand to arrive at another refugee camp in Indonesia and stayed for another seven months. My family arrived in Los Angeles, California, in 1982 when an American church sponsored us to live in America.

The new freedom we attained by simply stepping off the airplane and setting foot on America soil was not lost on my parents. After we relocated from Anaheim, California, to Atlanta, my father studied for months in preparation for his citizenship exam and became an official American citizen in 1987. My mother took her exam in 1989 and when she passed and acquired her citizenship, her new status automatically became mine and my sister’s as well. All four of us were official – we were American citizens.

After Mother gained her citizenship, she made immediate plans to set in motion the countless paperwork and documentations to begin sponsoring other family members so that they could also experience what freedom was like and to be able to live in a country where they would not be perpetually afraid of their own governments. The freedoms that all American citizens are granted in the Constitution.

My mother’s younger sister, Thuy also left Vietnam to come to America. Her plight was much more difficult than ours. My auntie arrived at a refugee camp in Malaysia in 1987 where she remained for seven years. The refugee camps by then had gotten more and more strict and they made life difficult for the refugees. The refugee camp officials kept telling the refugees to return to Vietnam because they were not allowing people to come to America anymore. My auntie was adamant about coming to America and that was why she stayed in Malaysia for as long as she did.

“We were treated poorly as if we were prisoners but I refused to return back to Vietnam like so many people did. They gave up and went back. I refused to go back,” my auntie said.

By sheer determination and my mother’s constant dealings with paperwork and documentations to get her sister to America and more importantly, God’s grace, my auntie finally arrived in Atlanta in 1994.

Having been born in Vietnam, but raised in America and living here almost my entire life, I know more about American history than I do Vietnamese history.

As a fan of the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, when he said on his Travel network show, “No Reservations,” that his first trip to Vietnam changed his life, that one of his all-time favorite cuisine is Vietnamese foodies and that he wanted to live in Vietnam, I was pretty proud of my rich Vietnamese heritage.

For those who don’t get what the big deal is and why everybody is up in arms over the current refugee and immigrant issue because it’s so far removed and on the other side of the world, let’s bring it closer to home. For those of you who know me and those who don’t, what does a refugee look like? Me.

If the only accent you have now is a Southern or Northern one, you haven’t gone far back enough in your family’s lineage to remember that we ALL came from somewhere else. Everybody immigrated to the United States – fleeing from religious or economic persecution, to escape famine or war, World War I and World War II, from N**i persecution, violence and poverty – to make a better life for themselves and their families. So what does an immigrant look like? Me.

The very First Amendment of our Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Nowhere else in the world can the citizens of a country feel freely enough to speak their minds openly about what is wrong and fight for what is right without fear from their government. For these reasons and many more, America is already great. I am proud to call this place my home. What does an American citizen look like? ME.

05/12/2020

[Copy editor]

I once was a copy editor for a local small town newspaper. Looking back, it was actually one of my all time favorite jobs. The pay was less than desirable with my English degree, and later come to find out, it was even less than the reporters whose work I had to edit. I digress.

It didn’t matter to me at the time because I loved it. So satisfying to read over copy and marking up all the errors with my pink pens and pink Sharpies. English teachers and professors and editors typical mark up papers with red ink, but I felt that making papers bleed pink was more pleasant to the writer than making it bleed red. Not as aggressive, was my logic. The AP Stylebook was my bible. I looked forward to buying the newest edition every year.

My very favorite thing to edit were the obituaries and I’d always read them first. I was fascinated by how someone’s life would be encapsulated by mere paragraphs, sometimes just with a few sentences. I was taught a particular way the obituaries were supposed to be formatted by the previous copy editor and I was a stickler that they should all be consistent and the same. It mattered. Because these people’s lives mattered.

Most of them were pretty much the same standard information: name, birthdate, death date, sometimes cause of death, a few sentences of how much they will be missed and whom they leave behind. Some were really sad to me because there wasn’t much written and I imagined them having lived a full life only to be forgotten in the end. The best ones were the smartasses even in their death. I remember one in particular that simply said: “I told you I was sick.”

The reason the job was so much fun was definitely because of the coworkers, writers and reporters. We all were relatively the same age and often hung out outside of work. I loved throwing things at them, like pens and other office supplies, out of frustration.

“What IS this? Who WROTE this??! It’s HORRIBLE! Do it again!”

But also to encourage them with small candy bars when they did well.

“Who wrote this? Seriously. Guys. Guys? It’s good. Good job. High five.”

The high school interns were a different story. I’m from the South, so we’ll just all collectively say a sweet, “Bless their hearts.” It was more time consuming to try to decipher what simple story they were tasked to write than to just rewrite the entire piece myself.

But the VERY worst part of the job was the management. Isn’t that always the case? My coworkers who were also my friends shared in the misery of uneducated leadership. One time when the office morale had gotten so low, there was a called meeting to a fancy bank conference room for a team-building exercise of sorts. There, I shared about my journey as a refugee and an immigrant from Vietnam. I was honored when I was asked to write about my story for a special feature for our Fourth of July issue. Management followed that gesture by asking me if I ate cats.

05/12/2020

[Nail tech]

People have always told me that I should write a book about my life.

“If I do write a story, I would want for it to turn into a big Hollywood movie adaption played by Lucy Liu, of course.”

Go big or go home. But don’t embarrass your father.

Mother likes to start all of her stories with “In my country...” and the hilarity ensues from there. Not because of what she’s saying but by comparison, them growing up in Vietnam and telling them to her American audience, and by audience, I mean her nail clients.

Let me interject and say for the record that I HATE doing nails. But I’m Vietnamese. Don’t we all do nails? At one point in your life if you are Viet, you either owned a nail shop or you worked at a nail shop, or someone in your family owns a nail shop or works at a nail shop.

“Pick out color. What color you like, honey?”

My intolerance for doing nails personally, is because of the ignorance of the nail clientele at large. I still am baffled to this day that in 2020, people are surprised when they hear me speak without an accent.

“Wow. Your American is so good! I’m impressed.”

“My English, you mean? Because that’s what I’m speaking, so...”

Circling back to literally everybody and their mamas being in the nails industry, we often get asked why everybody does nails and why there’s a nail shop in every shopping plaza.

Because, as Viets, we are very skilled with our hands. We are makers. We are doers. Especially in a poor country where you don’t have much, you had to make do with what you had. Coming to America without knowing much English, by being a maker and a doer, it is easy to pick up a new skill that can be easily taught from someone who has recently only been in the states a few months prior to you. Learning to do the same things over and over again doesn’t require much English.

“What shape you like? Oval, square, coffin? You like long or short?”

Bonus of working crazy long hours every day is that your English gets better.

05/11/2020

You ever noticed that the synopsis of almost every movie, no matter the genre, includes a has-been writer? Someone sitting at his computer, failing to come up with the next sentence, staring at the blinking cursor. And in the age of social media influencers and YouTubers, people very confidently tell people they’re a writer when anybody can string words together and self publish their own book to include in any one of their social media profiles and bios as “an award-winning author”? I say that as I smirk whenever I overhear the dude at the next table over at any local Starbucks telling that to someone he just met.

“Hey! I’m Wyatt. I’m a writer. What do you do?”

“Nice to meet you, man. I’m Paul. I’m a photographer.”

Like every other person sitting in an overpriced coffee shop with free WiFi, headphones on, typing at their laptops, hustling and grinding away to being the next big entrepreneur mogul with all the appropriate , , , , , , I along with Wyatt the Writer and Paul the Photographer, am snickering at the overheard conversations of people trying to network and make big moves while I’m staring at the blinking cursor on my iPhone XR screen.

Names may or may not have been changed to protect the innocent and people who never knew that by meeting them, they’d be in a book one day. Stories may or may not be loosely based on truth. Life is stranger than fiction anyway. Allegedly. These are the tales of a wild bipolar rollercoaster of a ride of an all American Asian girl at the risk of bringing shame upon her family name.

06/25/2019

back in the day

One of the area's premier walking trails is almost ready for people to explore its scenic paths. The Lorraine Trailhead is projected to be completed by early spring 2012. "The Lorraine Trailhead will be one of five sections along the nature walking trail that begins at Panola Mountain Park in Dekalb...

06/25/2019

I wrote about this place when it first opened up, too. it used to be a giant junk yard with hundreds and hundreds of cars 🚗🚕🚙🚌🚙🚗🚚

: “Lorraine Trailhead nears completion” 🗞

06/14/2019

when there used to be a :

“ shelters for rent in ”

05/29/2019

: so I’ve written about this stamp ministry a few times and it’s the only that I get contacted about the most from people all over the states. GIVE ME YOUR STAMPS!! 😂

A box decorated with different stamps sits by the front door as you walk into the sanctuary of Rockdale Alliance Church off of Old Salem Road in Conyers. The stamp

05/17/2019

I wrote this feature on Kristina Butler and Street Paws back in 2016. 3 years later and this is still applicable. we’re still looking for land to make a sanctuary for all these and . come see us TOMORROW at the !! 🐶🐱

Street Paws’ mission is to love and feed the animals they come across that are hungry, unloved and without a home. As funds and space allows, Street Paws will take

01/22/2019

Faces of Henry:
El-Mahdi Holly,
State Rep. El-Mahdi Holly HD-111

By: Nhi Ho

Newly elected State Representative HD-111 El-Mahdi Holly credits his sister, Sordaka Holly as the reason and inspiration for his new position serving as a public official representing the people of District 111 for Henry County.

Originally born in Michigan, Holly said he has been in Georgia most of his life. He has been a resident of Henry County for 15 years, a substitute teacher at Eagles Landing Middle School and remains active as a community organizer working with his local church, Tabernacle of Praise.

He graduated from Morehouse College in 1998 and with his master’s degree in Public Administration from University of West Georgia in 2002. From there Holly worked at several community organizations, and as a senior law clerk and criminal warrant officer for Fulton County’s Magistrate and State Court.

But it was really his sister, Sordaka Holly that upon her direction, she suggested that he lend his talents to getting good people elected.

“She saw that I already had a commitment to helping people; I was already doing it anyway,” Holly said. “She said, ‘Why don’t you work to get people that you believe in elected into office? And I told her at the time, I was somewhat cynical – I said ‘I volunteered for President Obama’s campaign but he’s already serving his second term and no one else inspires me.’ And she said, ‘No one?’”

Holly said the only person he really believed in at the time was Mayor Cory Booker of New Jersey who was then running for US Senate. What he describes as only possibly being divine providence afforded Holly the opportunity to fly up to New York in July 2013 to stay in his sister Sordaka’s apartment and make the daily commute from New York to New Jersey to work on Cory Booker’s campaign as a field organizer.

After that successful campaign and another fun one he recounts, Holly felt it was time to get back to Atlanta and in 2014, the House Democrat Caucus hired him where he worked under the leadership of Stacy Abrams.

“My job was to serve as field manager to support the Democrat who was running for House District 111, whose name is Jim Nichols,” Holly said. “And so I worked that campaign.”

In 2016, Holly was hired by the state Democratic Party where he worked in Macon-Bibb County, Henry County and 24 neighboring counties, gaining more experience.

“All that time, I was trying to find someone who would be best to run for this seat. I had no desire to cast my name. I liked being in the supportive role of helping that person,” Holly said.

“But really in 2017, my sister, she got very ill. The same sister, Sordaka who told me that I should embark on a career in politics. She found her health worsening and she was unable to just maintain a basic living for herself. She found herself in the Medicaid coverage gap. That’s the reason why I got in.”

Sordaka Holly passed away on July 29, 2017.

“I think like a lot of people, we hear about issues; we read about them, we see how it affects people, but it’s different when it actually touches you. And I think at the time, I remember, I couldn’t understand as to why Governor Deal did not sign over a fully funded healthcare bill especially when we had already paid for it. Our taxes had already paid for it. And it was just sitting there. And I have no problem if businesses stepped forward and provided a better solution which is why he never signed it. The problem is they have yet to actually do that. And so you have rural hospitals that are closing up because their staff can’t get paid, yet their staff still wants to help people. And at the same time, you have working families like mine who are having to say goodbye to their loved ones earlier than they should. And so, when she passed away, that hit me hard, and I went and qualified to run for State Representative almost immediately (August 11, 2017).

And through that process, not only her passing, but a woman who was very dear to my heart, fine artist Tamara Natalie Madden. She had already been a survivor of a rare kidney disease; but her health had worsened within the space of a couple of months. And during the course, early start of the campaign, I went with her to the hospital. Her death was quickened by the fact that she had acquired cancer - stage 4 - and had only about a week and a half to know that she had cancer at all. I was very close to her. I loved her very much. When she passed, it strengthened my resolve to know that so many other families outside of just mine, outside of just me, were going through this and that I had to do something about it. So their passings really started this long back-to-back 4-election campaign to get into public office to represent this district.”

Nhi Ho: I know that church and religion are really important to you and has been a big part of your campaign. What do you think about politicians using religion and quoting scripture in their campaigns?

El-Mahdi Holly: I think it’s telling about how they think and the decisions they make if you understand what they believe. And so for me, I’ve been brought up very much in a community service environment. I think that when you give yourself and your time helping other people, you understand what they’re going through. But also what it does is, it helps strengthen your faith in humanity. Because you know the problems they’re seeing. If you just look within the resources that you’ve been given, and look to draw those strengths out of yourself in a way that can help them, you realize that there’s a real shared humanity. And what I think it does is, it takes out all of the discontent with politics, and people get to see people as themselves.

I am a proud substitute teacher at Eagles Landing Middle School. I am a proud community organizer, I appreciate just doing the work. I don’t care for titles. I care for results. And that’s why I want to make a difference while I’m there. For as long as that may be.

NH: What do you want for Henry? For people to know?

EH: To bring the concerns of working families to be made manifest in the legislation that we pass at the Capitol. Particularly, I campaigned on a desire for people to be paid what they are worth; on women being able to attain the same pay as their male counterparts; on transportation improvements and community centers, as well as wanting to see that healthcare is fully funded.

NH: So what do you think your first thing will be as being the State Representative for District 111 to making Henry County better?

EH: The main one that touches everybody regardless of their income are the transit options. Because people are stuck in traffic every day. In fact, it’s not just Henry County; it’s all of Georgia that’s coming up from the south who realize that when they’re coming to Henry County, there is a bottleneck.

NH: Right! Just like how it is in Gwinnett County! It doesn’t matter what time of day it is.

EH: Exactly. Now the good news is that there’s been a pretty strong effort to build out and expand our roads and to bring more construction projects this way. Because it’s of paramount need, I’ve fortunately been placed on the House Committees on Transportation, Industry and Labor, and Code Revision. Our district, mine particularly - which covers southern Stockbridge, McDonough central, Locust Grove, eastern Hampton, and a little sliver of Jonesboro - our areas are really the homes of people who work every day.

Monday through Saturday, you have roughly 70,000 people commute outside of the district going to work at jobs elsewhere, spending money elsewhere. And you have to imagine for working people who want to be able to save their money, to either help out their children, to be able to go on a trip every once in a while, you know maybe save up for retirement, how likely is it that they are able to do that when they’re busy spending their money helping other counties get wealthy? And so there’s the challenge.

Also, too, Henry County - long before I ever decided to run - was designated as a drop-off hub for freight coming up from Savannah. So the Port of Savannah is expanding. They’re dredging that port in their desire to bring in bigger ships. When the bigger ships come, the freight that’s on those ships also comes up. There’s a good amount that’s coming up via our railways, but there’s a lot that’s traveling north via I-16 and I-75, and it’ll be dropped off all through Henry County which is why when you go by Locust Grove exit 212 or exit 216, you’ll see that there’s loads of logistics warehouses that are being built. And so whether we like it or not, there’s the realization that this is now a future for Henry County.

It’s fast growing. So while it’s growing, we just have to make sure that the needs of average workers in the area who will be there to fill those jobs are taking into account the needs of their families, that the desires to have those businesses remain successful and to attract larger investments into the area. What we don’t want, or at least what I don’t want is to make Henry a sweatshop county - where workers are pushed to their limits, and where profits are abound for only a few. I believe in our workers being able to arrive on time, put in their best efforts, and with reasonable sweat equity, gain a good level of living. And it would be my desire to see that would remain true in Henry County especially with this big economic boom of having these logistics facilities here. But what I would also like to do is to work with our commissioners and strengthen our professional industries that are here for people who are working in white color jobs, and also those necessary professional jobs such as office staff, movie industry staff. We know that as Hollywood is relocating to Atlanta, and we need to make sure that that industry is well supported by the people who live here, helping our wage earners get not only quality jobs, but allowing them opportunities to become credentialed.

NH: What’s the last thing you want to say?

EH: I really want to just take the opportunity to say I’m so thankful and I love getting out into the community; I love talking with people and I really believe that the more you talk to people, and understand their daily reality, what you’ll really see is they’re not defined by their political party. They’re defined by the needs of the loved ones who sit there at their table in front of them every morning.

Nhi Ho is a local Atlanta/McDonough freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can read more stories on Beloved Blurb on Facebook.