BIOGRAPHY AND LIFE STORY
In her rich and varied life, from 1975 to date, Wendy N.N. Duong has been a reporter, journalist, editor, public relations specialist, public education administrator, attorney, law professor. novelist and poet. She is also a self-taught painter whose work focuses on L’Art Brut. She currently writes full time and resides in Houston, Texas.
Née Dương Như-Nguyện (also writing creatively under the pen name Ng.Uyen Nicole Duong), she is known globally as the first Vietnamese American to hold judicial office in the United States. In 1992, she was appointed Associate Municipal Judge for the City of Houston and Magistrate for the State of Texas. She was then honored by the American Bar Association in New York City as among “Pioneer Women of Color in the Judiciary” (1992), and more recently by the Texas Senate (2023).
The judgeship was based on her 1991 White House Fellowship dossier: she had turned down the opportunity after being selected as regional finalist representing the Southwestern States. The decision was prompted by her long-term choice of combining a full-time law career with her pursuit of novel writing and the performing arts for personal satisfaction as the first-born daughter of parents who were language professors and self-taught artists.
“The law is my profession, but art is my lifetime vocation,” she said. “I must stay with the law to be an independent working woman in America, using my intellect, but I must also pursue artistic creativity to be myself.”
The intellectual bend was no surprise because in March, 1975, she was situated to become the national valedictorian for the Republic of (South) Vietnam, with six national scholarships to choose for her college studies abroad. The artistic bend was no surprise, either, because in March 1975, she became the last young woman to receive South Vietnam’s National Honor Prize in Literature during the Trung Sisters’ commemoration. South Vietnam fell, she and her family were evacuated to America, where she celebrated her 17th birthday.
During her three-year term on the bench in Houston, she reviewed search and arrest warrants, presided over inquests and the pre-trial processing of felony charges during night and weekend court sessions.
She resigned from the judgeship to join the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie, and subsequently became senior legal advisor for Mobil Corporation as part of its Major Global Transaction Group. In this capacity, she played a crucial role in the negotiation and closing of the first oil exploration contract between Mobil and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, immediately following the U.S. lifting of the trade embargo in 1994.
In 2001, having turned down offers from pre-merger Mobil and Texaco-Chevron, she joined the faculty of University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, as a corporate law and international business transactions professor.
During her professorship, she was scouted, first by an independent small press formed by the former government relations executive of Mobil Oil, and then by the newly established traditional publishing division of Amazon Corporation. AmazonEncore/Lake Union published her novel trilogy featuring Vietnam’s decolonization, the fall of Saigon, immigrant life, and career women’s themes. The third novel, Mimi and Her Mirror, won the Multicultural Fiction International Book Award in 2012, as a result of her novel trilogy being displayed at the New York City book fair. Other than that, her creative writing has never been submitted to any literary agent or publishing houses.
Ms. Duong holds a B.S. in communication/journalism, summa cum laude, from Southern Illinois University; a J.D., cum laude, from the University of Houston Bates College of Law, and an LLM from Harvard University (topping her LLM class, with a published thesis on women’s studies). She also received training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, as well as graduate or professional studies in linguistics, business administration, psychology, film, and music.
All her life, she has always combined her various demanding full-time careers with the ardent pursuit of the novelistic and performing arts, filling up her weekends and holidays. She views her “double life” as the natural result of being the first-born daughter of her Vietnamese parents, who were professors of languages in South Vietnam and self-taught artists (her father in painting, and her mother in the dramatic art).
“The pride I hold is neither my law career nor my artistic pursuit. It was the five years I spent to care for my aging and ailing parents in Houston, Texas, during a sorrow-filled period of great family tragedies,” she said. It was the period of soul-searching, love and total giving, all dedicated to my parents. I would do it again, this time better. This intense period will shape my creative writing in the last phase of my life, she said. “Thanks to this period of time, I know now I belong to my grandparents and parents. I now recall every single moment and every bit of memory about my childhood in Hoi An (until age 4), Hue (until age 8), and Saigon (until April 1975). This reservoir of feelings, emotions, images and sceneries serve as my true “homecoming” to my cultural roots: the impetus and treasure for my identity as a creative artist. My vocation. My destiny.”
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