Tuânminh Albert Đỗ (also known as Minh) never met his grandmother. She passed before he was born, but she was a singer, and so was his father. So when Minh sings, something bigger than him is at play. "When I sing, I feel connected to her," he says. "When I sing with my father, it feels important and precious and beautiful."
A few thousand miles away, a girl named Emily was watching snow fall from the rafters of a regional theater in Sonora, California at six years old. Her grandparents had driven her there. Her grandmother would go on to sew costumes for her shows. Her grandfather would build the sets. Even at a young age she was already sure of one thing: she was made for the stage.
Neither of them knew yet that the impulse pulling them toward performance wasn't really about performance at all. It was about remembering — the people they came from, the cultures that shaped them, the stories that existed long before they did. It would take years, a cross-continental move, a pandemic, and each other to understand that fully. But the thread was always there.
Before The Fairy Tale
Emily grew up in East San Jose, California, a first-generation Filipino-American surrounded by people who poured into her gift. Again, her grandmother sewed costumes for her shows, while her grandfather built sets. At family gatherings, her aunties handed her the karaoke mic because in Filipino culture, she says, that's just what you do. Emily was, by every account, the performer of the family.
"The earliest thing that I wanted to be was famous," she says without apology. "I always wanted to be a performer in some capacity." She auditioned for seven colleges and landed at NYU Tisch Drama and after graduating in three years, she had a manager, an agent, and a booking already lined up.
But then COVID hit, the industry shut down, and Emily found herself asking a question she hadn't prepared for: Who am I when I'm not on stage?
Minh's journey to New York was a different kind of odyssey. Born in Warsaw as the child of Polish and Vietnamese immigrants, he grew up immersed in a culture where the arts were simply part of life, subsidized by the government and accessible to everyone. "There's a greater systemic support for the arts [in Poland]," he explains. "Actors and theaters are taken care of." He arrived at NYU at eighteen to study musical theater, a genre that barely existed in Warsaw, and dove headfirst into a world that was simultaneously freeing and full of new restrictions.
His first year, he learned that as an international student on a visa, opportunities could be offered and then quietly taken away. He sat in acting classes studying scenes and roles that bore no resemblance to the layered, cross-cultural person sitting in the chair. And yet, his professors kept telling him that he could write his own story, but for a long time, Minh found that frustrating. "It felt like extra work that not everyone's going to do,” he admits.
Then something shifted.
The Move: Getting Lost on Purpose
If there is a single throughline to both of their paths, it’s this: rather than performing who the industry expected them to be, they chose to face the unknown, and then focus on remembering who they actually were.
For Minh, that lesson came through language. He describes what one of his mentors called "the zoo effect" — the tendency, when encountering something new, to point at it from a safe distance and move on. "You're just going to point and be like, oh, look at that, that's different," he says. "And you create that barrier." Learning a new language, he found, forces you past it because you have to dive in. "As you're learning the language, you have to face the fact that, 'Oh, I didn't know that.'" That vulnerability, he found, was the doorway to everything.
"I knew the word epithelium before I knew the word spatula," he laughs. But that gap between academic knowledge and lived experience became his creative engine. One of the projects he is most passionate about is a musical born from that very tension, inspired by the tradition that characters sing when words are no longer enough to express themselves. For Minh, that meant asking what a song looks like for a character who is ready to express themselves but doesn't yet have the words? "Many people sing, many people harmonize," he says. "We do all these things before we say words."
For Emily, the remembering came later…and harder. It took leaving the formal theater world she had chased her whole life to discover what she actually wanted from it. Through work with nonprofits rooted in Black and brown storytelling, through a Filipino indigenous dance company where she learned the myths and oral traditions of the southernmost island of Mindanao — the part of the Philippines that defied Spanish colonization — she began to understand what had been missing.
"There needs to be a strength and an intention behind the space that I take up," she says. "Because I am special, and you are special." She pauses. "I feel like I am holding all my ancestors."
What They're Building Together
That shared reckoning — Minh's with language and identity, Emily's with culture and belonging — is what Bai-Ka was built from. In 2020, as the world shut down, Minh founded the production company whose name is a fusion of bajka, the Polish word for fairy tale, and bài ca, the Vietnamese word for a lullaby song. Emily joined as collaborator, creative partner, and soon, his wife.
Together, they've produced short films, plays, a new musical, and more, including “What That Means to Me,” a video and book project reclaiming Asian American identity through poetry, dance, and original music. But more than a catalog of work, Bai-Ka is a declaration of a shared philosophy and, as they describe it, a mission to celebrate ancient traditions of humanity through common storytelling.
"We're not telling new stories," Emily says. "We are remembering. We're rediscovering. We are looking back at what has been said to inform what can be said today."
What You Can Take With You
Emily and Minh's story is not a blueprint for a specific career path. It’s a proof of concept for how to move when your path is uncertain. And as Bai-Ka continues to grow, the principles that built it are worth holding onto.
Follow what sticks, not what's certain. Even as he builds Bai-Ka, Minh hasn't stopped following the thread of curiosity that led him here. "I have to just follow what is sticking," he says of his creative practice. Not a five-year plan — what's sticking. It's a deceptively simple practice that requires both humility and self-awareness.
Hold the vision. Release the route. Bai-Ka didn't emerge from a clear road map. It emerged from COVID shutdowns, visa restrictions, and the frustration of being handed someone else's stories. Minh's openness to not knowing, to new art forms, languages, and worlds is not accidental. It's a choice he makes every time the path gets unclear.
Your community is your mirror. Bai-Ka is, at its core, a collaboration, and Emily would tell her younger self to embrace that sooner. "Feel empowered in collaboration. The goodness of those in your community is only a reflection of your goodness. And when I'm good, you're good. When you are good, I'm good," she says. "Release the control and feel free to be flexible in the water of life."
Remember before you perform. The most radical thing Bai-Ka is doing is insisting that the stories worth telling are not new ones. They're ancient ones that colonization tried to erase. To do your best work, you may need to stop searching for the next thing and instead turn around and look back.
Emily's grandparents introduced her to the theater at six, and something lit up in her that has never gone out. The memory of Minh's grandmother lives in every song he shares with his father. This duo didn't find their purpose in some forward-facing leap. They found it in the turning back.
That's the move, and it's available to all of us.
-
If you’re building something that matters and this story resonated, you’re not alone. The Purpose Post shares weekly stories on purpose, possibilities, and who you’re becoming — delivered straight to your inbox. Join us.
