Origin — The Crossing

Jack Phan came to the United States as an infant, a Vietnamese boat refugee. The crossing is where his story starts — a hook, not the whole of him.

Before I had words, I had a boat, a dark sea, and a story my family still tells about the night the pirates came. (Draft opening — pending Jack’s approval.)

I came to the United States as an infant, carried out of Vietnam by boat. The details of the crossing belong to the people who lived it awake — this is the account my family tells, and I hold it the way you hold something handed down: carefully, and without embellishment.

Why it leads

Every reinvention that follows — self-taught coder, founder, AI-ecosystem builder — rhymes with that first crossing: leaving one shore without a guarantee of the next. The Crossing is the hook for the rest of the timeline, not its centerpiece. The work is what came after.

Travel the spine forward to First Light, where the self-taught coding starts.