ELEVEN SIX WOMEN | NHI MUNDY
Photography by Michael Mundy | @themichaelmundy
Nearing the third season of her life, Nhi Mundy has decided, finally, to be looked at. After more than a decade in fashion, a stretch she calls “practice,” she moved upstate in 2012 and with an immigrant’s grit, built a small empire of restaurants and magazines: Dveight and Upstate Woman. Somewhere between the two, she spearheaded the revival of the sleepy town of Mountain Dale, and improbably, put it on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles. But then she stopped. The restaurants closed, the magazines went on pause, and she enrolled in Hunter College’s MFA program in creative writing, where she served as a Sainsbury Research Fellow for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. Her thesis, a memoir of growing up in the Midwest a decade after the fall of Saigon, wrestles with the fraught bond between a daughter and her strong and complicated mother and puts in full view the violence inherited from war. Writing a memoir, she admits, is the hardest thing she has ever done, so she’s been writing personal essays for Allure and Harper’s Bazaar to ease the strain. And at 47, she knows a thing or two about self care, having learned the lesson of slowing down and being kinder to herself, which includes only taking projects that feed her soul. It is a fitting turn for a woman who has spent years multitasking and making other people and places worth looking at. This time, she turns the gaze on herself.
Listen to the Conversation HERE
Fashion was your first career, and you’ve described it as a kind of rehearsal. What was your takeaway?
I arrived in New York at 19, in the late 90s, naive and terrified, with only $200 and one goal: to work in fashion. I cobbled together classes at FIT and eventually earned a degree in marketing. I started at the bottom, as a cashier at Armani, and worked my way up. By the end of my career I had been an account executive, a public relations director, and a digital marketer for Fortune 500 clients. Learning from the ground up showed me how the machine worked, and at a house like Armani I was exposed to the best minds in taste and creativity. In those formative years I picked up communications, sales, branding, buying, marketing, advertising, production, and event planning experience. It was inevitable that I would use those skills to build my own business.
Nhi wears the Becca Cardi styled with her own dress.
Ba & Me was your first venture, a Vietnamese takeout window that grew into multiple restaurants across the Catskills and Poconos, with features in Food & Wine, Zagat, and Saveur. What prompted the expansion?
When I opened the first location, the takeout window in Callicoon, I had some idea of what I was doing food-wise, having grown up working in my mother’s restaurant in the Midwest. What I didn’t expect was the explosion of business, with lines running around the block. After a year of promising numbers, I had my sights set on a bigger space. Then the decision was made for me: the owner of a small shopping enclave in Honesdale, PA, invited me to take over one of his spaces for an absurdly low rent. We opened the following year. After that, it was invitation after invitation: first Mountain Dale, then Livingston Manor. It seemed like a good idea at first, to expand so rapidly. Then came the pandemic; eventually, the hard work stopped making sense. After a decade in the business, I closed each location, one by one. These days, I consider myself a recovering restaurateur.
You mentioned Mountain Dale, where you also served as “Town Curator.” In addition, you founded two publications, DVEIGHT and Upstate Woman, magazines that champion upstate culture. What sparked these projects, and what did they teach you about the community here?
The idea for DVEIGHT came in a hotel lobby, where I picked up a well-designed newsprint publication and loved the feel of paper in my hands. By then I had met extraordinary people at my restaurants, and I realized the creative community was at my fingertips. They were my customers, so I simply asked if they wanted to be in my magazine, and many said yes. Upstate Woman came later, and grew out of DVEIGHT’s style series celebrating the modern rural woman. The Mountain Dale role came from my work as editor, when the owner of the town read my magazines and imagined his town could be as “hip” as my publication.
What I learned is how varied our community is. Celebrities, models, artists, and writers live peacefully alongside farmers, builders, nurses, and teachers. It’s as diverse as the city, only more extreme in lifestyles and politics, and yet, for the most part, everyone here is respectful. I think much of the tension we see is inflamed online; people seldom behave that way in real life. Upstaters know ours is a symbiotic relationship: the city folk bring economic prosperity, and the locals offer the much needed services and community support.
Nhi wears the Ana T-Neck in Black & the Pia Tube Skirt in Merlot
Recently, you decided to step away from the magazines. Why?
I grew disenchanted with the journalism I was offering. The stories had become formulaic, too Instagram-y, if you will. That wasn’t why I became a publisher and editor, which was to highlight underdog stories, stories that mattered and weren’t being told elsewhere. My disenchantment coincided with the moment I began applying metrics to our business model, and we had to if we wanted to keep growing and pay our talent a fair wage, but the result corroded into stories I eventually fell out of love with.
That was when I decided to pivot to stories that resonated with me, stories about my heritage. All of this stemmed from my years running restaurants and the inherent racism towards the food and its workers that I felt as a foreign-born restaurant owner. I have a lot of opinions about that, which I won’t get into here. But during that time I picked up Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, and it changed me. The question at the heart of that book, in my reading, is why we allow outsiders to dictate how our stories are told. I decided to write a book about my own experience as a refugee, which has taken more than four years. It is perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done.
Nhi wears the Ada Sweater Tank in Merlot styled with her own skirt & jacket.
What makes it so hard?
When I was running my publications, I noticed a gap between my abilities as an editor and my writers. Most came with hefty resumes: master’s degrees, PhDs, stints at Condé Nast and Hearst. My own writing experience was a few journalism courses at FIT. I knew I needed to step up my game, so I briefly attended the journalism program at SUNY New Paltz. There, I met Kris Jansma, the head of the creative writing department, and now a close friend, who eventually handed me a Phillip Lopate book that launched my obsession with the craft. Soon after, I transferred to Columbia University, where I studied under Lopate himself, along with my two greatest mentors, Sam Lipsyte and Margo Jefferson, both of whom I adore and from whom I draw my courage and confidence as a writer. They also fiercely backed my application to Hunter’s creative writing program, arguably one of the most competitive MFAs in New York. In the process of reading, writing, and learning what good literature is, I realized how hard it is to make. So much is involved that we don’t see: style, substance, structure, voice, listening to the sonic quality on a sentence level. Doing all of it consistently, page after page, with sincerity and stamina, and making it interesting and good, is nearly impossible. But I hope it can be done.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s work and your memoir both deal with the long shadow of the Vietnam War. How has working alongside him shaped your own book?
First of all, it has been a privilege—a dream—to work with these literary giants. I also can’t leave out Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, my professor at Hunter and my thesis advisor, who has been incredibly supportive. As for Viet, the fact that he is the first Vietnamese writer to win a Pulitzer Prize is not lost on me. All of my mentors inform my work in one way or another. With Viet, it is a matter of watching his career and mapping it like a blueprint, the way children follow in their parents’ footsteps through exposure and observation. He has become that figure for me, showing me that it can be done and how. Perhaps both our books deal with the “long shadow” of the war, but I think that is circumstantial. Most books, mine and his included, deal with the human spirit and its endurance through pain, struggle, and love, or the lack of it. People like to place our stories in neat containers, when in truth they are just like everyone else’s, just told with a tinge of yellow.
Nhi wears the Ada Tweed Tank styled with her own pant.
On your website, you say your work moves between “beauty, aging, motherhood, memory, and the immigrant experience,” though you’re “mostly chasing the meaning of life.” Have you gotten any closer?
I think so. My current assessment is that you must find meaning in your work and in your relationships, and by meaning I mean passion, inspiration, excitement, lust, the sublime. Without these, what is left is ultimately despair. That isn’t to say I don’t feel despair in my writing at times. I do. Memoir is the hardest form of writing, at least for me. Perhaps some novelists may disagree, but with memoir you have to relive the tragedies of your life, the moments you’ve locked away for so long, and excavate them, observe them, hold them up close, make sense of them. On top of the craft, there is the deep psychological work, and that is what makes it so difficult. I suppose that is why I started writing more personal essays. They are fun, a way for me to come up for air.
Your essays have recently appeared in Allure and Harper’s Bazaar, and take on beauty culture, aging, and the choices women make about their bodies. Does the form give you something the memoir doesn’t, and how have readers responded?
Writing essays is like eating dessert after a big meal: it’s sweet, speedy, and just fun to consume. I love magazine writing, particularly sharp pieces about women’s issues. I also love a good rom-com and shows about a female collective, and these essays offer me that same vibe. They gesture to a kind of thinking and writing that isn’t necessarily intellectual or high art but is still very necessary. My essays offer a window onto my own life but with lightness, humor, honesty, examination and feminine emotion, which I find I need to let loose sometimes. Judging by the emails and messages from my readers, they seem to want this too.
Nhi wears the Ada Tank and Lea Skirt in Ivory styled with her own shirt.
You’ve mentioned learning to be kinder to yourself and slowing down at this stage in your life. What does slowing down look like day to day?
Here is what it looks like in my head on a daily basis: You don’t have to launch another issue, yet. You don’t have to pitch or write a story you don’t care about. You don’t have to go to that networking event. You don’t have to finish reading that ginormous book. Too often we pressure ourselves to constantly refine, improve, and perfect, a mentality that I think stems from our culture of capitalism. But those pressures are not the meat of finding meaning. They are distractions, mental pollution. Often, I weigh what I need to do against what I want to do. Both matter, and both protect what I hope to accomplish in the limited time I have left on this earth, which is to love, to create, to learn. As long as my daily routine serves those three things, I am being kind to myself.
How would you describe your personal style now?
I remember the first Armani uniform I was given when I worked there as a teenager: it was a black Italian wool suit, and the way it moved on my body, I was sold from that day on. I think it was Einstein who recognized the value of a uniform: it frees the mind for more important matters. That, in a nutshell, is how I operate these days, and I owe Mr. Armani thanks for my style template. I know my body, my strengths and my weaknesses, and everything I own rests on that knowledge. I dress androgynously because I have a boyish frame that I have grown to appreciate after decades of feeling ashamed of it. I like to show my clavicle and arms, which I find elegant. I prefer wide pants because I dislike my calves. I wear white Converse because they are iconic and practical. I own three pairs of the same prescription frames in different colors, and most of my clothes are duplicates, just in different shades. I’m a minimalist, a pragmatist, in approach and attire.
Lastly, which ELEVEN SIX pieces have earned a place in your wardrobe?
I am obsessed with the Pia tube skirt and the Ada vest. I can think of a million ways to wear them, and each piece reads like a well-built paragraph: the structure holds, and a shift in tone could change the entire meaning of the outfit. Needless to say, I will be living in these beautiful pieces come fall.
