Building community with storytelling, birding, Tai Chi in the Richmond Annex

Richmond Annex resident Hao Tran finds beauty in the most unlikely places around his home of 20 years. 

From snapping photos of almost 50 species of birds around the neighborhood for his Instagram to coaching weekly Tai Chi meetups Saturday mornings at a local park, he can often be found walking around the Annex and other spots around the city.

In 2023 Tran published a series of short stories titled “Skinny Woman in a Straw Hat” inspired by his upbringing in Vietnam and his experience immigrating, eventually settling in Richmond.

Tran was born in Da Nang, a city in central Vietnam, in 1955. His family moved to the capital of Saigon when he was 10.

“Those were very turbulent times,” he said. “People left as refugees, and it took a long time for peace to return.”

He left Vietnam after graduating from high school in 1973 and was admitted into a program to study abroad in Australia where he eventually earned a degree in forestry.

“Most of my friends took engineering and food science, and I was the only one in my cohort to pick forestry,” Tran said of the program, adding that the destruction left by the Vietnam War inspired him to study nature. “I just loved the idea. The forests were destroyed, defoliated, burnt. I felt that I had to help.”

Tran settled in the Bay Area in 1977, taking classes at UC Berkeley and eventually earning a doctorate in Agricultural and Environmental Chemistry in 1986. He had local ties because his wife’s parents are from Richmond. The two were married while Tran studied in Australia.

“I came here, and the first few years were horrible,” he said. “The immigration situation — there are pathways and there are times where you are in limbo.”

After graduating from UC Berkeley, he was hired by the U.S. Forest Service as a scientist working at a lab in Madison, Wis., before getting a management job in Washington, D.C., and eventually doing work across all 50 states. His heart, however, stayed in the Bay Area, and he moved back in the early 2000s.

“The Bay Area is my first love since I first came to the U.S. in ‘77,” he said. “I’m lucky to have lived in the Bay Area while working for the Forest Service. I wanted to see more connections with the land — especially public land.”

Richmond, he added, has many public open spaces filled with different species of animals and birds — like Point Isabel and the various shorelines along the southern portion of the city. However, Tran feels like not everyone is aware of it.

“It’s everybody’s land and most don’t know. You’d be surprised by how many people don’t take advantage of all this,” he said. “It’s amazing the wildlife you see just walking along. You see pelicans, shorebirds, burrowing owls and the endangered (Ridgeway) Rail which lives in that marshland. Incredible wildlife and you don’t have to go far, it’s just right here.”

In his last few years at the Forest Service, before he retired in 2019, Tran found a passion for writing taking a poetry class at Berkeley City College.

“I didn’t know why. I actually don’t really like it (poetry),” he said. “But I thought I had a need to write something. I just wrote one story at a time depending on what hit me emotionally.”

After his retirement, Tran had compiled 16 personal short stories which spanned his entire life — before and after the war — and his return visits to his home country after 20 years away.

“Some of it is really painful because most people in my generation — my friends, brothers, people my age, don’t write and most of them don’t read because they don’t like to look back,” he said, adding that the exercise of writing became part of his healing process. “A lot of the immigrant experience is not fun.”

His professor at Berkeley City College encouraged him to publish his work and eventually it was released in 2023, selling about 600 copies.

Tran is planning a second book that delves deeper into contemporary issues such as the environment, climate change, sea level rise and the relationship between farmers and land.

From writing to one-bird-a-day pics and Tai Chi

Another passion that he discovered as a retiree has been birding around the Annex. In 2022, he began documenting all the species of wildlife around the neighborhood on his Instagram page.

“Most of them are local birds within two blocks of my home in the Annex,” he said. “I post one bird a day.”

Admittingly, carrying a long photo lens is not the typical icebreaker when interacting with his neighbors, he said.

“When I walk around I see a lot of joggers, people with dogs and people with kids,” he said. “Here I am walking around with a big lens and when people see me the first few times they’d ask me ‘Can I help you?’ or ‘What are you shooting at?’ I tell them ‘I’m not a stalker. I’m a birder.’”

Another way he’s been able to get to know his Annex community is through the weekly Saturday morning Tai Chi groups he leads at Huntington Park.

“Since 2005 I’ve formed this Tai Chi group, and we meet every Saturday morning at 8 a.m.,” he said. “People come and go. It is free, I don’t advertise, but it is just a nice group. We have about 10 to 12 people on average.”

Tran joked that, through these interactions, he’s met many different Annex neighbors — so many he thinks he would have a puncher’s chance at becoming mayor, though he said he wouldn’t run.

“It’s just that I don’t want to work anymore,” he said between laughs.