# Wendy Duong

Wendy Nicole Duong, née Dương Như Nguyện (also writing creatively under a pen name as Uyen Nicole Duong), is 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.” After serving a three-year term, she resigned to become an international lawyer for Mobil Corporation - Asia-Pacific. In 2001, she joined the faculty of University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, as a corporate law and international business transactions professor. A Fulbright Core Program Legal Scholar to Asia and Fulbright Legal Specialist to Russia, Duong also combined her legal career with novel writing, and was scouted by the publishing division of Amazon, Inc., which published her historical fiction trilogy featuring Vietnam’s decolonization, the fall of Saigon, immigrant life, and women’s themes. The third novel, Mimi and Her Mirror, won the Multicultural Fiction International Book Award in 2012. She currently practices law in Houston and writes full-time.

## Life in exile

Born in Hoi An, Vietnam to parents who were language professors, Duong and her family escaped the Communist siege of Saigon on a U.S. cargo plane three days before the collapse of the Republic of (South) Vietnam. Then a 16-year-old about to graduate from high school, she in March 1975 had just won South Vietnam’s Presidential Honor Price in Literature, and was expected to be designated as National Valedictorian by the Ministry of Education for her perfect GPA and national ranking.

## Education and career

In America, she continued to excel academically. She attended Southern Illinois University on scholarship, and graduated summa cum laude, majoring in journalism, with a minor in French and Vietnamese comparative literature. She became the first foreign-born news editor for the campus newspaper.
Upon graduation, she worked for a Houston advertising firm (founded by Jack Valenti), and decided to pursue law. She then graduated from the University of Houston Law Center with a J.D, cum laude, receiving the Jurisprudence Award in constitutional law. Duong subsequently earned her LL.M. (with a straight-A transcript and published thesis on gender studies) from Harvard Law School.
During law school at the University of Houston, Duong worked full time as Executive Director of Risk Management for the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and became the first Asian-American woman to serve the HISD in an executive position. She also became the first Vietnam-born lawyer to clerk for the federal court in Texas.
Duong then left Texas to begin her law practice with the prestigious law firm of Wilmer Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) in Washington D.C., during which time she also represented Vietnamese refugees pro bono, with Wilmer’s full support. In 1991, she was selected as regional finalist representing Southwestern states for the White House Fellowship, but withdrew her application due to federal employment restriction. Prior to her judgeship appointment in Houston, Texas, Duong was a special trial attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission Office of General Counsel in Washington D.C., and was recognized by the agency with outstanding-lawyer performance awards.
Later, as an international lawyer and corporate in-house counsel, she handled the multi-million-dollar “Blue Dragon” oil exploration contract offshore Vietnam for Mobil, and was the first Vietnam-born lawyer to join the multinational corporation’s global Major Transaction Group. In private practice, she headed a team of lawyers examining Y2K liability exposure for all international assets of a Texas-based multinational energy company.
Known in the Vietnamese American community for her multi-faceted career, in her younger days she was a singer/dancer, attended the American Academy for Dramatic Arts, and auditioned for the debut of the musical Miss Saigon in New York City and Los Angeles. A self-taught L’Art Brut visual artist, Duong also wrote and published essays on law and culture, law and art, law and technology, human rights, gender studies, corporate law, and international economic law. Among Vietnamese American literary artists, she is the only one who writes and publishes bilingually (Vietnamese/English, both poetry and novels). She combined artistic pursuits with the full-time practice of law for 4 decades, working in major cities of the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. While serving as a professor of corporate and international economic law at the University of Denver, she used her paintings and essays to advocate against human trafficking, and successfully organized a diversity concert featuring classical, Broadway, and Vietnamese music at Hamilton Hall, Lamont School of Music, the first concert of its kind in Denver.