Where My Community-Building Instinct Actually Came From

Last updated: 2026-07-06

A few months ago, I was on a podcast and the host asked me a question I hadn’t been asked before.

“Where does your community-building instinct come from? How did you end up hosting fifty dinner parties in Austin? You just… do this. Where did it start?”

I paused. I actually didn’t know.

I’d never thought about it. I had a few theories — loneliness when I moved to Austin, reading the right books at the right time, stumbling into it without a plan. But none of those felt like the real answer.

And then it came to me.

It was my mom.

The Suitcase and the Dinner Table

My parents are Vietnamese. They both met at a refugee camp in the Philippines. They eventually made it to the Netherlands, where they knew no one. They arrived with a suitcase, some documents, the clothes they had, and very little else. They had to build an entire life from scratch in a country where they didn’t speak the language and had no community.

My mom’s first instinct was to start hosting.

She found other Vietnamese refugees — people who were in the same situation, who’d just arrived, who didn’t know anyone either. And she started gathering them together. Little dinners. Small gatherings. Karaoke nights. People sitting around a table, eating food, laughing, being with each other in the middle of uncertainty.

She wasn’t in a stable situation herself when she started doing this. She was still building. But the first thing she reached for wasn’t security — it was connection. For other people.

I grew up watching this. I didn’t analyze it. I didn’t take notes. It was just how our family operated. When people needed community, you provided it. You cooked for them, you opened your space, you made them feel like they belonged somewhere.

The Realization That Took Thirty Years

When the podcast host asked me where it came from, I had to trace it back.

I’d moved to Austin in 2014. I was professionally in a good place — my productivity company was doing well, I had work that mattered to me, I had achieved most of what I’d set out to achieve professionally.

But something was missing. I had a lot of acquaintances and very few actual friendships. I knew people by their job titles, not as people. I’d read a book called 30 Lessons for Living, a compilation of life wisdom from people who’d reached the end of their lives, and the pattern was impossible to ignore: the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. Not your achievements. Not your career. Your relationships.

So I started hosting dinner parties.

Small ones at first — 6 or 8 people I already knew. I did it again a few months later. Then again. I kept going. Before I knew it I’d hosted fifty dinner parties over two years. Then larger events. Then something that felt like an actual community — people who knew each other, who showed up for each other, who considered this group a real part of their lives.

I thought I had figured this out on my own. A response to loneliness, a choice, an experiment that worked.

But when the podcast host asked where it came from, I realized I hadn’t figured it out at all. I had just remembered it. From a childhood spent watching my mom gather people together when she had almost nothing, because gathering people was what you did.

What Gets Passed Down Without Words

There’s something worth sitting with here.

My mom never sat me down and explained why community matters. She never gave me a framework for hospitality or a philosophy about connection. She just did it — consistently, quietly, in the middle of circumstances that would have given her every excuse not to.

And I absorbed it. Without knowing I was absorbing it. Without being taught, without being told.

This is how a lot of values actually get transmitted. Not through explicit instruction but through modeling. The people around us when we’re young demonstrate a way of being in the world, and we internalize it so naturally that we mistake it for our own idea later.

I’m not sure I would have started hosting dinner parties in Austin if I hadn’t grown up in a household where you just… do that. Where the response to someone struggling or alone or new to a place is to invite them over. Where hospitality isn’t a strategy — it’s just what decent people do.

Generosity as Habit

I’ve talked to a lot of people who want to build stronger communities or deeper friendships but feel like they don’t know how or aren’t naturally wired for it. They’re waiting until they have more space, more time, more resources. Until they’re settled.

My mom didn’t wait until she was settled. She was in the middle of settling — newly arrived in a country she didn’t know, building a life from nothing — and she still reached out.

That’s not advice. I don’t think you can engineer that. But it does suggest something about timing. The conditions for generosity are never going to be perfect. The people who build great communities aren’t usually doing it from a position of abundance. They’re doing it because they made a decision about what kind of person they want to be, and then they just keep doing it regardless of circumstances.

For my mom, it was feeding other refugees. For me, it was dinner parties for people who were new to Austin. The situations are obviously different. But the instinct traces back to the same place.

And I think that’s worth knowing. Where the things that feel most like “just who you are” actually come from. Because usually there’s someone behind it. Someone who modeled it before you thought to ask why.