High school poet captures life as Gen Z in O.C. with ‘When You Know Nothing’

“My mom always says, ‘Oh you think you know everything, but there’s so much more you have to learn,” says Kaya Do-Khanh, 17, describing the title of her debut poetry collection “When You Know Nothing.”

In her approximately 80 poems, self-published digitally through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, the Irvine teenager captures the raw emotions of adolescence — when you feel like you’ve finally figured out how to navigate the ebbs and flows of high school, only to realize “that I’m just starting. I’m tiny, and there’s so much out there in the world.”

when you know nothing
naive and crazy
and oblivious
that’s when it’s the best

Her title poem — and the play on what she knows and doesn’t know — could also allude to her passion for poetry. She’s been writing since middle school, always jotting down words and phrases on post-it notes. In middle school, she wrote a poem called “Soul of the Sea,” about her love of the ocean, which made it into her collection.

She knows that she has a lot to learn, but she likes that her poetry is simple and raw, inspired by poets like Rupi Kaur whose work is more accessible to Gen Z writers because it’s Instagram-friendly.

“Nothing is really filtered,” says Do-Khanh, a senior at Beckman High School in Irvine. “These poems have the sad parts, the growing, the beginnings, the endings ... I’m putting it all out there.”

Her father, Daniel Do-Khanh, is a lawyer who dabbled in creative writing in his youth, notably penning original poetry when courting Kaya’s mother after meeting at UC Irvine.

“But creative writing was not in the cards for me as an educational pursuit or career,” he says. “As a first generation immigrant to the U.S. after the Vietnam War, there were certain expectations, and rightly so, to secure ‘safe’ careers.”

Kaya Do Khanh says not a lot of her peers at Beckman, known for being academically-competitive, share her literary interests, and many of her friends don’t even know she has published a collection of poetry.

Kaya Do Khanh, 17, holds an image of the cover of her e-book, “When You Know Nothing.”

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

“Everyone’s like, I want to be a doctor, lawyer, and I’m like, I wish I wanted to be that,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to be an author.”

Daniel, who helped launch the Vietnamese American Oral History Project at his alma mater in 2001, says he considers his daughter “as American as apple pie and pho” and wants to give her the opportunity to tell her story and work for her own American Dream.

“Kaya is overall a shy, more reserved, person, and yet you see in her writing and poetry this deep insight in her surroundings for her age and experience,” he says.

As she writes in the first poem in her book, “therapy,” her writing is “not an escape or a secret place / it’s just that I’ve got things to say.”

For more information, visit kayainwords.com.

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