Sony was named after the Sony Trinitron, the first TV his father bought once he arrived in America after being released from a reeducation camp back in Vietnam. Though the TV was made in 1968, his old man didn’t get one till ’91, the year Sony was born. Naming your child after electronic devices was not uncommon among people in refugee camps back then. Hai knew a kid in Windsor named Toshiba (which got him mistaken for Japanese). Aspirational monikers didn’t stop at electronics either, but extended to any cultural relic possessing social or monetary value. One of his mother’s coworkers named
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