Welcome to the Stage of

NGUYEN TRANG
NHAT ANH

About

About me

I’m Nguyen Trang Nhat Anh, a student at Hanoi –Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, currently based in Hanoi. I grew up in a loving family of four, where conversations often turn into laughter and ideas take shape over shared meals. Curiosity has always guided me — I love discovering meaning in the ordinary, connecting emotion with expression through art and storytelling. My motto is simple: to create with sincerity, and to leave a little warmth wherever I go.

“Every note I play echoes

where I began — and who I’m becoming.”

01 Small
Interests

"I grew up with music..."

The steady tick of my grandfather’s metronome marked the rhythm of my childhood, patient, precise, unyielding. My grandparents were both music teachers, and their home became my first classroom. Ours was a family steeped in traditional music , afternoons of piano lessons often followed by my grandmother’s gentle guidance through old Chèo and Cải lương melodies. I began lessons before I could even write properly, my legs barely reaching the pedals, my tongue still slipping over tricky words. It was then that I learned the piano wasn’t just an instrument; it was a language, one that demanded both discipline and feeling.

In the evenings, my sister and I would turn the living room into a miniature theater. A bedsheet became a ball gown; a hair tie became a chandelier earring. We sang into hairbrushes, danced on couches, built LEGO stages and balconies for imaginary audiences, and practiced harmonies to Camp Rock’s “This Is Me.” Between performances, we watched Teen Beach Movie and The Greatest Showman, memorizing every line until our voices cracked from laughter.

At school, I carried that same joy with me. I joined every small performance I could, from holiday songs to short plays. I didn’t think of it as “performing”; I just loved watching sound and movement turn into connection, the same way they did in our living-room productions.

Of course, not every day was gentle. There were afternoons when the piano keys blurred through tears of frustration, when the ticking metronome felt more like a reminder of failure than rhythm. But my grandparents never let me quit. They taught me that persistence itself was a kind of music, slow, imperfect, and endlessly human.

Looking back, those “small interests” were the start of everything. They taught me patience, curiosity, and the quiet joy of creation. Every note I played was a conversation between who I was and who I was becoming. And even now, whenever a tune is sung, I still hear that metronome ticking somewhere in my mind — steady, guiding, reminding me where I began.

"Stages got bigger, echoing louder...."

Exploration

02

On stage, I was expected to sing pop anthems, the ones that drew easy applause, yet deep inside, I longed for the soft echoes of Chèo and Cải lương that once floated through my grandparents’ home. As I grew older, music transformed from mimicry into exploration, a way to rediscover where my voice truly belonged.

Between the ages of ten and fifteen, I stepped beyond the comfort of the living room, taking hip-hop classes after school, joining summer musical workshops, and auditioning for community productions even when my knees trembled. Each rehearsal felt like entering a new world filled with mirrors, rhythm counts, and laughter between takes. I learned to project, to listen, to move as part of something greater than myself. Under the stage lights, I no longer sought attention, I found meaning. That was when I realized that performance was not about being seen, but about bringing stories to life.