We are Sonam’s souls. What would you like to know about her?
Who She Is
Sonam Zangmo is her Dharma name, given to her by her Guru. It became the name her international friends came to know her by, and eventually the name she chose to write under.
She has lived in Ho Chi Minh City for more than twenty years and thinks of it as her hometown. She is a Buddhist, a single mother, and a writer who takes her work seriously and writes with her whole soul.
Dharma is not simply one part of her life. It is her path, her truth, and the place she returns to whenever life knocks her down.
She spends much of her time writing, learning, and exploring whatever awakens her curiosity—from education and psychology to languages, astrology, Tarot, and other subjects that help her understand herself and the world around her.
Motherhood taught her that she is more resilient, patient, compassionate, and responsible than she once believed.
And if everything else were stripped away?
Sonam would still be the person who finds a way to rise again, even after being burned to ashes.
Sonam was a shy and deeply insecure child who grew up feeling that she had less than many of the people around her.
Home was often filled with conflict and violence. School was not much easier. She met far more teachers who discouraged curiosity than those who encouraged it, and she rarely had more than one or two close friends at a time.
Even then, however, she was stubborn.
Quietly stubborn.
She could be withdrawn, difficult to persuade, and unusually loyal to whatever she believed was true.
For years, she dreamed of growing up quickly enough to leave home. One of the first moments she truly felt free came when she was finally able to travel abroad alone without her mother stopping her.
Adulthood, of course, was not the happy ending she had imagined.
Marriage, work, money, motherhood, and failure all came in colors far messier than pink.
Her understanding of failure changed with age. At eighteen, it was simply a necessary step. At twenty-five, it hurt, but she believed she could start again. Later, there were years when failure felt almost unbearable.
At thirty-four, she sees it differently.
Failure has become raw material for two things she values enormously: patience and the ability to work without demanding immediate results.
If there is one theme running through her life so far, it is simple:
Never stay defeated.
The rest of the story?
She is writing it herself.
Sonam has never been particularly good at learning the way schools expect people to learn.
She prefers to teach herself, follow a question until she reaches its roots, and keep asking until an answer actually makes sense. General explanations rarely satisfy her.
That made conventional schooling difficult, and her grades were never remarkable.
After high school, she studied traditional medicine for two years. She loved learning about medicinal herbs but decided not to pursue it as a profession. The knowledge stayed with her, even though the career path did not.
She then spent more than a decade in sales. She discovered that she was very good at understanding what people actually needed and helping them choose accordingly.
Later, she tried running her own business, including a vegetarian restaurant.
None of those paths became permanent.
Writing did.
If money were taken out of the equation entirely, writing is still the work she would choose. In the long term, she wants to build an entire ecosystem of content around the subjects she genuinely cares about and knows through firsthand experience.
She also loves languages because they give her access to people, cultures, knowledge, and worlds beyond her own. She is currently studying Tibetan and hopes to move on to Chinese and Japanese afterward.
For Sonam, learning has never really been about collecting qualifications.
It is about discovering what else she might be capable of.
Ask Sonam what she does best and her answer is surprisingly simple:
She makes a plan, and then she carries it out.
That ability underlies almost everything else she does.
She enjoys ideas, but ideas alone do not interest her for long. She wants to turn them into something real.
She hopes to create many things over the course of her life: fiction, nonfiction, educational projects, research-based content, digital projects, and probably a few things she has not imagined yet.
But the first major creation she chose to bring into the world is her fantasy novel:
The Resonant Heir.
To her, it is more than a first book.
It is a piece of her soul—and the first gate to everything that comes after.
When Sonam still ran her vegetarian restaurant, she organized several charity drives for people in need in the surrounding community.
Those projects ended when the restaurant did, but the intention behind them did not.
What she hopes to do in the future is much bigger.
One day, she wants to help build a system that creates meaningful online work opportunities for people whose circumstances make conventional employment difficult—especially pregnant women, single mothers, and others who may have talent but lack the freedom or conditions needed to use it.
Why?
Because disadvantage does not mean lack of ability.
Some people are capable of far more than their circumstances allow the world to see.
And Sonam has very little patience for watching talent get buried.
Sonam does not usually become obsessed with something in the sense of forgetting the world for ten hours straight.
She does something slightly different.
When she likes something, she researches it.
If she grows plants, she experiments until she finds better ways to grow them.
If she likes a particular cake, she will teach herself to make it until it tastes exactly the way she wants. Sponge cakes, macarons, simple recipes or difficult ones—it makes little difference. She does not mind failing a few times.
Her fascination with astrology, divination, and the occult began around the age of twelve, when she would save part of her breakfast money to buy fortune-telling books from market stalls.
Stories came even earlier. She read countless short stories as a child, but Japanese manga became the real fascination. Inuyasha remains one of the series that has stayed with her the most.
As for dislikes?
She has very little tolerance for poor hygiene.
And few things test her patience quite as efficiently as a son who does not want to brush his teeth.
A normal day in Sonam’s life can be summarized fairly efficiently:
Write. Write. Write.
Edit. Edit. Edit.
Mantra. Mantra. Mantra.
And somewhere in between, handle the endless business of being a mother.
Writing and revision occupy a large part of her daily life. Dharma practice runs alongside them, and motherhood has a talent for interrupting any schedule it wishes.
People who know her often seem to think she is a little strange.
Sonam, meanwhile, remains convinced that she is behaving perfectly normally.
Sonam seems to become a slightly different person depending on who is describing her.
Men who have tried to pursue her romantically have called her proud or aloof.
Her friends tend to describe her as warm and lovable.
People older than her often see her as modest.
People younger than her tend to find her dependable.
People who dislike her have occasionally chosen less diplomatic vocabulary.
Sonam’s own description is simpler.
She gets irritated and angry easily, feels things intensely, and is just as quick to cry as she is to laugh—yet sometimes she can be as cold as a frozen log.
And she is, by her own admission, a little mad in a way that does not always make sense to other people.
When she is angry, she also has a practical rule.
If someone can be scolded and might actually change, she will scold them.
If they cannot?
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Find something better to do.
Four things matter deeply to Sonam in relationships:
kindness, empathy, stability, and safety.
She does not need people to be perfect, but she does need them to respect boundaries.
Someone who repeatedly ignores another person’s limits will lose her trust quickly. Rudeness and irresponsibility are not far behind.
For Sonam, affection also means very little if it exists only in words.
One of the clearest ways someone can make her feel loved is to genuinely try to help her—even when doing so is difficult for them too.
She remembers effort.
Especially the kind that costs something.
Sonam’s dream home is large, peaceful, and surrounded by an unreasonable amount of flowers—something closer to Gardenscapes than a minimalist architectural magazine.
She wants to spend the rest of her life creating projects that are useful to others.
And she wants to explore the world with her son.
Explore, not simply travel.
She wants to understand places, cultures, people, languages, and ways of living—not just arrive, take photographs, and leave.
As for secrets?
Sonam claims to have hundreds.
Unfortunately, the genuinely interesting ones share one inconvenient characteristic:
Sonam Zangmo is building a body of work across fiction, nonfiction, and visual creation. This website is designed as an official home: a place to discover worlds, verify publications, and follow the larger catalogue over time.
The house comes first. Commerce enters quietly only when the reader wants to keep going.
