Tuesday morning, May 26, 2026. The Canby City Council chambers are full. Canby Mayor Brian Hodson signs a Memorandum of Understanding with Nguyễn Minh Hiệu, Director of the Bắc Ninh Department of Industry and Trade, while Standing Deputy Secretary Nguyễn Thị Hương of the Bắc Ninh Provincial Party Committee witnesses.
The delegation has brought Đông Hồ folk paintings, a centuries-old Vietnamese art form, as gifts for their hosts. Among those watching: Amy Nguyen, president of Dragonberry Produce. She has watched a moment like this once before.
Amy Nguyen
The room behind the room
The MOU signed in Canby is not the start of a relationship. It is the local-level expression of one that began eleven years earlier and roughly seven thousand miles away. On October 19, 2015, inside Hanoi’s Presidential Palace (colloquially the White House of Vietnam) Oregon Governor Kate Brown, the first Oregon governor to lead a diplomatic delegation to Vietnam, put pen to paper on the first formal cooperation agreement between the State of Oregon and Vietnam.
The signing was one element of a multi-day diplomatic visit, and Amy Nguyen traveled with the Oregon delegation throughout.
Two rooms, eleven years apart
The first Oregon-Vietnam cooperation agreement
Formalized into a cooperation agreement
A Vietnamese province and an Oregon city
Amy was in the room in 2015. Eleven years later, she was in the room again.
Mayor Brian Hodson, City of Canby
What the MOU does
The agreement names trade, manufacturing and logistics, agricultural exports, education, tourism, and cultural exchange as its working categories, moving the relationship, in the words of the morning’s proceedings, from symbolic partnership to strategic economic alliance.
Bắc Ninh brings a province positioning itself as one of Vietnam’s high-tech industrial centers, with a stated orientation toward green industry and a digital economy. Canby brings a Pacific Northwest agricultural community already operating as Vietnam’s most consequential lychee corridor into the United States.
Around the signing table
Christine Drazan
Traci Hensley
Hoàng Anh Tuấn
Phan Thế Tuấn
Nguyễn Đình Lợi
Nguyễn Thị Hương
The common thread
In his remarks, Mayor Hodson singled Amy out by name, repeatedly lauded across the morning as instrumental in making the engagement possible. The Woodburn Independent’s columnist, a self-described veteran of sister-city ceremonies that “invariably fall away,” put Dragonberry’s role plainly: Amy Nguyen and her company “have been the tip of the sword in nurturing this opportunity.” After the signing, the Bắc Ninh delegation visited Dragonberry’s Canby facility.
The framing is not incidental. Over eleven years, Amy has been present at the federal level (the February 2026 address to General Secretary Tô Lâm in Washington – see From Volume to Vision), the state level (the 2015 Brown delegation), the regional level (the Canby-Bắc Giang sister-city partnership signed earlier this year – see From Lychees to Sister City), and now the province-to-city level.
The 2015 photograph and the 2026 photograph show different rooms, different delegations, and the same person witnessing both. For Dragonberry, the implication runs in two directions: a corridor that took eleven years to build, and a corridor now stable enough to be the platform for the next eleven.
Báo Bắc Ninh – Bắc Ninh thúc đẩy hợp tác kinh tế – thương mại với thành phố Canby (Hoa Kỳ) (Vietnamese)
Woodburn Independent – Canby, Vietnam looks to possibilities for the future
Woodburn Independent – The Bac Ninh-Canby partnership offers potential that begs for action (opinion)
Vietnam.vn (English) – Bắc Ninh and Canby City of Oregon expand economic and trade cooperation corridor
