La Suong Suong

La Sương Sương (1972-2007) was a famous overseas Vietnamese singer.

Born as Đỗ Thanh Trang on May 13, 1972 in Saigon, South Vietnam, she grew up in a large family as one of nine children.  At the age of 19, she entered Tiếng Hát Truyền Hình Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh (Ho Chi Minh City Television Vocals Talent Search) competition and placed 4th out of more than 1,000 contestants.  Among the contestants at the competition included future overseas Vietnamese superstars Hồ Lệ Thu, whom she had tied with for 4th place, and Như Quỳnh, the winner.  It was at this competition where she would meet her lifetime partner, musician Nhật Trung.  La Sương Sương had chosen her stage name after a character in a Taiwanese movie.  For the next 3 years, La Sương Sương would embark on a promising professional singing career in Vietnam.  In 1993, she recorded a duet album with singer Minh Thuận in Vietnam for the music label, Mimosa, which is a subsidiary of Làng Văn.  The duet album was entitled, Có Nhau Trong Đời, and released two years later.   


Just when her name was about to reach national prominence in Vietnam's pop music industry, La Sương Sương and her family left their native homeland to resettle in the United States in 1994.  After a year living in San Jose, California, La Sương Sương relocated to Orange County, California.  Shortly thereafter, she was introduced to Thái Xuân, the owner of Diễm Xưa Productions, and was offered a recording contract with the label.  With the well-received releases from Diễm Xưa Productions of her debut studio album, Tình Đầu, during the spring of 1996 and a sophomore effort, Chia Tay Hoàng Hôn, during the fall of that same year, it was apparent that La Sương Sương was following in the footsteps of her predecessors, former labelmates Ý Lan and Thanh Hà, into becoming a major overseas Vietnamese pop music star.  For the next couple of years, La Sương Sương recorded a string of successful studio albums for the Diễm Xưa Productions label which included Không Còn Ai Yêu Anh Như Em Đã Yêu Anh (1997), Đừng Nói Yêu Em (1997), 18 Yêu Kiều (1998) and Nhớ Em Hà Nội (1998), a duet album with singer Vũ Khanh.  She also recorded several duets with male artists Hoàng Nam and Kỳ Anh for Diễm Xưa Productions.

Toward the end of the 1990s, La Sương Sương began to branch out and collaborated with various other overseas Vietnamese music labels such as Làng Văn and Tình Productions.  In 2002, La Sương Sương appeared together with Nhật Trung on volume 67 of the Paris By Night live show video series produced by Thúy Nga in a duet performance of a song he had written, Đành Chôn Theo Quên Lãng.  The pair would be invited back on the Paris By Night stage a total of 3 more times for volumes 68, 73 and 80 performing duets of the songs, Tình Trái Ngang (written by Nhật Trung), Trái Tim Buốt Giá (written by Nhật Trung) and Tình Em Mùa Xuân (written by Trường Huy), respectively.  In 2004, the pair released their duet album, Đêm Cô Đơn.  La Sương Sương's last solo studio album, Asian Top Hits: Nuối Tiếc Một Bờ Môi - Phai Dấu Cuộc Tình, was released on October of 2005 by Tình Productions.

In 2004, La Sương Sương's successful music career came to a screeching halt after she had been diagnosed with kidney failure.  On May of 2005, she traveled to mainland China for a kidney transplant procedure.  Several weeks after returning to the United States, La Sương Sương resumed her music career as her health had seemed to be improving.  Unfortunately, by the winter of that year, her body began to reject the transplanted kidney.  On December of 2005, she underwent another unsuccessful kidney transplant.  This would be followed by a couple of liver transplants with similar results.  La Sương Sương died on January 24, 2007 at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.  She is interred at Oak Hill Cemetery in San Jose, California.