Anh Nguyen Austen

No, I felt a moral obligation to my family, which is extremely Catholic.

So, you know, but I remember, you know, growing up praying the rosary every day.

And then even my mother saying, you know, one of you children should be given to God to thank for our journey.

So that kind of laid the fabric in my mind.

I don't think any of my brothers and sisters heard that, that somehow I was to do that.

They do.

I'd gotten a lot of scholarships and lots of offers and they had really brought me in for that.

But, you know, I grew up in a very lucky time.

They valued creativity and something called metacognition.

And I did well there.

You know, I was able to interview for a very top fellowship program.

from the Thomas Watson at the end.

And I remember just that Bryn Mawr gave you a lot of freedom to be creative.

Like I wanted to go to Vietnam and do memoir, food writing, actually.

And they gave me every opportunity to find those things.

So I didn't think it was a very, it's not a very strenuous college in that sense.

You really had to kind of find your own way and you're given every support possible, but they really wanted you to drive your own vision of the world.

So I was on a trip in London for some conferences, and I had been presenting these histories of refugees in Australia and their connection on Facebook with one another, again, based on the camps that they were from, the refugee camps, and then also the boats they were rescued.

And I decided to throw this email out and this picture that my father had given me years back of the doctor and the boat.

There's like a painting of the boat in it.