Anh Nguyen Austen

I think he would have written in Vietnamese to my mother.

She didn't probably know as much English as he did.

Yeah, I asked her about that and she said that, you know, she never met them and she didn't know.

So she became kind of the new person or kind of a bit of the housemaid in the family.

And she did struggle a little bit with my grandmother who was very...

demanding and she didn't know what she was in for but later you know that grandmother on her deathbed asked for my mother so I think despite some difficulties they ended up quite fond of one another.

So he just would go to the office, the army office, and then he would bring his studies.

And then that was what his main job was.

And he was kind of completing that baccalaureate then.

And he would bring little treats back to her.

He knew she was struggling a bit, so he would find petite fours and they would have some quality time together.

on their own, and later when he had my brother, they had their first child, he decided to insist that they get a separate home so that they wouldn't have to live with the grandparents.

Yeah, it is 1970 and, you know, so they are struggling actually to have children and they go to the priests and they ask about this and you can sense the post-war...

malaise and the priest turns to them and says you know look around at all the poverty and suffering around you I don't think you're concerned of that much of magnitude in the world and you know so they go away and then finally they get a first child which is good and then by the time it's 1976 right after the fall of Saigon is the year that I'm born so I think they proceeded in a way despite the war

Well, there's certainly that sense that we were property owners and that our fortunes would change.

But it was just pure chaos for everyone.

And specifically for my mother's family, they were living on the coast.

So when the US Navy had left and evacuated, they all got to go on those Navy ships.

So her entire family had evacuated and were headed to the US.

But she lived inland because she had married my father.