Anh Nguyen Austen

had political leanings merely for survival.

And so there wasn't that sense of division, so to speak.

Yeah, well, I just took my son back maybe two years before COVID and I'm walking down the dusty streets and, you know, I walk into this convenience store and the man in the convenience store, he knows me, recognises me right away.

And this is, you know, I'm in my 40s now.

Yes, he recognised me from Phuong Anh as the child, but he did know of our family and he knew of our journey and he also talked about that he would have been one of the passengers, but he'd pulled out at the end.

Oh, definitely.

I think that I had a very protective childhood.

I had a lot of my cousins to play with and had all these aunties and extended family.

My favorite cousin and I, you know, would go around and apparently he taught me how to walk and run.

You know, we would go chasing flies, you know, using plastic bags.

And supposedly we also, you know, would catch bees and tie them on strings.

go out and dance in the rain when it rained really heavily.

I don't really know.

And so, yeah, in my imagination of it all, I'd be like, well, we'd take out the stinger and then we would, you know, like, you know, immobilize the leg.

It was just something that we did, and we also created these little kind of beaded critters, and we also have cricket fights.

You would aggravate the cricket with a little wand that you made from your hair, and then they would attack each other.

It was kind of like cockfighting, but with crickets.

Oh, actually, I haven't told him much about that anyways.

I don't think he knows to ask.

When I took him back, he learned to love the street foods and that was plenty enough.