Viet Thanh Nguyen

We were the survivors.

We made it out of the country.

We were given opportunities that many people literally would have died for and many people did die for.

And so, you know, everything that happens after that, I feel grateful that I've had the opportunity to be a writer.

But everything takes place in that context of tremendous loss of the refugee experience, of war, of knowing, as I do as a scholar of this war, that during the years of the 1940s through the 1970s in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, millions of people died.

So I'm very lucky, and I try to make the most out of that opportunity.

My parents were born poor in a poor rural northern village in an area that's famous for producing hardcore communists and hardcore Catholics.

So 30 minutes before my parents were born, Ho Chi Minh was born.

My parents were Catholics.

They chose a different route.

They lifted themselves out of poverty through hard work and ingenuity.

They lost everything again 20 years later as they became refugees for the second time.

They fled from North to South Vietnam in 1954 when the country was divided, fled from Vietnam in 1975 when their side lost the war.

They came to the United States with some money but not a lot.

They started from the bottom working as janitors and people doing manual work.

They opened a grocery store in San Jose, California.

They worked for 12 to 14 hour days, seven days a week, almost every day of the year.

They were shot in their store on Christmas Eve.

They were held up in their own house at gunpoint.

I was there to witness that.