Viet Thanh Nguyen

That was what the refugee experience was like, not just for us, but for so many other refugees who were trying to survive in a very difficult and violent time in San Jose, California.

I think that, well, first of all, the first thing that happened that I really remember is that coming to the United States at four years of age, we ended up in an army camp.

So 130,000 Vietnamese refugees come.

We're put into one of four camps.

Ours was Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania.

In order to leave that camp or any camp, Vietnamese people had to have Americans sponsor them.

So we had a very unusual circumstance.

No American church or institution or family was willing to sponsor all four of us.

So one sponsor took my parents, one sponsor took my 10-year-old brother, one sponsor took four-year-old me.

That's where my memories begin, howling and screaming as I'm taken away from my parents.

And I thought it wasn't such a big deal.

I got to come home after two months, three months.

My brother didn't get to come home for two years.

And I thought everything was fine.

I just moved ahead with my life.

And then I think in retrospect, looking back upon my life as I was writing this memoir, Man of Two Faces, looking back at me at four years of age,

Nine years of age, listening, hearing about my parents being shot, 16 years of age, seeing a gunman in our house, I understood in the end that, in fact, these things really did matter.

That how I had coped with the refugee experience was by turning myself off emotionally, by just becoming completely numb emotionally.

So when my brother said, what's wrong with you?

I thought that was what was wrong with me.