Viet Thanh Nguyen

And my brother did too.

And I think what we experienced out of that is we knew the kinds of sacrifices that had been made to give us the opportunities that we had.

And so we never needed, I think, a lot of motivation to just do our hardest to try to

pay back our parents for their sacrifices, but also I think simply to pay back this entire idea that we were the lucky ones.

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.