Viet Thanh Nguyen

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.

It was just a very difficult physical and emotional experience for them.

My mother ended up going to a psychiatric facility three times in her life soon after she arrived when her mother died.

in vietnam and she was not there to be able to mourn her mother in person that broke her then again uh you know 15 20 years later i was 18 years old she and i wrote a whole book about it you know a man of two faces was she broken simply because of some crack in her own foundation or was she broken because of all the horrible things that she experienced through war and the refugee experience

I will never know the answer to that question, which is why I wrote a book about it.

And then she was broken for the third time when I was an adult, and she never recovered from that.

So that was the kind of life that my parents lived.

They were hardworking, intelligent, successful people who overcame a lot.

And in my mother's case, she could not overcome the last and final weakness within herself that she was not responsible for.

I was nine years old.

I was home on Christmas Eve with my brother who was 16.

I was watching, I believe, Scooby-Doo Christmas.

I was having a great time.

Phone rings.

My brother answers the phone.

He puts it down.

He says, Mom and Dad have been shot.