Mariam Muhammad
Spring 2022
“So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And walked off to look for America”
“America,” Paul Simon
The concept of “America” is one that’s elusive, as the lyric above demonstrates, but also, paradoxically, deeply grounded in a transnational consciousness that has moved through space and time, across America’s borders, to places thousands of miles away. What is for certain is that “America” is highly sought-after. For my interviewee Minh Nguyen, that was his life’s truth.
After interviewing Minh—a 48-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who was born in Saigon, South Vietnam towards the end of the Vietnam War—I walked away with at least one over-arching conclusion: for a multiplicity of reasons, migration is a profoundly harrowing and life-changing experience. Minh, born in 1973, was the fourth child in a series of six children. His father had fought for the losing South in the War and had decided to change his name after the defeat to avoid being found out by the new Communist government and being sent to a not-very-discreetly euphemistic “re-education camp.” Minh’s story, in fact, conveys another generation of migration; his father’s parents had already taken their children and moved to Vietnam to escape Mao Zedong’s Communist China. The uncompromising search for freedom had already been long established in the family before the newly named Nguyens stepped on a boat in the dead of the night, in the summer of ‘78, to escape Vietnam, with the youngest child a mere infant. They had no idea where they were going; all they wanted, according to Minh, was to go “anywhere but Vietnam.”
“We were willing to leave Vietnam to go anywhere else.”
Leaving Vietnam was not simple for the Nguyens. They didn’t have any connections in the US or anywhere else, and they were immersed in an atmosphere of total fear. Stories of vessels sinking in the heart of the ocean, of people being stranded on deserted islands in the middle of nowhere, of life-threatening illnesses and disease, and finally, of desperation driving people to utter horrors like cannibalism, were not uncommon. His parents, however, were determined to leave Vietnam at whatever potential cost to their family. When they got on the boat, they had nothing but a handmade bag stuffed with jewelry and whatever valuables they still owned, along with the children’s birth certificates.
When the boat that was “puttering along” with only one working engine reached Malaysia, the authorities replenished it with basic supplies without allowing it to dock. They were tired of Vietnamese refugees and refused to accept more. The people on the boat had no choice but to continue in the hopes that they would survive the journey to Indonesia, and that there, they would find acceptance.
In Indonesia, Minh’s family was able to set its feet on dry land once more. The dry land, however, was an undeveloped island that had been designated for Vietnamese refugees, and thus the waiting process for Minh’s family began. While the children played on the island in blissful ignorance, Minh’s parents and his older siblings lived through unbearable uncertainty. They were hoping to make their way to one of the countries in the West that was accepting refugees: Italy, Canada, France, or the United States. Secretly, however, their hearts were set on going to one place.
One year of arduous waiting later, their prayers were answered when a Christian fellowship spotted the potential in their family and decided to sponsor them into the States. The family couldn’t help but celebrate: they were elated.
For Minh and his family, once they arrived in San Francisco, the American Dream that they had hoped for came true. The United States, according to Minh, was unlike any other country because it exemplified opportunity. As I spoke to him and told him about how America was also visualized in Pakistan as the “land of opportunity,” Minh emphatically affirmed my words: “That’s the word: opportunity.”
“Oh, my God, we’re going to the US! Streets are paved with gold, and money grows on trees! Anybody with a pulse could succeed.”
“…they [my parents] just talked about freedom and the opportunity to succeed. And the US was the number one place that you can, that has all these opportunities. And they said that we’re very blessed to be here.”
Opportunity to Minh means that you can be Black, Asian, or anyone; you can come from anywhere; you can desire anything, and if you work hard and choose the right path, you will make it. Coming from the landscape of poverty in Vietnam, Minh saw and continues to see the US as a land that generates wealth; where “anybody with a pulse could succeed.”
Listening to Minh, it’s hard not to appreciate the profundity of his experience and how it shaped his entire life as well as his belief in the world. The story of the actual migration that I just related above has been told and retold in Minh’s family: Minh himself doesn’t remember anything. His earliest memory is of him in school in the US. However, the impact of these experiences lives on, especially for Minh. He decided a few years ago to immortalize his story in a book that he titled: “I Nguyen: A Spiritual Journey through Immigration, Assimilation, and Graduation.” Playing on his last name, Minh demonstrates his commitment to the American Dream in proclaiming his victory as an immigrant. He ultimately feels like has won in life: coming from a background of incredible poverty, he has reached a point where he can own a house in California and send both his children to expensive private colleges.
The book, however, is not intended for a wide audience. Minh is not seeking fame or a career as a writer: he just wants to preserve a momentous oral history for his children and their children. He wrote it for them and dedicated it to them.
“Later on… if my grandkids or my great grandkids are curious on where we came from, or where the Chinese part of them came from, they would know.”
Like a dutiful historian, Minh collected the stories that he had grown up with from his mother and siblings to tell the story of his origins, and how his journey across the Pacific as a child shaped the trajectory of his entire life. Whereas his mother was (affectionately known as) “the dropout” in the family and his father had the equivalent of an Associate degree, Minh now has a doctorate. He’s a clinician, living in Orange County and practicing in San Bernardino. He will never forget, however, what he owes this country, and is a proud American citizen.
“…we still hold it [the American Dream] in our hearts! …people who have not gone through this process, they don’t understand freedom.”