Refugee Experience in America
What was it like for your dad coming to America?
For my dad, coming to America was very very difficult because he couldn’t speak English. He came to America. He came to Richmond, Virginia to work for money. He worked at a Church’s, it was a fried chicken fast food joint. He worked there for about a year before coming to California with his brothers. From there, he and his brothers all went to school. They started off at community college and my dad would both be working part-time or full-time, depending on the time period, while he was a student as well.
He studied to become an engineer, and he is now an electrical engineer for the navy. But for him, he only became an engineer because it required him to not have a fully extensive vocabulary, and it also made the most money as well for someone who did not know English that well. It’s also a similar reason why my mom became an accountant.
But for my dad—I asked him recently—he honestly, he does not like his job that much. He only became an engineer because he had such limited English skills. If he could redo it, he probably would’ve studied some sort of philosophy and gone into writing or something similar like that. But because he had to be so focused on finding money for him and his brothers, and in order to secure a stable job for the future, he ended up pursuing a career he doesn’t necessarily enjoy it today.
Can you talk a little bit about your dad’s experience versus your mom’s?
My mom had an easier time. My mom left Vietnam before my dad did. I believe she left during the war. My mom, in Vietnam, was very well off. My grandpa was a dentist and my grandma was a professor at a college. For my mom, my mom definitely had an easier time coming to America than my dad did because she was very well off in Vietnam. My mom herself was super successful. She went to the number one high school in Vietnam that is still very very difficult to get into today, while my uncle went to the second-best high school in Vietnam. The reason why they left though is that they also got scared of the war, so they came over here, but I believe they came by plane as well. For them, it was much easier to come over. When my dad came over, in the end he became very successful financially.
My grandparents had the opposite experience. While in Vietnam they were very well off with their careers. When they came over to the states, it was too late for them to restart with a college education and my grandpa obviously couldn’t become a dentist over here. His English skills were too limited and the techniques used over here are different than techniques used in Vietnam. He ended up working for a pizza delivery place while my grandma worked for a nail salon.
For them, to be honest, it might have been better for them to have stayed in Vietnam, but they came over here because it was better for my mom and my uncle to be here. They sacrificed a lot to come here for my mom and my uncle when in actuality, probably for themselves, would have lived a much more comfortable life in Vietnam. My mom, when I was little, would tell me stories about how during the war they would have these bomb shelters. It would be a little dome, kind of like a concrete dome. When she was little, she would have her dolls and she would just play inside that little hideout. And she remembered that sometimes that they actually would use the hideout. They would hear bombs dropping sometimes and then she would always run in there, crying sometimes, and eventually though, she kind of, I guess, got desensitized from it as well. That was my mom’s side of the family’s experience.