Years of My Life - Hien Nguyen

Years of My Life

I am an American, born in the north of Vietnam when the French still controlled the country to parents who disliked the French but also were non-believers of the communist Vietnamese style of government. When the French were defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu by the Vietnamese Nationalist led by Ho Chi Minh, and subsequently the country was split into two at the seventeenth parallel, my father chose to move to the south.

I was just a young girl and the significance of what was happening to the country and my family did not have a significant impact on me because my parents took good care of their children.

My father provided the family with all the daily needs such as food, a place to live. He was very focused on education and made sure that everyone went to school.

My mother seemed to have a child every two years so where ever we lived there was always a flock of children. My older sister and I ended up as two primary baby sitters. One sister passed away as a young child, but my mother ended up giving birth to fourteen.

My love of reading and my mathematics ability led me to excel in school and from early on I dreamt of going on to higher levels of education.

I was inspired by a Vietnamese writer who wrote about the universities in the United States. I had a dream of going to school there. I graduated from high school with a dream of going to the US.

But life has a way of creating natural barriers and getting pregnant presented a major one that I had to manage and overcome.

I left home so that I would not shame my parents. I went to Hue to a girl friends house and lived there until I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.

I returned home and my aunt took my daughter Thu, and I went home with my mother and lived there for a short time.

I knew I needed a good job so that I could make my own way. I ended up working for several US agencies and earned a good living.

During that time, I maneuvered my way through the maze of requirements but eventually was accepted to attend a US college.

With the help of a sponsor, I was able to get to the US by myself.

I attended Pensacola Junior College where I met the person that now more than fifty years later I am still married to. During the early years of our marriage, I worked at sponsoring my entire family out of Vietnam. In the subsequent years, Thu came to the US, I had two boys. My entire immediate family immigrated to the US.

The family now lives across the entire US, from Texas to Georgia, to Ohio and California. Each family gathering gets larger as the new generation gets added and then the next.We all know that we live in the greatest country in the world, and we now call it ours as well. Our history includes Vietnam, but our future is definitely in the United States of America.