A STORY IS TOLD ABOUT A MAN WHO WAS TRAPPED IN a terrible flood. He clung to a pole while the flood waters rose all around him, and he looked up into the heavens and prayed, “God, I trust You! I know You can save me!”
While the man was praying, a boat rowed up behind him and a rescue worker called up to him, “Sir, get in the boat!”
“No!” the man called back. “I’m trusting God to save me!”
The rescue worker had no choice but to row away, but when the water had risen almost to the man’s chin, the rescue worker tried again.
“Please, get in the boat!” he shouted. “You’ll drown!”
“Go away!” the man shouted back. “I’m trusting God to save me!”
Then the water rose over the man’s head, and he drowned.
In heaven, the man said to God, “I trusted You! Why didn’t You save me?”
God replied, “Who do you think sent the boat?”
Who do you think sent the boat? is a question I have asked myself many times over the years. There were four derelict fishing boats that the Malaysian navy towed out to sea and abandoned, but my family’s boat was the only one rescued; the other three eventually drifted back to Vietnam. Two of them made landfall somewhere along the Ca Mau peninsula not far from our original point of departure. The third boat, which carried Grandmother Chung and my uncle’s family, missed the coast of Vietnam completely and drifted almost 375 miles northeast before it finally came to rest on a small, rocky island called Phu Quy.
My family was near death after six days at sea. Grandmother Chung and her family had to endure more than three weeks of hunger and thirst, and a little boy on their boat died along the way and had to be buried at sea. After landing at Phu Quy, the passengers were turned over to the Vietnamese authorities, who briefly imprisoned them before releasing them to return to homes that were no longer theirs.
In 1993, my father returned to Vietnam for the first time since our midnight departure from Ca Mau fourteen years earlier. Grandmother Chung, my uncle, and many of the other passengers on that third boat had resettled in the Mekong Delta. Grandmother Chung was eighty-five by the time of their visit, and though her body had aged, her temper had not cooled a bit. The first time she saw my father, she hit him and shouted, “Where have you been so long? Why didn’t you think of me?”
Several years later my parents both returned to visit Bac Lieu, my mother’s hometown and the place where my father had lived until he was eight years old. They were greeted as returning heroes in Bac Lieu; many of the older residents remembered the second-most beautiful woman in Bac Lieu, and some of my father’s former rice mill employees came to pay their respects. A ninety-two-year-old man even rode his bicycle from miles away just to have a chance to see him again.
My parents never said a lot about those trips. I think the reason was it was sad for them, but I never realized how sad until Leisle and I had the chance to visit Bac Lieu ourselves in the spring of 2002. Grandmother Chung had passed away by then, which was sad in itself because she was a larger-than-life character to me, and I really wanted Leisle to have the chance to meet her—despite the Chinese proverb that warns, “Two tigers cannot share one forest.”
I met many of my cousins and other relatives on that trip, and I was shocked by the conditions some of them were living in. Some of their houses were little more than shacks; they were dark and oppressive, with bare lightbulbs that dangled from electrical cords and walls plastered over with newspapers. There were no beds to sleep on, and the toilet was a makeshift device attached to a garden hose. One of my relatives was living in a hut in his older brother’s backyard, and it had no running water; I felt so bad for him that I went to the nearest ATM, withdrew all the cash it would give me, and handed him the equivalent of half his yearly income.
When the Vietnamese government relinquished some of the businesses and property it had “borrowed” from its citizens after the war, my uncle had been able to recover one of the family’s rice mills. When I went to see the rice mill, it was a ghost town; it still had the original fifty-year-old milling machinery, but it was in such rusted disrepair that it hadn’t been operating for years. The rice mill was no longer a business; it was just a memento of my family’s former prosperity. For some reason my uncle was still holding on to it; his oldest son even slept there with a few dogs to guard the property, though I could see nothing there worth stealing.
My uncle took us to visit a family shrine, which was a shabby little building in the woods with no electricity or running water—yet my uncle’s oldest daughter stayed there to guard it. She lived by herself and cooked her meals over a little fire with bamboo shoots she dug up in the woods. When my uncle introduced us, she walked over, looked up at me, and started to cry.
“Why is she crying?” Leisle whispered. “I thought she didn’t know you.”
“I think she’s sad,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because of where I am and where she is.”
For me, visiting Vietnam was like walking into a parallel universe—the life that would have been mine if the current had been a bit stronger or if the wind had shifted direction. As I stood there in my parallel universe, looking at my alternate life, I found myself feeling guilty and ashamed—guilty because I had received a blessing they had not, and ashamed because I had not done more to help them.
Why me? Why my family and not theirs? Our boats were all set adrift at exactly the same location; why did the same wind take our boat in one direction and theirs in another? We were blessed—there’s no other way to say it—but why weren’t they? Were we more worthy in some way? Were we more deserving of rescue? I don’t see how; my family’s entire contribution to our rescue was to lie there waiting to die.
The only answer to the question “Why?” is, “God only knows”, so rather than philosophize about a question I cannot answer, I prefer to ask two other questions that are much more practical: “Who do you think sent the boat?” and “What does He expect me to do now?”
My Christian faith has always played a central role in my life, and it supplies answers to those two questions: “Who do you think sent the boat?” Answer: God sent the boat. “What does He expect me to do now?” Answer: Now that I am safely ashore, He expects me to send the boat back for someone else.
I was twenty-six years old when I returned to Vietnam. I still had two years to go at Harvard Medical School, followed by a one-year internship in a predominantly Vietnamese section of Boston, a three-year dermatology residency at Emory University, and a highly specialized yearlong fellowship in Mohs Micrographic Surgery. I spent fifteen years of my life in college and medical school, and I was thirty-three before I ever saw my first patient independently. I worked long and hard to get where I am today, but the humbling truth is that all my hard work has been possible only because of a blessing I received that I did nothing to deserve. I believe that blessing is something I am expected to pass on to other people in any way I can. I think that’s what we all are expected to do.
Jesus once said, “When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required” (Luke 12:48 NLT). I used to wonder who Jesus had in mind when He spoke of those who have been given much because I sure didn’t think it was my family. We arrived in America with nothing but the secondhand clothes on our backs. And who exactly has been entrusted with much? Not us—everything my family owned was taken away from us before we left Vietnam. The way I saw it, my family had been entrusted with nothing and had been given nothing, and I just hoped those rich and powerful people would read Jesus’ words and take them to heart.
But when I went back to Vietnam and stood there in my parallel universe, looking at my alternate life, I finally understood: He meant me. At that moment I was overwhelmed by the realization of just how much I had been given and all that had been entrusted to me. I was the one who made it out; I was the one plucked dying from the South China Sea; I was the one granted asylum in a country where education was available to everyone and prosperity was possible for anyone willing to work hard enough. If not for those rare and precious gifts, I might have spent my life wandering down some dirt road, tapping the haunches of a water buffalo with a bamboo rod.
I believe individual people can make a remarkable difference. What was a man like Stan Mooneyham doing in the South China Sea? He literally had no business being there because World Vision was a land-based organization. Stan Mooneyham wasn’t really sure what he was doing, but he did it anyway, and I think that’s what I respect most about what he did. He was an ordinary man who allowed his heart to be broken by the sight of suffering and did what he thought God wanted him to do. If not for him and his colleagues at World Vision, my life would have ended anonymously at the age of three in the South China Sea. My gratitude for what World Vision did for my family and my respect for the compassionate work they continue to do all over the world is the reason I now serve on their board of directors.
I often have been asked the question, “When did you become an American?” The answer to that question depends on another one: What makes someone an American? From a legal perspective the answer is simple: I went through the naturalization process and became a US citizen when I turned twenty. But I’ve come to believe that being an American involves much more than birthplace, legal status, or ancestry; it involves a set of shared values and beliefs about opportunity, prosperity, and fairness. Generations of refugees and immigrants who came to this country understood and shared those values and beliefs, and by doing so some of them became more American than many who were born here.
My parents wanted me to grow up American but never lose my root. In some ways I’ve been able to do that, but in other ways I have not. I can still speak Vietnamese, which is a great source of pride for my parents since most Vietnamese refugees have lost their native tongue by my age. But I chose my own bride, and when I married her, we didn’t move in with my parents as we would have in Vietnam. It’s the same with Leisle: she still speaks Korean and honors her parents’ wishes whenever possible, but she also had the audacity to marry a Chinese man, and she doesn’t do all the cooking—and not just because of her tiny hands. Leisle and I like to think that even though we have abandoned some Asian customs and traditions, we have retained our tap root—the deepest part of our Asian heritage that we consider part of our identities.
We have three children of our own now, and we want them to keep that tap root, too, but they’re growing up in a different world than we did. I write this book from the comfort of my Colorado Springs home. When I look out my window to the west, I can see Pike’s Peak, the Air Force Academy, and a breathtaking panorama of the Rocky Mountains. When I look out another window, I can see the beautiful new elementary school my children attend. The school is close enough for them to walk to every day, and there are no chained-up pit bulls or dilapidated trailer parks anywhere along the way. We tell our children we love them, we hug them, and we kiss them American-style. We have taken each of them to an eye doctor to make sure they can see the blackboard. They each have their own clothing, their own toys, and their own bicycles—and they even speak English, just like everyone else in their class.
But that was not the world I grew up in, and those were not the forces that shaped my life and character, and it causes me to wonder: How can I give my children all the things I never had without allowing them to become complacent? How do I teach them that America is a land of opportunity but was never meant to be a place of entitlement? How do I allow them comfort and ease but instill in them the value of hard work? How do I allow them to grow up American but still pass on that tap root my parents left to me?
I am a refugee, and I always will be. But in a way, all of us are refugees. We all are born in a time and place we didn’t choose, born without language, property, or money, dependent entirely on the decisions of others for our very survival. We all are strangers in a strange land, left to fend for ourselves in a world we barely comprehend, and as we find our way in this world, we need to help others do the same. We all have been blessed—every one of us—and we all are expected to give back.
My mother and father still live in Fort Smith, Arkansas. They remained in that three-bedroom house across from the former Chungking Chinese Restaurant until 2011, when Leisle and I bought them a new one—a three-thousand-square-foot house in the very same neighborhood as the affluent junior high where I used to bring home discarded clothing from the lost and found. If you ask my father what he thinks of his new house, he will tell you, “It’s a waste of space.” I think he likes it anyway.
My mother recovered remarkably well from her stroke, and she is almost as feisty as she used to be. Not long ago I asked my father, “How do you think Mom has changed as she’s gotten older?” and he said, “She talks back more than when she was young.” When I asked my mother the same question, she said, “When I was young, I was stupid.” My mother and father still don’t tell each other, “I love you,” but it’s not unusual to find them walking around the lake behind their house, holding hands.
Their greatest source of satisfaction is their children and their accomplishments, the most important of which are their families. Jenny and her husband have two grown daughters and still live in northern Virginia, where Jenny is studying to become a respiratory therapist. Yen and her husband live in Houston with their two children; she works as an ultrasonographer. Nikki and her husband live in Edgewood, Maryland, where she taught school for several years before choosing to focus her time and attention on her three kids. Thai and his wife have a son; Thai works as a senior systems engineer for Comcast in Reston, Virginia. My twin brothers Anh and Hon are both optometrists; they both live in Arkansas, and both are married. Anh has two children, and Hon has three. Bao was recently married and is a family physician in California, and his twin brother, Toan, and his wife live in Texas, where he works as a dentist. Du, the youngest of my brothers and sisters, recently became engaged; he’s a dentist too.
And my brother Bruce has a master’s degree in science management and is team leader of cytology at a hospital in Albany, Georgia. When my family gets together every Christmas, my father still tells him, “You know, you could still become a doctor.”
Leisle gave up her dream of becoming a Supreme Court justice. When I began medical school, she took a job with a consulting firm to help pay the bills and decided she liked the business world, so she picked up an MBA at Harvard and now runs the business side of our medical practice in Colorado Springs. I’m grateful for the sacrifice she made on my behalf, but the legal world will be worse off without her.
We are a family of refugees. Our country of origin didn’t want us, and we traveled eleven thousand miles hoping to find one that did. Everything we once owned, everything we once were—it was all dropped in the ocean, and it rests with a derelict fishing boat at the bottom of the South China Sea. But we were rescued from that ocean, and though we lost a fortune, we found a greater treasure.
We are Americans now, and we’re finally home.