THIS IS A STORY TOO BIG FOR ONE PERSON TO TELL.
It’s a story that spans two continents, ten decades, and eleven thousand miles. It’s the story of a fortune lost and a treasure found, the story of two lost men and three extraordinary women who changed their lives.
My name is Vinh Chung. I was born in a country that no longer exists and grew up in a country I never knew existed.
I was born in South Vietnam just eight months after its fall to the communists in April 1975. But this is not a story about the Vietnam War—this is the story of what happened next, to more than a million people, including my family. For most Americans the final image of the Vietnam War was a grainy black-and-white photograph of an overloaded helicopter lifting off from the rooftop of the United States Embassy in Saigon. When that helicopter departed, my story began.
When I was three and a half years old, my family was forced to leave Vietnam and flee to a place we had never heard of, somewhere in the heartland of America, called Arkansas.
I am a refugee.
My family went to sleep in one world and woke up in another, and more than anyone in my family I was trapped between those worlds. I was born in Vietnam, but I was not Vietnamese; I was raised in America, but I was not an American. I grew up Asian in character but American in culture, a citizen but always a refugee. I had no lessons from the past to guide me, no right way to do things in the present, and no path to follow into the future.
Since I was so young when I left Vietnam, I never really had the chance to understand Asian culture or master the Vietnamese language. I grew up in America, where there was a new culture and a new language to learn, but there was no one to help me because no one in my family had been there before me. We were all lost and had to find our own way in America, and it was hard for each of us in a different way.
We are Chinese by ancestry, born in Vietnam, and raised in the jungles of America. We arrived in this country with nothing but the clothes on our backs and unable to speak a single word of English; my family now holds twenty-one university degrees, including five master’s and five doctorates from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, George Mason, Michigan, and Arkansas.
But in July 1979, my family lay half-dead from dehydration in a derelict fishing boat jammed with ninety-three refugees lost in the middle of the South China Sea.
How we got from there to here is quite a story.