My parents, 2019
My family came to the United States in 1975 as refugees of the Vietnam War. I was born a year later.
They were sponsored by a Lutheran Church in Belmont, California. The kind hearts at that church helped my family land on their feet. They helped my dad get a job at an engineering firm and helped my mom learn English. My parents moved to Newark, CA, in 1980 and were able to buy a house and raise my three older sisters and me there; in many ways, the “American Dream” came quickly.
Although US participation in the war was understandably controversial, my family would not have had the life we had if it weren't for the American support of the South Vietnamese people.
My dad spent most of his years as a civil engineer for the state transportation department. My mom worked as an assembly technician for most of her life but somehow worked her way up into a computer engineering position at Intel a few years before she retired. They have both been retired for well over a decade.
In the spring of 2017, my father had a benign tumor the size of a baseball removed from his brain cavity. Although he was expected to make a full recovery, he has lost most of his mobility, and his cognitive ability has suffered.
This is what every morning was like for two years after his operation.