Family Roots

Mom recounts the painstaking last days of camp life before hitting the final destination, Singapore. We reminisce about her excitement in moving forward, relate gratitude towards things like good bathrooms and running water, and set the stage for the next chapter in her life: the true beginnings of the immigrant journey.

End of season one.

In this episode, my mother continues to describe what living through the refugee camps was like. We go from the waiting game to trying to understand how people survived and sometimes thrived. Through the many different challenges, I learn how my family saw opportunity and chance through each moment, and we dive into how their activities allowed them to stay active and hopeful until the time arose for them to head out.

In this episode, we continue to uncover what island life was like for my mom, and how in the midst of a stagnant environment, her family found a way to stay busy and productive. We realize the common theme of drastic and different perspectives from when we were both kids, and how that has shaped her growing up. We get closer and closer to the day where her family is set to board a plane to America, the promised land.

Destiny has chosen life for my mother and her boat. We finally touch land and immediately get busy learning about life in a new country, language, and context. My mother unknowingly becomes quite the businesswoman, and we discuss her character and how her own volitions and surroundings molded that into who she is today.

The boat journey reaches a peak level of desperation after being so close, yet so far from land. After being turned down and left with a broken boat, we discuss my mother’s experience with letting literal fate take the wheel and a listless drift towards either death or salvation. 

This episode is a little longer than intended but the real value of the conversation is at the end of the interview. Let us know what you think.

The boat journey goes from bad to worse. We discuss the traumatizing events that my mother went through, and the resolutions she made for herself coming out of the other end as a survivor.

In this episode, we discuss the directionless journey of being a refugee on a boat. I learn from my mother about what it’s like to rely on the most basic instincts for survival, what her boat went through, and describe the feeling of that experience.

In this episode, we talk about how communist Vietnam began to become a more prevalent force in my mother’s life. We discuss what she, her family, and her society had to do in order to adapt and survive. We also get into what her family did in order to prepare for escape and the events that led up to that day.

In this episode, we cover the family dynamic - what it was like living with my grandma and grandpa and having the siblings come into play. We discuss her schooling, her religion, and her society, all in the contexts of a pre-communist Vietnam that was hastily approaching.

In our first episode of Roots, we discuss lineage. We get into the founding blocks of our family, their upbringing, and try to piece together what they went through.