Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

NBC News anchor and correspondent Vicky Nguyen has a story to tell of her family’s daring escape from communist Vietnam and her unlikely journey from refugee to reporter—a story told with laughter and fierce love. Starting in 1975, Vietnam’s “boat people”—desperate families seeking freedom—fled the Communist government and violence in their country any way they could, usually by boat across the South China Sea. Vicky Nguyen and her family were among them. Attacked at sea by pirates before reaching a refugee camp in Malaysia, the Nguyen family survived on rations and waited months until they were sponsored to go to America. But deciding to leave and start a new life in a new country is half the story; figuring out how to be American is the other. Join us as Nguyen recounts the story from her memoir Boat Baby of growing up in America with unconventional Vietnamese parents who didn’t always know how to bridge the cultural gaps. It’s a childhood filled with misadventures and misunderstandings, from almost stabbi