August 13, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Hoat Hoang was still a boy when his family left their village in the middle of the night. The fall of Saigon had changed everything, and the only way forward was through jungles, border checkpoints, and refugee camps that offered little hope. When they finally reached the United States, nothing about it felt like a finish line. Hoat worked long hours, learned English sentence by sentence, and kept his head down. In this story, Hoang walks us through his journey from Vietnam to becoming a celebrated surgeon in America.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories, and up next
a story from Wat Wong. Today, Whatt is a surgeon,
but his journey to getting there was far from ordinary.
He's here to share the story of his family fleeing
Vietnam and arriving in America with nothing.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Growing up in South Vietnam. I was really young at
the time. But the things that we remember are the
things that we did all the time, and so we
were Catholics, so we went to the Mass all the time.
Every morning we would go to church. Our village was
along the seashore. It was a fishing village and so
my dad was a commercial fisherman. He would leave every morning,
(00:53):
come in every night, and so we would run out
to the dock to see the day's catch. We didn't
have running water. Though we had the electricity, it was
really limited. So we had a light in the house
and my grandparents, my dad's parents, they had the only
TV in the village, and so all of us would
swarm to his house and watch his TV. We didn't
(01:17):
have an ice machine. We had an ice box. So
my mother if she needed ice, she would send me
to the ice factory. She always ordered the bigger block
of ice, because I would walk along the beach in
the hot sand. When I picked up the big block
of ice and started walking home, ICE's cold, so the
(01:38):
ice would fall on the sand and then it would
start to melt, so then I would pick it up
and start walking a little bit more and it would
fall again. So by the time I made it home,
that block of ice was a lot smaller than the
block that I started with. So those are some of
the simple, fond members of the things that happened all
the time. But at that time, the North Vietnamese Communists,
(02:01):
which they were supported by China and by the Soviet Union,
were trying to overtake the South Vietnam, which was non communists.
So we were the democratic side of Vietnam, and it
was a civil war going on during that time, and
so ultimately South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese Communists.
(02:21):
That's when I remember things such as the troops storming
the South Vietnam and people just scrambling under military fire.
I remember, as a six year old hiding underneath the mattress,
underneath the bed, and the North Vietnamese troops would run
through our house and ransacking the house and hearing gunfire
(02:43):
in the village and thinking, oh, my goodness, this is
not going to end. Well. I remember hearing them yelling,
you know, where's your dad, because my dad was part
of the South Vietnamese military. He had served a while back,
but at that point any grown man was considered a
to them, and so they were looking for any men.
So the North Vietnamese as they came down, we knew
(03:07):
that democracy was going to end because Christianity was not
going to be loud. There was going to be a
lot of tyranny as far as religion, as far as economy,
as far as finances, and my parents knew that was coming.
And so when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese,
(03:27):
and that was April thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, when it happened,
it happened in a hurry. The North Vietnamese troops came
in rapidly, and my parents decided to flee, and so
as the troops were storming the ground, the only place
you can flee is to the ocean. We knew that
the US had some presence in the ocean, and so
(03:49):
we thought, okay, well, if we stay on land, you know,
we're doomed, but maybe if we head out to the sea,
maybe there would be somebody to receive us. We just
had to flee. We didn't have time really to say
any goodbyes. My immediate family and cousins and aunts and uncles,
we all jumped on my dad's boat. I had three siblings,
(04:10):
one of them was a newborn. And as we fled
land and headed out, we saw a larger vessel and
we thought, oh, thank goodness, you know, here's somebody that
can help us. And as we approached that ship, come
to find out that was a communist ship, and so
they started firing on us, and my grandmother was hit,
(04:32):
and of course she was hurting them, and she told
her husband, my grandfather, listen, and we need to get
back to land because I won't be able to survive this.
So when we went back on shore, my grandfather told
my dad, son, there's no life for you here. Take
your family with you, take the kids. We've lived a good,
(04:54):
long life, and you go make a new life for
yourself and your family. I think back now, and I think, okay,
so I'm a dad now with two kids, and I
can't imagine my parents telling me that, And I had
to choose between do I stay with my parents or
do I take my family to a new opportunity. Whatever
that opportunity was, we didn't know that it was going
to be better. We just knew if we stayed, it
(05:17):
wasn't going to be good. So my grandparents stayed, and
I can't imagine my dad what he felt. He took
the four kids wife, my mother, of course, and headed
back to see and eventually we came upon a US
ship that received us. We really had no idea of
(05:37):
what a US ship was going to look like versus
a communist ship, and so when we came and approached one,
and it turned out to be friendly, my dad boored
it first, and then my mother handed me to my dad,
and then handed my youngest brother, who was a newborn
at the time, to my dad, And so the three
(05:59):
of us got on the neighbor ship first, and right
then they cut off any more people coming onto this
ship because the ship was full. So then my mother
and two other siblings were still on my dad's boat,
and so they separated us, and then because they had
no more room, we were now parted from one another,
(06:20):
and who knows when we would see each other again,
you just literally watch it float away. That was hard
on my dad because my youngest brother was still breastfeeding
at the time, and so here he is with a
newborn baby being breastfed and he can't feed the baby.
I learned pretty quickly where to find milk in the ship,
(06:41):
and so we just stumbled through it, but eventually got
my younger brother fed, And I do remember the first
good memory of being on that US ship was when
we were looking for something to eat, and the first
US food that I ever put in my mouth was
a Hershey's chocolate bar and it was the best tasting
(07:05):
thing I had ever put in my mouth. Gosh, that
Hershey's bar was good. So of course we were fearful
and not knowing what we were getting ourselves into. But
several weeks later we were all reunited. We all met
together back again in Guam, which was US owned at
(07:25):
that time. Basically we just stumbled across one another on
that island. Then we were all brought to Florida. We
were at a immigration camp there and from there the
different families were sponsored by American and US families two
different locations within the US. So there was a farming
(07:48):
couple in Kentucky, Campbellville, Kentucky, that through the US Catholic
Charities Association, they sponsored my parents and the four kids,
and so we packed up got onto a Greyhound bus
to Campbellville, Kentucky from Florida. There, my dad, who worked
in the ocean his whole life, was now transplanted into
(08:12):
a farming community. And at the time none of us
spoke English. The only English we knew was yes and no.
So I started kindergarten in Kentucky, and somehow along the
way we were supposed to bring a blanket to take
a nap with. Well, not understanding English, my parents didn't
pack a blanket, and so when I showed up for
(08:33):
a first day of school and all the other kids
are napping and they all had their blankets, and I'm
standing around looking at the kids, I don't have a
blanket to take a nap with. And so we quickly
learned and adapted. I do remember things that made it easy.
For example, math, because two plus two will always before,
regardless of whatever language you speak. And whether you attend
(08:56):
a Catholic Mass in Vietnam or you attend one in Campbellville, Kentucky,
it's hey, we all worship the same God, we all
have the same Savior, and we're all trying to get
to the same location. But the rest of it, it
comes quickly when you have to speak that language. The
material things that you accumulate over time, all of that
(09:18):
you set aside, hoping you'd find a new life, a
better opportunity for yourself and for your kids.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And you're listening to Wa Wong tell the story of
what happened to so many families when Saigon fell, when
South Vietnam was captured by the Communists, and there were
consequences when we left Vietnam, But my goodness, Americans did
step up. The role of the Catholic charities plays in
so much of this, and all kinds of Protestant charities
as well, and stepping up and taking care of the
(09:48):
least of these. When we come back more of this
remarkable story, Wat Wang's story here on our American story,
(10:09):
and we returned to our American stories, to the story
of what Wung after fleeing Vietnam. We'd heard about how
he and his family had begun to assimilate into American life.
Here's what to tell us about more of his adventures
here in America.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
I think in growing up and in hindsight, you see
the things that your parents do or did and appreciate
their efforts. You know, my parents made a lot of
sacrifices a long way, and I hear stories like, for example,
growing up at South Vietnamese culture, we eat a lot
of rice, and in Kentucky it was all potatoes. And
(10:52):
so my dad would come back and come home from
hard day's work, and the farming couple that sponsored us,
they would have a little bit of rise, and so
we would cook it up and there really wasn't enough
to go around, and so my dad would just go
hungry and sacrificed it and saved it for us. And
so there's no telling how many countless sacrifices that I
(11:13):
don't know about it they've made. But they instilled on
us the work ethic, the faith that is required through life,
and so I tried to teach that to our kids
as well. So in South Vietnam, Capolicism was not necessarily
the most prevalent religion, but it was for us and
(11:36):
it was impactful for us and my parents. If they
had their preferences, I would be a priest right now.
But I didn't go that route, much to their dismay,
so I went to med school instead. That's a funny story.
My younger brother was asleep and my cousin and I
were playing while he was taking a nap, and we
(12:00):
had a coin, maybe been a quarter or something like that,
and we were just spinning it on top of my brother,
who was asleep on his forehead, thinking oh that this
is kind of fun. That quarter landed in his mouth.
He woke up and inhaled and swallowed that coin. So
that got us in so much trouble. So we went
(12:21):
to the emergency department. The doctor came to see him,
took him to surgery, took the coin out, saved the day,
came back out. My mother, of course, is still mad
at us, but her son is saved. And I thought
to myself, you know what, that's pretty neat. He saved
my younger brother's life. I think I want to do
that one day. It was just by chance, doing something silly.
(12:46):
It's something I shouldn't have been doing. That kind of
peaked in interest. We never know what's in front of
us and the experiences that we go through at the
time that we go through. Sometimes you don't really appreciate
it until much after the factory. When we were growing up,
we were poor in the US. We were poor and
(13:09):
my parents were not educated, so they did mostly labor jobs.
And one of the jobs that my mother did was
we worked in a crab factory. We picked the meat
out of the crabs. And so here I was middle
school and in high school picking a stinky crab and
why am I doing this? You know, a lot of
(13:30):
my friends during the summer were hanging out the house
watching TV and all that, and I'm going to a
stupid crap factory. We were paid by production, so the
more crabs you crack, the more meat you get, the
more you get paid. What I'm getting at is the
moltor dexterity that's required to crack a cloth precisely to
get that meat out so that there are any shells
(13:52):
in that meat. It helped improve my handspeed, my manual dexterity,
so my left hand is just as good as my
right hand. And yes, my mother woke us up at
four o'clock in the morning every day to go to
the craft factory. And it smelled horribly, and I hated
it and I dreaded it. But here I am as
a surgeon thirty years later, with finger and hand dexterity
(14:16):
that could not have been more polished than because of
that manual worth it. I did so another something that
I thought, Gosh, why am I doing this, which then
I later appreciate. So in college at LSU, during my
freshman year, as I was walking around campus thinking about
(14:40):
what I was going to do in a for a
summer job, I saw a flyer about the Southwestern Publishing
Company And I no idea what the Southwestern Publishing Company was,
but it's at four hundred dollars a week summer job.
And I thought, four hundred dollars a week, that's good
money for a college studentnineteen eighty seven. And so I
(15:02):
went to one of their seminars, not knowing what I
was getting myself into, and so come to find out
it was door to door book sales, blind code calls,
knocking on the door seeing if a mom or dad
might want to buy educational books for their kids. And
I thought, there's no way, but I gave it a try,
(15:27):
and so we learned how to approach someone a complete stranger,
try to determine what their needs were and maybe provide
a product or service that can help them and their
children do better for themselves. So fast forward twenty years later,
I'm sitting with a patient who I've never met before.
(15:50):
This person could be from any walk of life, and
they have a problem, an unmet need, and so you
try to identify with that person, see what their needs
are and how can I make their life a little better.
And so that experience, as a nineteen year old college
student knocking on one hundred and eighty doors per week
(16:13):
code calling, really shaped how I communicate with people to
this very day, you know, trying to identify what their
needs are and hopefully make a difference in their life.
As you're going through these experiencing in life, most of
the time is there for a reason. We just don't
realize it at the moment, But you do learn to
(16:34):
appreciate those things later on. As I was growing up,
I had a lot of horrible dreams about the troops
storming the village and crawling under the bed and the
nightmares within, and that lasted for decades. It took a
long time for those dreams to go away. The US
(16:55):
we and I say we because I feel like I'm
obviously I'm part of the US now welcoming society, and
every one of us has a culture and a background
that's interwoven into one another, and so the US was welcoming,
and the US Catholic Charities Association really did a great
(17:15):
job with bringing us in and finding families and assimilating
us within the US. I just remember the kindness of
our sponsoring families. They had kids and grandkids that were
about our ages, and so my siblings and I, you know,
played with them and ran around the farm and did
(17:36):
silly things. But I just remember their kindness. If it
wasn't for them and what all they did for us,
you know, we wouldn't be where we are now. I
can't imagine what my parents went through. Everything is falling
apart around you. You're leaving your parents, you don't speak
(17:56):
the language. The only thing that we had was literally
the clothes on our backs. Who knows where are you going?
Not everyone came to the US. It all depended on
the immigration services and where they decided. So we were
just happened to be within that group that came to
the US. You never know what happens in life and
(18:19):
how that might impact you later on, but appreciate it
for what it is when you're going through and try
to make the most of it.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And great work by Madison on the production. And a
special thanks to Wa Wang for sharing his story with us,
and what a quintessentially American story it was. His parents
wanted to be a priest. He disappointed them and became
a doctor. His work at the crab factory, well, that
helped him with his hand dexterity and also his discipline.
He had to get up at four am. His door
(18:53):
door book sales gig taught him to listen, taught him
empathy that helped him with his bedside manner. He had
bad dreams, he said, from all that happened in South Vietnam,
but they diminished in the US. He said, well, it's
a welcoming society. Our cultures are interwoven. My Sicilian grandparents,
my Lebanese grandparents would agree. And a special thanks to
(19:15):
Catholic Charities for all the great work they do. The
story of Watwang the story of America. In the end,
here on our American stories
And we're back with our American stories, and up next
a story from Wat Wong. Today, Whatt is a surgeon,
but his journey to getting there was far from ordinary.
He's here to share the story of his family fleeing
Vietnam and arriving in America with nothing.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Growing up in South Vietnam. I was really young at
the time. But the things that we remember are the
things that we did all the time, and so we
were Catholics, so we went to the Mass all the time.
Every morning we would go to church. Our village was
along the seashore. It was a fishing village and so
my dad was a commercial fisherman. He would leave every morning,
(00:53):
come in every night, and so we would run out
to the dock to see the day's catch. We didn't
have running water. Though we had the electricity, it was
really limited. So we had a light in the house
and my grandparents, my dad's parents, they had the only
TV in the village, and so all of us would
swarm to his house and watch his TV. We didn't
(01:17):
have an ice machine. We had an ice box. So
my mother if she needed ice, she would send me
to the ice factory. She always ordered the bigger block
of ice, because I would walk along the beach in
the hot sand. When I picked up the big block
of ice and started walking home, ICE's cold, so the
(01:38):
ice would fall on the sand and then it would
start to melt, so then I would pick it up
and start walking a little bit more and it would
fall again. So by the time I made it home,
that block of ice was a lot smaller than the
block that I started with. So those are some of
the simple, fond members of the things that happened all
the time. But at that time, the North Vietnamese Communists,
(02:01):
which they were supported by China and by the Soviet Union,
were trying to overtake the South Vietnam, which was non communists.
So we were the democratic side of Vietnam, and it
was a civil war going on during that time, and
so ultimately South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese Communists.
(02:21):
That's when I remember things such as the troops storming
the South Vietnam and people just scrambling under military fire.
I remember, as a six year old hiding underneath the mattress,
underneath the bed, and the North Vietnamese troops would run
through our house and ransacking the house and hearing gunfire
(02:43):
in the village and thinking, oh, my goodness, this is
not going to end. Well. I remember hearing them yelling,
you know, where's your dad, because my dad was part
of the South Vietnamese military. He had served a while back,
but at that point any grown man was considered a
to them, and so they were looking for any men.
So the North Vietnamese as they came down, we knew
(03:07):
that democracy was going to end because Christianity was not
going to be loud. There was going to be a
lot of tyranny as far as religion, as far as economy,
as far as finances, and my parents knew that was coming.
And so when South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese,
(03:27):
and that was April thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, when it happened,
it happened in a hurry. The North Vietnamese troops came
in rapidly, and my parents decided to flee, and so
as the troops were storming the ground, the only place
you can flee is to the ocean. We knew that
the US had some presence in the ocean, and so
(03:49):
we thought, okay, well, if we stay on land, you know,
we're doomed, but maybe if we head out to the sea,
maybe there would be somebody to receive us. We just
had to flee. We didn't have time really to say
any goodbyes. My immediate family and cousins and aunts and uncles,
we all jumped on my dad's boat. I had three siblings,
(04:10):
one of them was a newborn. And as we fled
land and headed out, we saw a larger vessel and
we thought, oh, thank goodness, you know, here's somebody that
can help us. And as we approached that ship, come
to find out that was a communist ship, and so
they started firing on us, and my grandmother was hit,
(04:32):
and of course she was hurting them, and she told
her husband, my grandfather, listen, and we need to get
back to land because I won't be able to survive this.
So when we went back on shore, my grandfather told
my dad, son, there's no life for you here. Take
your family with you, take the kids. We've lived a good,
(04:54):
long life, and you go make a new life for
yourself and your family. I think back now, and I think, okay,
so I'm a dad now with two kids, and I
can't imagine my parents telling me that, And I had
to choose between do I stay with my parents or
do I take my family to a new opportunity. Whatever
that opportunity was, we didn't know that it was going
to be better. We just knew if we stayed, it
(05:17):
wasn't going to be good. So my grandparents stayed, and
I can't imagine my dad what he felt. He took
the four kids wife, my mother, of course, and headed
back to see and eventually we came upon a US
ship that received us. We really had no idea of
(05:37):
what a US ship was going to look like versus
a communist ship, and so when we came and approached one,
and it turned out to be friendly, my dad boored
it first, and then my mother handed me to my dad,
and then handed my youngest brother, who was a newborn
at the time, to my dad, And so the three
(05:59):
of us got on the neighbor ship first, and right
then they cut off any more people coming onto this
ship because the ship was full. So then my mother
and two other siblings were still on my dad's boat,
and so they separated us, and then because they had
no more room, we were now parted from one another,
(06:20):
and who knows when we would see each other again,
you just literally watch it float away. That was hard
on my dad because my youngest brother was still breastfeeding
at the time, and so here he is with a
newborn baby being breastfed and he can't feed the baby.
I learned pretty quickly where to find milk in the ship,
(06:41):
and so we just stumbled through it, but eventually got
my younger brother fed, And I do remember the first
good memory of being on that US ship was when
we were looking for something to eat, and the first
US food that I ever put in my mouth was
a Hershey's chocolate bar and it was the best tasting
(07:05):
thing I had ever put in my mouth. Gosh, that
Hershey's bar was good. So of course we were fearful
and not knowing what we were getting ourselves into. But
several weeks later we were all reunited. We all met
together back again in Guam, which was US owned at
(07:25):
that time. Basically we just stumbled across one another on
that island. Then we were all brought to Florida. We
were at a immigration camp there and from there the
different families were sponsored by American and US families two
different locations within the US. So there was a farming
(07:48):
couple in Kentucky, Campbellville, Kentucky, that through the US Catholic
Charities Association, they sponsored my parents and the four kids,
and so we packed up got onto a Greyhound bus
to Campbellville, Kentucky from Florida. There, my dad, who worked
in the ocean his whole life, was now transplanted into
(08:12):
a farming community. And at the time none of us
spoke English. The only English we knew was yes and no.
So I started kindergarten in Kentucky, and somehow along the
way we were supposed to bring a blanket to take
a nap with. Well, not understanding English, my parents didn't
pack a blanket, and so when I showed up for
(08:33):
a first day of school and all the other kids
are napping and they all had their blankets, and I'm
standing around looking at the kids, I don't have a
blanket to take a nap with. And so we quickly
learned and adapted. I do remember things that made it easy.
For example, math, because two plus two will always before,
regardless of whatever language you speak. And whether you attend
(08:56):
a Catholic Mass in Vietnam or you attend one in Campbellville, Kentucky,
it's hey, we all worship the same God, we all
have the same Savior, and we're all trying to get
to the same location. But the rest of it, it
comes quickly when you have to speak that language. The
material things that you accumulate over time, all of that
(09:18):
you set aside, hoping you'd find a new life, a
better opportunity for yourself and for your kids.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And you're listening to Wa Wong tell the story of
what happened to so many families when Saigon fell, when
South Vietnam was captured by the Communists, and there were
consequences when we left Vietnam, But my goodness, Americans did
step up. The role of the Catholic charities plays in
so much of this, and all kinds of Protestant charities
as well, and stepping up and taking care of the
(09:48):
least of these. When we come back more of this
remarkable story, Wat Wang's story here on our American story,
(10:09):
and we returned to our American stories, to the story
of what Wung after fleeing Vietnam. We'd heard about how
he and his family had begun to assimilate into American life.
Here's what to tell us about more of his adventures
here in America.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
I think in growing up and in hindsight, you see
the things that your parents do or did and appreciate
their efforts. You know, my parents made a lot of
sacrifices a long way, and I hear stories like, for example,
growing up at South Vietnamese culture, we eat a lot
of rice, and in Kentucky it was all potatoes. And
(10:52):
so my dad would come back and come home from
hard day's work, and the farming couple that sponsored us,
they would have a little bit of rise, and so
we would cook it up and there really wasn't enough
to go around, and so my dad would just go
hungry and sacrificed it and saved it for us. And
so there's no telling how many countless sacrifices that I
(11:13):
don't know about it they've made. But they instilled on
us the work ethic, the faith that is required through life,
and so I tried to teach that to our kids
as well. So in South Vietnam, Capolicism was not necessarily
the most prevalent religion, but it was for us and
(11:36):
it was impactful for us and my parents. If they
had their preferences, I would be a priest right now.
But I didn't go that route, much to their dismay,
so I went to med school instead. That's a funny story.
My younger brother was asleep and my cousin and I
were playing while he was taking a nap, and we
(12:00):
had a coin, maybe been a quarter or something like that,
and we were just spinning it on top of my brother,
who was asleep on his forehead, thinking oh that this
is kind of fun. That quarter landed in his mouth.
He woke up and inhaled and swallowed that coin. So
that got us in so much trouble. So we went
(12:21):
to the emergency department. The doctor came to see him,
took him to surgery, took the coin out, saved the day,
came back out. My mother, of course, is still mad
at us, but her son is saved. And I thought
to myself, you know what, that's pretty neat. He saved
my younger brother's life. I think I want to do
that one day. It was just by chance, doing something silly.
(12:46):
It's something I shouldn't have been doing. That kind of
peaked in interest. We never know what's in front of
us and the experiences that we go through at the
time that we go through. Sometimes you don't really appreciate
it until much after the factory. When we were growing up,
we were poor in the US. We were poor and
(13:09):
my parents were not educated, so they did mostly labor jobs.
And one of the jobs that my mother did was
we worked in a crab factory. We picked the meat
out of the crabs. And so here I was middle
school and in high school picking a stinky crab and
why am I doing this? You know, a lot of
(13:30):
my friends during the summer were hanging out the house
watching TV and all that, and I'm going to a
stupid crap factory. We were paid by production, so the
more crabs you crack, the more meat you get, the
more you get paid. What I'm getting at is the
moltor dexterity that's required to crack a cloth precisely to
get that meat out so that there are any shells
(13:52):
in that meat. It helped improve my handspeed, my manual dexterity,
so my left hand is just as good as my
right hand. And yes, my mother woke us up at
four o'clock in the morning every day to go to
the craft factory. And it smelled horribly, and I hated
it and I dreaded it. But here I am as
a surgeon thirty years later, with finger and hand dexterity
(14:16):
that could not have been more polished than because of
that manual worth it. I did so another something that
I thought, Gosh, why am I doing this, which then
I later appreciate. So in college at LSU, during my
freshman year, as I was walking around campus thinking about
(14:40):
what I was going to do in a for a
summer job, I saw a flyer about the Southwestern Publishing
Company And I no idea what the Southwestern Publishing Company was,
but it's at four hundred dollars a week summer job.
And I thought, four hundred dollars a week, that's good
money for a college studentnineteen eighty seven. And so I
(15:02):
went to one of their seminars, not knowing what I
was getting myself into, and so come to find out
it was door to door book sales, blind code calls,
knocking on the door seeing if a mom or dad
might want to buy educational books for their kids. And
I thought, there's no way, but I gave it a try,
(15:27):
and so we learned how to approach someone a complete stranger,
try to determine what their needs were and maybe provide
a product or service that can help them and their
children do better for themselves. So fast forward twenty years later,
I'm sitting with a patient who I've never met before.
(15:50):
This person could be from any walk of life, and
they have a problem, an unmet need, and so you
try to identify with that person, see what their needs
are and how can I make their life a little better.
And so that experience, as a nineteen year old college
student knocking on one hundred and eighty doors per week
(16:13):
code calling, really shaped how I communicate with people to
this very day, you know, trying to identify what their
needs are and hopefully make a difference in their life.
As you're going through these experiencing in life, most of
the time is there for a reason. We just don't
realize it at the moment, But you do learn to
(16:34):
appreciate those things later on. As I was growing up,
I had a lot of horrible dreams about the troops
storming the village and crawling under the bed and the
nightmares within, and that lasted for decades. It took a
long time for those dreams to go away. The US
(16:55):
we and I say we because I feel like I'm
obviously I'm part of the US now welcoming society, and
every one of us has a culture and a background
that's interwoven into one another, and so the US was welcoming,
and the US Catholic Charities Association really did a great
(17:15):
job with bringing us in and finding families and assimilating
us within the US. I just remember the kindness of
our sponsoring families. They had kids and grandkids that were
about our ages, and so my siblings and I, you know,
played with them and ran around the farm and did
(17:36):
silly things. But I just remember their kindness. If it
wasn't for them and what all they did for us,
you know, we wouldn't be where we are now. I
can't imagine what my parents went through. Everything is falling
apart around you. You're leaving your parents, you don't speak
(17:56):
the language. The only thing that we had was literally
the clothes on our backs. Who knows where are you going?
Not everyone came to the US. It all depended on
the immigration services and where they decided. So we were
just happened to be within that group that came to
the US. You never know what happens in life and
(18:19):
how that might impact you later on, but appreciate it
for what it is when you're going through and try
to make the most of it.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And great work by Madison on the production. And a
special thanks to Wa Wang for sharing his story with us,
and what a quintessentially American story it was. His parents
wanted to be a priest. He disappointed them and became
a doctor. His work at the crab factory, well, that
helped him with his hand dexterity and also his discipline.
He had to get up at four am. His door
(18:53):
door book sales gig taught him to listen, taught him
empathy that helped him with his bedside manner. He had
bad dreams, he said, from all that happened in South Vietnam,
but they diminished in the US. He said, well, it's
a welcoming society. Our cultures are interwoven. My Sicilian grandparents,
my Lebanese grandparents would agree. And a special thanks to
(19:15):
Catholic Charities for all the great work they do. The
story of Watwang the story of America. In the end,
here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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