More than 40 years ago, my father’s family fled the Vietnam War and came to America. He left behind his younger brother and my grandparents (they would take a separate journey), and settled in a refugee camp in the Midwest. He tells me that he would eat fish from the backwater creeks behind the camps ― fish that Americans would never touch, and though he got sick he continued to eat because food was food. Eventually the family moved to California and reunited under one roof. In those days, my father, his brothers and his grandmother slept together on one mattress ― they had fitful dreams, I’m sure.
My father made his way to UCSD, and there, he met my mother who left Indonesia to attend college in America. A decade later they married. In the ’90s, on a winning combination of hard
