“I remember coming to America for the first time like it was yesterday. I wore a women’s shirt with a red rose in front of it and wore flip flops of two different colors. I was poor.” My father is a Vietnamese refugee. My dad was born in July 1966 in Saigon, in the south of Vietnam. His parents migrated from the North to the South, and due to growing up with them, he adopted the Northern accent. He said that his parents often talked about their journey moving to the South to escape the communists, and to look for freedom. He described his life as a typical student. He went to school, went home, ate, and slept. However, he was also looking for opportunities and freedom — outside of Vietnam. In early March 1980, he left Vietnam with an adult cousin as his guardian, as he was only 14 years old. He stayed in Thailand for five months. There, he learned the basics of the Thai language to get by temporarily. As he was in Thailand, he was informed that his other cousin in the states will sponsor him. In late August, he moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. He went to Warren Easton High School on Canal Street. My dad had quite a culture shock, as a girl next to him smiled and said hi to him, showing off her braces. He was taken aback and exclaimed, “Iron teeth!” That high school has a 98% black population, and my dad stood out a lot as a lone Asian boy. He found a living by working for a Chinese restaurant and a supermarket there. In 1989, he obtained his citizenship in New Orleans. After four years, he decided to leave New Orleans. In 1992, he moved to California in search of a better life. During this time, he lived in Orange County at an uncle’s place. He worked at a traffic signal company with good pay and attended Orange Coast Community College — however, he did not have the chance to finish his education. In 1997, he returned to Vietnam for the first time since 1980 to reunite with family and also met my mother. They became engaged in Vietnam, but my dad had to return to California. In 1999, my mother moved to California to live with my dad in a small apartment in Orange County. They quickly got married and had their first child in 2000. Then, they had me in 2001. At first, they had many struggles building a family from scratch with limited English capabilities, but my dad was still working at the traffic signal company, making our family, luckily, middle-class. My mom was a housewife, tending to me and my brother. Our lives were quite pleasant and my parents had a strong drive to teach us English and educate us well with many thick educative books and challenging us with copies of “50 math problems in 5 minutes.” Although our family started off well in the first decade of my life, when my dad was laid off from his middle-class job he had since he was 25 — everything became harder. My little sister was born in 2013, worsening our financial struggles. My dad did not have anything more than a high school degree. A high school degree won’t give you many job opportunities now compared to then. Then, when I was a sophomore in high school, my dad went to trade school and got a degree in air conditioning because it was the fastest to obtain. My dad quickly realized that it was a mistake. He struggled with finding a stable job, so my mom had to stop being a housewife and went to beauty school to get a license to do nails, like many Vietnamese women in America. To this day, my family is still going through this struggle. However, this makes me want to work harder in my education and to have a secure future so that I don’t disappoint my parents. I want to continue their search when they came to America — the search for opportunities and freedom.