Two of the hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees rescued by American troops in 1975 were my mother and father: He was sent to Camp Pendleton in California and she to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. Their families were eventually relocated to Stockton, California, where they met and fell in love.



My mom and dad adjusted to life in the States because they had to. They figured out how to fill out college applications, how to pass English proficiency tests without actually knowing English, how to find good schools for their kids, how to understand when those kids didn't want to be engineers and went to work for BuzzFeed instead (“Is that a website?”). They assimilated, because that’s what it takes to make it here.



They're hardly the first or last immigrants to understand just how hard that social adjustment is. The language barrier was the first hill they had to climb. Navigating a new school system, and not having to wear uniforms, was another; there was barely enough money for clothes, let alone “cool” ones.

