August 16, 2018
Luke Kertcher is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania
Trinh Truong is an undergraduate student at Yale University
Like 20% of our classmates at Yale and Penn, we are Asian American students attending Ivy League schools.

One of us graduated from a public school in the rural Midwest, where only a handful of Asian Americans were enrolled. The other attended a high-needs, urban public school in upstate New York, where more than 47 languages were spoken by a student body comprised mainly of refugees and immigrants. One of us had no standardized test preparation beyond poorly resourced teachers printing past exams. The other is lucky to have been included in a limited-enrollment college preparation program for low-income students that offered test preparation. Both of us are first-generation, Vietnamese American college students receiving substantial amounts of financial aid.

July 2, 2018
Phuong-Chi Nguyen
My family came to the United States in 1975 after fleeing Saigon by boat. After being rescued at sea, we were sent to Camp Pendleton in San Diego. I was born five months later, the first of my family in the country.  

In that first wave after the war, we were welcomed with open arms in America. Sponsors helped my parents find jobs and we were able to save money, buy houses. For my part, I went to school, worked hard, and listened to everything the teachers told me.

I was what Americans called the “model minority.” A good immigrant.

July 5, 2018
Kathy Khanh Linh Tran, Delegate, 42nd District, Virginia House of Delegates
In 1979, my parents and I were refugees, escaping from Vietnam on a rickety boat for several days. My mother remembers that on the night we left our homeland, there were no stars in the sky - it was so dark that she could not tell where the ocean ended and the sky began. As we left the shores into this watery abyss, she wondered how we would survive.

July 3, 2018
The recent news of children being torn from their families at the border is  a chilling reminder of the threats currently facing vulnerable communities. The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy has violated and traumatized the families of over 2,300 children. The executive order that purports to halt family separation neither fixes the irreparable harm nor seeks to reunite already-separated families. Rather, it now allows families to be detained indefinitely. The crisis is far from over.

June 22, 2018
Thu Quach, PhD, PIVOT Policy Committee Chair
My family – my parents, two siblings and myself – escaped from Vietnam in 1979 by boat and arrived in the US as refugees. We were among the 800,000 boat people who braved the perilous journey, risking our lives for the sake of survival. I often tell my two sons that we were one of the lucky families who remained together. Many families were not so fortunate.

June 20, 2018
Mr. Huy Chi Tran, 47, died on June 12, 2018, while in ICE custody at Eloy Detention Center (Eloy) in Arizona. Mr. Tran had been detained at Eloy since May 25, 2018. According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he was found unresponsive in his cell on June 5, 2018, and transported later that afternoon to the Banner Casa Grande Medical Center in Casa Grande, Arizona, where he died a week later. ICE has not disclosed the cause of Mr. Tran’s death or any facts or circumstances leading to his hospitalization.

May 12, 2018
Although many Vietnamese Americans have progressive views, their voices have been relatively quiet in the Vietnamese American press. PIVOT-The Progressive Vietnamese American Organization, was created to ensure that these voices are heard in our communities. Thus, we are launching this regular monthly column in Nguoi Viet on the first Saturday of every month.

May 11, 2018
My aunt helped me raise my sons. This wouldn’t have been possible without family immigration.

May 7, 2018
C. Huynh is a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park
Janelle Wong is Senior Researcher at AAPI Data
Asian Americans have the highest annual household income and are most likely to hold a bachelor’s degree of any racial group in the United States. However, collecting detailed data on different Asian national-origin groups in the U.S. reveals disparities within the broader “Asian American” racial category. Asian American civil rights groups, led by Southeast Asian advocacy organizations, have long led the charge for the collection of detailed ethnic data, arguing that these data are essential to policymakers, with information about needs within the community that are often hidden.

April 26, 2018
Dr. Tung Nguyen
My life has been separated by a clear line—a childhood in wartime in Vietnam, an adulthood as a refugee in America. For many years, I have listened to stories, read books, and watched shows and movies about the war and what happened afterward. I think that many of these histories and stories are true. But to me, they are true in the way that a blind man’s description of the world based on what he can touch is true. I myself have no pretense of knowing the truths about something that costs millions their lives and weighs heavily on millions of survivors. I can only tell you what I have touched, and what has touched me. So here are some memories.