After spending five torturous years in a Communist re-education camp, my father was determined to start a new life for his family in America. The day he left Vietnam, my father packed nothing but notebooks. That forever reminded us of the value he placed on education.
After my parents immigrated to America in 1996, they insisted on having an American-born child, unaffected by the plague of poverty and war. I was born when my father was 51, an age that put him...