She’s Winning Her Long Battle for an Education

There have been times in Gina-Nga Nguyen’s young life when she wasn’t sure she would have a future.

Like when she was 6 years old and soldiers came to her family’s mountain village in Vietnam and took her father away. Or the time her family, seeking to escape their native land, were swamped after boarding an overcrowded riverboat and had to be rescued by local villagers.

Even at that age and amid such turmoil, Nguyen harbored her ambition. From the age of 3, she had watched her parents, both doctors, work with patients, and she had dreamed of becoming a doctor like them.

Her dream seemed stillborn after the Vietnamese government barred her from school, a bit of bureaucratic revenge for her father’s wartime role treating wounded U.S. soldiers.

The ban threatened to shatter the young girl’s hopes.

“I could see no future,” said Nguyen, now 25. “There was no future for us.”

But she has found a future anyway.

Seven years ago, she was a new immigrant able to speak almost no English and with no formal education. Last May, she graduated summa cum laude from UC Irvine with a 4.0 grade-point average. A biology major, she is now completing medical school applications.

Such is the power of ambition and the strength of having faith in yourself.

Sitting in the noisy student center at Orange Coast College, where she is taking elective classes in philosophy and language, Nguyen said, “I just love studying. People don’t understand that. But they spent a whole childhood studying, which is why they hate it.

“For me, it is just something so very pleasant.”

Nguyen was born in the village of Da-Lat, about 60 miles northwest of Saigon, the younger child of Giac Nguyen and Nguyet Dam. Giac Nguyen, her father, was a general practitioner, while her mother focused on women’s health.

During the war, her father went to work for the U.S. military, treating wounded and sick American soldiers. When the war ended, he feared that the Communists would come for him but hoped that, because he was working in a small mountain hospital, they would leave him alone to treat the villagers.

For Nguyen and her brother, who is two years older, the hospital became a second home.

“I watched my father do surgeries,” she recalled. “I watched my mother deliver babies. I watched all those things.”

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But eventually, the soldiers came.

One day, her father went to work, “and they just came and took him to prison,” Nguyen said. “They took all the [male] doctors and shipped them somewhere. I was 6. For more than two months, we didn’t know what had happened to him. Then they moved him to a prison about 100 miles into the mountains, in the forest. We went to visit. He just told my mom he’ll be in prison for the rest of his life.”

The punishment extended to the next generation: Both children were barred from formal schooling. Nguyen’s mother taught them what she could, and nuns whom her father had helped gave them private lessons in French and English.

In 1980, the family left Da-Lat and moved illegally to Saigon, where the father joined them after his release from prison a few weeks later. To keep the government from finding them, they moved constantly, spending a few days at a time with a series of friends and relatives.

Nguyen said that as a teenager she learned “all the girl stuff,” such as sewing and cake decorating. It was a far cry from medical school, but the skills were marketable--she could earn as much as $100 for an ornate wedding cake, enough to feed the family for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, they made plans to escape. They tried several times but luck ran against them: a leaky boat, smugglers who failed to come through. Their hopes were buoyed in 1982 when Giac Nguyen slipped down a river and boarded a smuggler’s ship before it set sail.

“At first, we thought he was successful,” his daughter recalled. “We thought he crossed the border. But the guard boats caught them, and he went back to prison for three more years.”

Her brother, Hong-Vu Nguyen, escaped in 1987 and made it to France, where he still lives. Three years later, the rest of the family was allowed to leave under a program that granted exit visas to those who had collaborated with the U.S. military.

Nguyen and her parents first went to a camp in Thailand, then to Virginia, then to Garden Grove. Her father took a job as a health educator at the Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a Westminster agency that offers support and cultural connections for Vietnamese Americans.

Her mother went to school in Fargo, N.D., to study psychiatry. She passed the California exams but has yet to find a job in her field.

Nguyen hit the books.

She began with classes in English as a second language and a three-month vocational training program in dental hygiene. While working part time as a dental assistant, she enrolled at Orange Coast, where she turned to career counselors for advice on going to medical school.

“They said that since I didn’t go to high school, and with my English, there’s no way you can make it there. Be more practical,” Nguyen said. “It was so discouraging.”

But she wasn’t dissuaded.

She transferred to UCI, completing three years’ worth of classes in two years, maintaining perfect grades while working part time in the dentist’s office and tutoring other students in biology and chemistry.

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She is holding fast to her lifelong ambition of being a doctor.

“I want to be a primary care physician,” she said. She has considered obstetrics and gynecology, she said, “and I’ve read some books about psychiatry. But I want to go and work with underserved people and the poor.”

She is waiting now, but not patiently, for word on whether she has been accepted to medical school. Meanwhile, she is studying speech and philosophy, she said, to improve her language skills and to understand better the way Americans think.

Cultural comprehension comes in the details. Whereas “bacon and eggs” brings to mind a breakfast scene for Americans, the phrase means nothing to Nguyen. She wonders how many other allusions she misses.

“I don’t want to feel like a foreigner,” she said. “I just want to feel at home.”