Immigrant Teen Easily Jumps Language Barrier, Keeps Going

When she came to Orange County from Vietnam at age 15, Oanh Nguyen could barely speak English. She had left behind her parents and younger brother and came to Garden Grove to live with an uncle she had never met.

Two and a half years later, her grade-point average is off the scale. She made a nearly perfect score on the SAT and will skip her senior year of high school to attend USC on a full scholarship. As part of the deal, when she graduates from college, Nguyen, now 18, is guaranteed acceptance into USC’s medical school.

To hear Nguyen’s teachers talk about her is almost scary.

Ralph Georgy, who taught Nguyen in two Theory of Knowledge classes at Fairmont Preparatory Academy in Anaheim, called her “the most amazing student” he has had in his 15 years of teaching, “without reservations.”

“I think at her age, she exceeds Einstein,” he said.

She also was a volunteer at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, helped tutor kids in Anaheim and went to the prom. And she likes the TV show “Friends.”

So much for the language barrier.

Even her uncle is surprised at how quickly she picked up the language. He was worried that because they live in Little Saigon, where she could easily navigate speaking just Vietnamese, Oanh would be slow to pick up English.

“I think she speaks English better than me, and I’ve been here 20 years,” Thanh Nguyen said.

Oanh Nguyen doesn’t really know how she learned the language so quickly, although she thinks the English-only policy at her private prep school helped. “I still have so many difficulties,” she said in a high lilting voice with just a trace of an accent.

Nguyen already was attending a school for gifted students in Ho Chi Minh City when she came to the U.S. Her uncle said Oanh’s parents tried for several years without luck to send her to this country for a better education. Suddenly, he said, the Vietnamese government had a change of policy and allowed some students to leave the country. The U.S. granted her a visa.

Despite flying to a new country alone at such a young age, Oanh said the excitement over her new life overcame the anxiety. When she arrived in Los Angeles, she was greeted by uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents, few of whom she had ever met.

“There were so many thoughts and feelings at that time,” she said. “I cannot remember it clearly at all. It was just a blur.”

She talks to her parents on the phone and e-mails--her father is an engineer, and her mother owns a small store that sells ceramic tiles--but never considers going back. “I don’t think the thought of giving up ever occurred to me.”

Nguyen won’t go back to Vietnam for a visit because she’s afraid she won’t be able to return to the U.S.

She arrived in this country in the middle of ninth grade, coming from one of the few communist states to the heart of capitalism. Her life in Vietnam was a comfortable one, though. Her parents, living in a country where the annual per capita income is barely $250, make enough money to pay the $8,000 tuition at Fairmont.

At first Oanh had a tough time adjusting. She had trouble understanding the language, and her classmates couldn’t understand her. Cultural nuances were beyond her.

Her uncle said she felt frustrated at first because she didn’t have many friends.

“That’s no longer a problem,” he said. “She has too many friends.”

The uncle, a computer programmer, enrolled Nguyen at Fairmont because of its strong academic reputation and small classes. Nearly all its students go straight to four-year colleges after graduation.

He thought his niece would be the exception and would attend a community college. “I’m thinking she can’t catch up in English in a very short time. We need to give her some time to get fluent, and when she becomes fluent in English, she can go to [a four-year] college.”

At first, he seemed on target. Oanh dropped out of a history class that first semester because she couldn’t understand what was going on and concentrated on math and science. But her uncle pushed her into activities that would force her to speak English, such as volunteering at the hospital and participating in the Orange County Leadership Institute, where she learned public speaking.

In her second semester, she started taking honors and advanced placement classes. “I knew if I kept taking regular classes, I would be bored,” she said. “It kept me awake, and it kept me going.”

That year was the only time she didn’t get all A’s. She got a B+ in honors English and a B in fundamentals of speech. But she got enough A-pluses and extra points for taking advanced placement classes to boost her weighted grade-point average to 5.1 for her high school career.

Nguyen’s studies don’t stop during the school year. Her first summer in this country, she took classes at UC Irvine in calculus and music. She was only 16, and she needed the teachers’ approval to enroll. She earned A’s.

Last summer, she went to math camp at Stanford University, and she’s spending six weeks this summer at the Research Science Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, taking classes and working with a mentor investigating the disease neurofibromatosis type II. More than 600 students applied for the 50 U.S. slots.

Breakfast starts at 7:30, followed by classes and lectures. She often doesn’t return to her room until midnight.

“I’m experiencing sleep deprivation because the program is extremely intensive,” Nguyen said in telephone conversation from her dorm room.

She says the others in the program are smarter than she is, though that can be hard to believe. “They are amazing people,” she said.

She scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of her SAT and 780 on the English. Here’s what 780 means: She missed three questions. And English isn’t her native tongue.

She blew past the 1480 SAT score averaged by the 45 students accepted into USC’s Baccalaureate M.D. Program, which reserves a place in the medical school for the students after they complete their undergraduate work.

Her uncle suggested she apply to the USC program. “I said, ‘It’s cool,’ ” Oanh recalled, sounding like any American teenager.

More than 500 students annually apply to the program. Just one or two a year take the route Nguyen has followed and jump from their junior year of high school into the program.

“The professors who interviewed her thought she was pretty amazing,” said John Burdick, associate dean of USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Nguyen plans to major in biochemistry, a new major at USC, which will prepare her for a career in research after medical school. Georgy offers superlative after superlative for his former student. Her versatility, he said, goes beyond just math and science.

Nguyen needed to move to another level of academics, Georgy said. “She’s exhausted our curriculum,” he said. “We had nothing else to offer her.”