Grateful

Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, surrendered to the armies of the North on April 30, 1975. A man with twelve children watched fear, secrecy and hunger become their life. One day his daughter told him she was leaving.

He begged her to take one of his younger sons. Two days later on a dark night she took her little brother and her 3-year old and became a refugee with no country and no security.

"After eight months in [a] refugee camp, perfect strangers at a church in Knoxville, Tennessee, sponsored [her] to come to the dream land." And that's how this refugee mother with her first child and her brother came to America. She survived it all.

Her second daughter, Adrienne, feels deep gratitude for what her mom did. "From the moment I entered this world as your second baby girl, I have never wanted for anything. Heaven willing, I will never know the hunger and desperation that defined your twenties. . with all the privileges I have as a healthy young woman with a Yale degree, nothing I accomplish can compare to what you’ve done."

Adrienne sums it up this way, "I have grown up so comfortably eating the fruits of your suffering."