Hồ Diệu Hồng

Sinh viên năm thứ nhất, Houston, Texas

“Seek out your roots and you will find your life” - Anonymous

Growing up in America and spending most of my life here. I never really knew my roots and the place I am supposed to call my homeland. Unlike my friends, who were born and raised in the United States, I knew I was born in another country, a country filled with the blood and tears of its people.

My father fought against the Communists in the Vietnam war and when the war ended, they imprisoned him for several years as punishment. Years later, the American government granted him permission to reside in America, allowing him to escape the hostility he was facing due to opposition to the Communists during the war.

At the age of four, I left Vietnam and the first four years of my life behind me. Because I left at such a young age, my memories of beautiful country of Vietnam are very vague. I only know about Vietnam through the pictures I have and the stories that are told to me by my family.

As a child of immigrant parents, I was raised with discipline and have always been expected to do best in everything that I do. I knew my parents have sacrificed immensely, leaving all the things they knew and loved and arriving in a foreign country that they knew nothing about. Yet they did this for siblings and I so that we would be presented with the opportunities they were never given.

Although I was very young at the time, I knew it was hard for my parents those first couple of years. My dad worked in multiple jobs, from fast food restaurants to cleaning other people’s houses, in order to put food on the table. My mom worked tirelessly to take care of siblings and me. Even though they were exhausted, my parents never once complained because they new their hard work would one pay off.

Thirteen years later and my parents’ blood and sweat did pay off. My brother is attending pharmacy school, my sister is attending Rice University, and I will be graduating high school in this spring. My father no longer has to work multiple jobs, but is now working for a company that allows him to have weekends and holidays off. It’s astonishing how thirteen years can bring about such changes, and as I look back I’m amazed to see that the reason I am where I am today is because of my parents.

I know that the best way to repay my parents is to take advantage of any of opportunities that are presented to me and never take anything for granted.

Knowing this, I hope to continue my education at a four years college, in which I will be majoring in Biology. Following this I plan to enter medical school in hope of becoming a doctor. After graduating from medical school, I plan to work in the hospital for a few years to stabilize my life economically.

Once I am ready, I intend to return to Vietnam with my brother, who would be a pharmacist by that time, and my sister, who would be a doctor by then, and open up a practice to treat the underprivileged people there free of charge.

Although it has been thirteen years since I have been back to Vietnam, it is still nonetheless a part of my past because this was the place I was born and where I gained my earliest childhood memories. I hope that by a clinic in Vietnam, I am able to provided medical services to those who are unable to afford it. I also hope that by going back to Vietnam and helping the people there, I will able to find that part of my life that seems to have been buried behind when I left thirteen years ago.