Boat Baby

Boat Baby is a memoir by Vicky Nguyen, an NBC News correspondent and Today show consumer correspondent, tracing her life from her family's escape from communist Vietnam in 1979 to her arrival at NBC's New York headquarters four decades later. The narrative alternates between Nguyen's career milestones and her parents' history of sacrifice and reinvention as refugees in America.

The memoir opens in 2019, when Nguyen returned to Mountain View, California, after two days of interviews with 21 NBC News executives, a gauntlet nicknamed the "NBC Wheel of Death." She felt confident she had earned the consumer correspondent role with the network's investigative unit, a position that would make her one of the very few Vietnamese Americans on national television. Her husband, Brian, her high school sweetheart, greeted her pragmatically, insisting nothing had changed until a formal offer arrived. Nguyen sobbed in the shower, recognizing that Brian's resistance to uprooting their family would become her primary obstacle.

The narrative shifts to 1979, when Nguyen was an eight-month-old named Yên. Her parents, Huy Nguyễn and Liên Đỗ, had plotted an illegal escape from Vietnam, where the communist government that took power after Sài Gòn fell in 1975 had stripped citizens of basic freedoms. Disguised in country clothes, the family rode a bus eight hours to a riverside village, where smugglers were to row them to a fishing boat. Communist police intercepted the rowboat and demanded gold; the family bribed the officers and continued. After their guide abandoned them in the jungle overnight, a companion spotted another guide at dawn who directed them to the departing boat. Huy carried baby Vicky as the family sprinted to the beach and boarded as the last passengers.

The memoir traces both parents' origins. Huy was born in Hà Nội in 1954, the year France conceded Vietnam to the Việt Minh independence movement and the country split into communist North and U.S.-allied South. His family relocated to Sài Gòn, where he grew up hustling, selling fighting crickets and collecting bottle caps. Drafted into the South Vietnamese Army in 1972, he served as a medic; shrapnel lodged near his spine during a firefight and was never removed. After Sài Gòn fell, his eldest brother, Hùng, went missing in action and was never found. Liên grew up in a poor fishing village near Vietnam's southern tip and left for Sài Gòn around age 18, where she worked for American military contractors and took a job at Holt International Children's Services, an American adoption agency. After the war, the couple married in a somber 1976 ceremony and survived by selling black market medicines. When Vicky was born in the summer of 1978, their resolve to flee intensified.

During the sea crossing, Thai pirates boarded the 30-foot fishing boat, fired a revolver, and stripped passengers of jewelry. After two days on the South China Sea, the 68 refugees reached Pulau Bidong Island, a Malaysian refugee camp. The family endured ten months on meager United Nations rations. Liên wrote to Holt requesting sponsorship, and Wannell Ware, a Holt administrator, mobilized colleagues to bring the family to America.

They arrived at San Francisco International Airport on March 10, 1980, and resettled in Eugene, Oregon, where Holt and two church congregations furnished an apartment. Roughly a year later, Liên's brother Tâm, 21, was stabbed to death during an argument at a friend's house. His killer was convicted of manslaughter and served less than two years. Liên was devastated by guilt for bringing her brother to America.

Unable to bear the reminders, the family moved to Reno, Nevada, where Liên dealt blackjack and Huy washed dishes while Vicky started kindergarten as the only Asian child in her class. After hearing that San Jose's "Little Sài Gòn," a thriving Vietnamese enclave, offered better business opportunities, Huy moved the family there, and the parents purchased a food truck to serve Silicon Valley workers. When Huy decided San Jose was oversaturated with Vietnamese businesses, they relocated to Santa Rosa, a predominantly white agricultural suburb where Vicky's Vietnamese name was constantly mispronounced. She chose the name "Vicky" after a character on the sitcom Three's Company.

In Santa Rosa, Huy opened Contemporary Design Furniture and built a thriving business through relentless salesmanship and same-day delivery. By 1988, the family purchased a home for $199,000 and paid off the mortgage within a few years. During a grocery trip to San Jose, Huy recognized Tâm's killer working as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant named Tự Do, meaning "freedom." He called 911, and police arrested the man, now a fugitive wanted for murdering his ex-wife.

Growing up in predominantly white Santa Rosa, Vicky endured racist taunts and navigated her identity as one of very few Asian children. At 11, she traveled to Vietnam for the first time and witnessed the poverty her cousins lived in, planting a conviction that she could not take her opportunities for granted. Through her teen years, she met Brian in ninth-grade geometry and began dating him by her junior year. Cheerleading and summer jobs built her confidence and work ethic. At the University of San Francisco on a 75 percent academic scholarship, a chance lunch with Toan Lam, a Chinese-Vietnamese communications student interning at a local TV station, showed her that broadcast journalism was possible for someone who looked like her. She switched her major from biology to communications and graduated as the university's commencement valedictorian in 2000.

Nguyen's early career was humbling. Her first reporting job in Orlando paid $26,500 a year; she shot, wrote, and edited her own stories. She moved through progressively larger markets, from Reno to Phoenix, where she doubled her salary and hit her stride after years of live reporting. Meanwhile, her parents' finances crumbled when Huy secretly refinanced their home to fund stock day-trading and lost everything. Her parents moved to Phoenix, where Liên enrolled in barber school over Huy's objections and began cutting hair at Great Clips, while Huy cycled through jobs and business ventures, repeatedly asking Vicky for capital. She began saying no, torn between filial duty and self-preservation.

After marrying Brian in 2007, Nguyen endured four miscarriages across seven pregnancies before welcoming three daughters: Emerson, Odessa, and Renley. Liên moved in to provide childcare each time, enabling Vicky to continue her career. At NBC Bay Area, Nguyen joined the investigative unit and, with producer Kevin Nious, exposed Sysco Corporation's unsafe food storage practices, resulting in $19.4 million in penalties, the largest consumer settlement in California state history.

When a colleague alerted her in December 2018 that the Today show's consumer correspondent position was open, Nguyen interviewed and received an offer. Brian resisted the move, insisting the salary justify relocating their family to New York. After protracted negotiations, they reached a deal. Hours before her red-eye flight, Nguyen discovered her father had again approached a friend seeking investment for a business venture. They argued, and Huy stormed out without saying goodbye.

On April 22, 2019, Nguyen delivered her first Today show report. The family reunited in New York that fall, with her parents once again sharing the household. Covid-19 soon upended their lives. Brian worked at Lenox Hill Hospital, and a surge of attacks against Asian Americans compelled Nguyen to report extensively on anti-Asian hate, hosting an NBC News special called The Racism Virus. The morning after the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women, she barely held herself together on set before breaking down, acknowledging she could no longer separate the accumulation of anti-Asian violence from her personal identity.

In one of the memoir's closing episodes, Huy fainted, gashed his forehead on a nightstand, and received 14 stitches near the scar from his childhood jeep accident in Sài Gòn. Brian and Liên managed the crisis calmly while Vicky fainted at the sight of blood. The incident reinforces why the family lives together and brings the narrative full circle. Nguyen closes by reflecting that the discomfort of constantly starting over produced something valuable: a deep understanding of what it took to arrive here and a resolve never to take her life for granted. In a letter to her three daughters, she urges them to approach life with confidence, find supportive partners, and leave people better than they found them.