This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we're back with our American stories.

And up next, a story from Watt Wong.

Today, Watt is a surgeon, but his journey to getting there was far from ordinary. He's here to share the story of his family fleeing Vietnam and arriving

in America with nothing. Growing up in South Vietnam, I was really young at the time, but the things that we remember

are the things that we did all the time. And so we were Catholic, so we went to Mass all the time.

Every morning we would go to church. Our village was along the seashore. It was a fishing village, and so my dad was a commercial fisherman.

He would leave every morning, come in every night, and so we would run out to the dock to see the day's catch.

We didn't have running water, though we had the electricity, it was really limited.

So we had a light in the house, and my grandparents, my dad's parents, they had the only TV

in the village.

And so we, all of us would swarm to his house and watch his TV.

We didn't have an ice machine, we had an ice box.

So my mother, if she needed ice, she would send me to the ice factory.

She always ordered the bigger block of ice because I would walk along the beach in the hot sand.

When I picked up the big block of ice and started walking home, ice is cold, so the ice would fall on the sand and then it would start to melt.

So then I would pick it up and start walking a little bit more and it would fall again.

So by the time I made it home, that block of ice was a lot smaller than the block that I started with.

So those are some of the simple fond members of the things that happen all the time. But at that time,

the North Vietnamese communists, which they were supported by China and by the Soviet Union,

were trying to overtake South Vietnam, which was non-communist. But so we were the democratic side

of Vietnam. And it was a civil war going on during that time.

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