Speaking of America: 'Here, you have the freedom'
When the communists came to his Vietnam town, Phong Robert Nguyen fled to a fishing boat, jammed already with 50 of his wife’s family. As they cast off, they saw a barge filled with refugees sink, “and I saw a couple hundred people die in the water. We pulled about 50 aboard our boat, but we were about to sink then.”
That started Nguyen’s odyssey in 1975 from a country riven by war to a summer-sultry fishing village in the country that lost. Forty-two years later, he is a man content to see his sons and daughters
