One Million Steps: Lessons From A Legendary Hike

By Ngan H. Nguyen

Stretching 500-miles across the northern part of Spain is the Camino Francés of the Camino de Santiago. A pilgrimage to the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.

It was by fate that I found this path and it became one of the greatest adventures of my life. Over a million steps crossing the rugged Pyrenees and spanning undulating p

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ngan H Nguyen, LLC
• Release date: Jun 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578537474

Book preview

How Far I've Come

Love comes in various forms. So does family.

The love from family could mean intricate hours of winter fishing or long, intimate talks over a shared daily meal. Taking highroads into urban forests in search of squirrels and not-bears. Fixing messed up automobiles with your dad in the garage, and for the more subtle ones, learning to cook a traditional dish from your mother. Yes, I know what a family’s love should be. But that's only in the movies, isn't it?

I heard my dad was hardly in his 20s when he got married. A handsome Vietnamese man with a challenging childhood of his own. Being given away by his mother at the age of two, he was raised by a kind aunt who was gracious enough to take him in.

He is a talented and driven man—I’ll give him that. Growing up in post war Vietnam with nothing to his name, he married and soon after, adopted my older brother, then later, I was born. Juggling between odd jobs to provide a good life for his family, he managed to find the means to bring his family to the United Stated back in 1993.

Being from a different culture with limited English, he worked multiple jobs to put a roof over our heads.

I was only seven years old when we moved to the US. As a young girl, I didn’t really understand all that he did for us because I didn’t know I needed all of that. Now that I look back, I never really wanted him to be good at anything. I just needed him to be a father, a parent, but between all the jobs, he was absent as I grew up.

My mother didn’t have a much easier background. Losing her father at the age of two during the war, she was raised by her sisters after her mother passed away when she was 11 due to over exhaustion from raising six children alone.

A beautiful, gentle and kind woman, yet so strong and independent, I learned from her the ability to stand on my own, no matter the circumstances.

She always had the best relationship with Dad, at least until we moved to the States where she could no longer just stay home to raise the kids. Living costs in the U.S. is much higher and she ended up taking multiple jobs to help support our family as well.

I've read many stories about migrated people and life in foreign lands. Some of them adapt quickly, some of them turned out happy in the end, or even better. I wonder why ours was different.

Hardly seeing each other and the challenge of communication, along with adapting to a new culture, accent, and tradition wasn’t easy. They ended up taking much of the frustration out on us kids. I wasn’t alone in experiencing this and my older brother had it worst with the extreme arguments and late-night fiasco with my parents when they were around, at least until he left home at 16 years old when I was 11.

I’m sure life wasn’t too bad, we had a roof over our head and food on the table but all I seem to remember were the fights from the age of seven to when it got to the point that it was so challenging, I also left home at 16 years old.

After one particularly bad argument, at 3:00 a.m., I climbed out my bedroom window and that was it. It was my first act of freedom. Leaving out without telling anyone where I was going. Well, more rightly put, even I didn't know where I was going. All I knew was that I would hitch hike a ride to the closest major city.

The thought vaguely crossed my mind of where I would live and how I would survive. In the end, I concluded that the word survive was the only thing I had to worry about. Living? Well, I've not been living for a while already. What difference will a couple months make now?

The arguments were the least of my challenges growing up. There were things that occurred that no child should have experienced but unfortunately many go through. No more details about those in this book, maybe someday I will talk about them. For now, I’ll just add that regarding these particular things, my parents were not the culprit. Regardless, they left searing wounds I continue to heal from and wonder if it will ever be truly gone. Now it is worn with more of a badge of a warrior who have survived the unimaginable.

Being isolated in a twisted attempt at protection for much of my earlier years, the first thing I realized was how big the city was in actuality. I wasn't sure where I was, but it certainly wasn't the outskirts of Corvallis, Oregon. Perhaps I could make a life for myself here? In this city? Maybe not? It doesn't matter, I only had to make one choice at a time, that way, well, hopefully that way, I'll go far.

When I started exploring the city, the first thing I did was asking the mall shop owners if they were hiring. Well, they weren't, of course they weren't. It couldn't be that easy anyway. In short, the first night ended with me lying on the lawn just behind a complex. I was afraid surely, but not as much as I was cold. There were people there too—I wasn't alone.

And yet I was.

I thought about talking to strangers but, what good will that do. Besides, I didn’t know if any of these people that hung around were safe for me.

Till this day, if asked how long it took the hour hand to get 6:00 a.m. in the morning, I'd say it was nothing less than a decade. Well, the long-awaited mornings came, and I started my journey to nowhere.

Life has a way of providing and I eventually did find some kind people at a career service center to help me find a minimum wage job that could afford to pay for a small studio on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.

The studio didn't cost much, well, it wasn't exactly in the best position and definitely needed some refurbishment, but I had my very own roof and that was something to celebrate. I was then working two jobs, yet still barely getting by. I remember feeling fortunate if I even have $75 left over at the end of every month. Months and months went by like this. I felt like that was it for my life and I had no means of getting out of those circumstances.

It was then Christmas of 2003 when Portland was hit with one of the biggest snow storms in a long while. That Christmas morning, I woke up to an icy cold house and the landlord couldn’t send someone to come fix the heater because of the snow that had accumulated in the streets.

I was by myself that day. I wasn’t in communication with my family after leaving home. I didn’t have close friends or extended family, and no one really to call during a holiday that seems like others celebrated with family. I had tried to be strong up to that moment, but the icy cold of that morning made all the feelings of hopelessness and loneliness that I was holding at bay come rushing in. I was in complete despair and wore myself to sleep.

There is always a gift in adversity and there was freedom in the letting go. That next morning when I awoke, something had shifted in me. There was a burning desire for something more. I remembered a long-forgotten dream of getting a higher education. A dream I had buried or better to say, hibernated for a while because I didn’t think it was possible for me. The dream was to actually finish high school and go to college.

When that possibility came, I didn't know how I was going to do it. A high school drop-out working 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. every day with no money and no support. But what felt true was a burning desire to pursue this dream and with that fire, I decided I was going to do whatever it took.

I took the steps that I could. I started researching community college requirements and seek out high school options which eventually lead me to find a night school. With the generosity, trust, and understanding of the head of the school, I was allowed to do my work on my own after finishing my second job every night.

Life during this time went by in a blur with me often doing school work into the early mornings to then catch a couple hours of sleep before I needed to be up at 7:00 a.m. to make my hour-long commute to a job in the mall that started at 9:00 a.m.

With a burning desire, no challenges stand in the way. My desire was for the dream of going to college, so this lifestyle went on for over six months. Given also that I was in my teenage years with ample health and energy. Eventually I did earn my high school diploma and got accepted into Linn-Benton Community College.

With this college acceptance, I applied for student loans and scholarships which provided enough money to pay tuition as well as for my own place, so I didn’t have to work as many hours. I located back to Albany, which was between Portland and my home town of Corvallis, and found a part time job in the evenings to supplement my income.

My college dream was unfolding.

When something doesn’t come easy, you work harder at it and this was exactly what I did. I studied during the day and worked late into the evenings, often coming home around mid-night every day. Catching up on school work during my breaks and after work. The lack of sleep never bothered me because I was now living my dream of a higher education. It fueled me.

After about a year at this community college, I earned a good enough GPA to apply to transfer to Oregon State University. A month after submitting my admissions application to the University, I was in. I’m forever grateful the admission office valued progress and ignored my dismal 2-point-something GPA in high school to only consider my near perfect GPA at the community college.

My earlier years felt like a constant uphill battle that I dearly wanted this path to college to be worth it. That now I had made it, all I needed to do was follow the path laid out before me and I was set for a wonderous life.

Not knowing any better, it was my belief that the path was to go to college, get a good job, get married, have kids, raise them well, climb the ladder, build up a good retirement, and be at peace once I leave the workforce to enjoy my last days.

I had to navigate my own way for so long that I so dearly wanted to walk an easy path laid out by someone else.

So, I did just that. I worked hard and studied degrees that I believed would provide me with the best chance for success. I didn’t just study one degree, I studied two degrees. Eventually graduating with two honors degree. One in Biochemistry and Biophysics. The other in Chemical Engineering with a Bioengineering emphasis. For sure I felt like one of these degrees would provide an excellent job. Then I would be on my way.

In my romantic life, I also felt like I was on a good path. During my time in college, I met a wonderful guy around my age, John. We became the best of friends and lovers. He was kind smart, fun, handsome, caring, and we were interested in many of the same things. We traveled together, pursued new hobbies together, talked late into the night about everything under the sun, and shared many wonderful years and holidays together.

Through him, I was given opportunities to experience what it was like to have a good family since he came from a much larger family that was way more stable than mine. I feel blessed that life had a way of providing, filing gaps and giving me what I had longed for.

Oregon State University is in the same hometown I grew up in, and even while I attended classes there, the relationship with my parents were never what I longed for. We were too different and continued to grow apart, but I still tried to cordially reach out every few weeks just to be present. I think they appreciated it.

After my brother left when I was 11 years old, it was a few years before he reconnected with my parents and started coming back to visit for very brief periods just to be present.

I had idolized him growing up, but it is interesting how the years when you’re younger seems to go by faster, and by the time he came back to visit, we no longer had the relationship that was there when I was growing up. Or truth be told, maybe I had shut that part down when he left. Probably because of the hurt and resentment for him leaving me in that challenging home life all alone. It would be over a decade later that we would be able to start mending that relationship and begin to hold a conversation longer than five minutes at a time.

Regardless, for those years I was John, I was able to put all that aside. During our time together, I became very close with his family, especially his mother—a smart, adventurist, kind, interesting woman who was a world traveler in her early years and so wise.

We hit it off right away and she would come visit often through the years my boyfriend and I were together.

We continued dating after college when I joined two start-ups in renewable energy while working on my MBA. This provided wonderful experiences in my career. Between work, attending evening school for my MBA, and a relationship, I barely had any time, so I continued going through the motions of it. I was completely oblivious to what was bubbling underneath the surface of my consciousness.

In the quietest moments, something didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t feel completely happy but being in my early 20s, my boyfriend and I would just fill that space with doing stuff. Literal stuff. We'd go out partying with friends, work out a bunch, adopt the latest health fad, travel, or binge watch shows and movies. I just thought that was what couples did.

It wasn’t until later though that I realized that you can’t run away when things are tugging at your consciousness. A few years later, I was finishing up my MBA, and that nagging feeling just poked at my gut harder. I just eventually knew I had to do something differently.

I didn’t really know what that something was, but I just knew it had to be somewhere else.

It felt crazy at the time, but I had a good education. Now, good experiences in two very successful start-ups. I had a wonderful relationship where I got the family I had always longed for with an amazing man that loved me dearly, and now even an adorable dog that was our baby together. I lived in a beautiful modern condo in a luxury high-rise in the new up and coming waterfront district of Portland.