NW Vietnamese News April 25, 2021 Book Cover Beyond the fact his parents fled Vietnam in the 1980s as boat people, Eric Nguyen knows very little about who they were or what they lived through before he was born. “They always had their eye on the future,” the 33-year-old author said in a recent phone call from his home in Washington, D.C. “There’s a lot they haven’t told me.” Like so many others in his generation, Nguyen has never pressed his family hard for answers. Not only did he want to move on as he’d been taught to do, but he also had little desire to bring up painful memories for his refugee parents.