From Saigon to Silicon Valley: Ten Years Away From Home

In 2016, at an age when most people are still figuring out what they want, I boarded a plane from Ho Chi Minh City with a suitcase, a student visa, and a bet I was making entirely on myself. My parents would not be coming with me. Nobody I knew would be waiting on the other side. I have not returned home since.

That was ten years ago. I am still here.

Leaving Vietnam was never a single dramatic moment. It was a slow accumulation of certainty that the life I wanted was not going to arrive on its own. My parents, who spent decades building a tile manufacturing business from the ground up, understood this in a way that only people who have taken real risks can. They gave me their blessing, helped me pack, and watched me go.

I knew the odds were not entirely in my favor. Moving to a foreign country at 14, without family, without a fallback plan, without any guarantee of success is a bet that does not always pay off. I had seen enough to know that. I made the bet anyway.

Growing up, I watched my parents make hard calls with incomplete information every single day. They managed production schedules, delivery logistics, supplier relationships, and finances, all without the tools or resources that most businesses take for granted. Without realizing it, they were teaching me something about how the world actually works. I just did not have the vocabulary for it yet.

The first years in the United States were the most difficult. Every system I needed to navigate, from school enrollment to healthcare to simply managing money, had to be figured out without anyone to call. Problems that most students could bring home to their families, I had to work through alone. It was hard in ways I did not always have words for. It also built something in me that no classroom could have.

I did not expect to feel at home in the Bay Area as quickly as I did. Silicon Valley has a particular kind of energy that is hard to describe until you have spent time inside it. The conversations are always about what is being built next, what problem has not been solved yet, what is possible if you are willing to move fast enough. For someone who grew up watching a family business navigate real constraints with limited resources, that mindset felt less like culture shock and more like recognition.

Sitting in classrooms at Santa Clara University while companies around me were building AI tools that could reshape entire industries gave the years of distance a meaning I could finally point to. The separation from family, the years of figuring things out alone, the choice to stay when staying was hard — it had all been pointing somewhere. I was starting to see where.

I found my direction in data. The intuition I had built watching my parents run their business, understanding how decisions get made, where information gets lost, what actually matters when things go wrong, turned out to be exactly what data analytics is about. It was a language I had been learning without knowing it. Studying it formally felt less like starting something new and more like naming something I already understood.

In the spring of 2026, I am a few weeks away from graduating with a degree in Management Information Systems from Santa Clara University. Over the past few years I have built machine learning pipelines, designed relational databases, led a team through a 24-hour AI hackathon, and used data analytics in a real workplace to help a business make better decisions. The work is real. The skills are real. But the thing that made all of it possible is harder to put on a resume.

Ten years of living independently in a country that was not mine. Ten years of solving problems without a safety net. Ten years of missing a city, a language, a family, and choosing every day to keep building anyway.