Category Archives: The Immigrant Experience

My Real Education at Cal

Last week while hobnobbing with writers at the Bay Area Book Festival gala atop the Memorial Stadium, which overlooked the UC Berkeley campus and the sparkling bay, I couldn’t help but give into nostalgia. Exactly 30 years ago I, a premed, graduated from that campus down below with a degree in biochemistry. But I didn’t become a doctor. I picked up the pen, dropped the test tube, and through some years of struggling, became a journalist and writer instead.

Yet if I didn’t learn how to write at Cal, it was certainly here that my literary life really began. A refugee boy from Vietnam at age 11, I barely spoke a word of English. I lived in a crowded apartment full of refugees where Mission Street ended and the working class of Daly City began. It wasn’t until I was a junior at Lowell High School in San Francisco, when a few of my Vietnamese friends were applying to Cal, that I first heard of the school. And I thought that maybe I, too, should apply.