Ngo's mother belonged to a middle-class family who owned a jewelry business. After the collapse of the [[South Vietnam]] in 1975, their family home and business were confiscated by the Communist regime because the family were classified as [[bourgeois]] [[capitalist]] exploiters. His father worked in [[law enforcement]] in a village in South Vietnam. Both families were imprisoned in Communist re-education camps in the [[Maoist]] belief that hard labor and reeducation would reform counter-revolutionaries until becoming good [[socialist]] citizens. Both experienced unprecedented suffering and [[poverty]] after their time in the camps and fled along with tens of thousands of others on small boats off the southern coast of Vietnam in the late 1970s. They met one another in a [[refugee]] camp in [[Indonesia]] and eventually settled in [[Portland]], [[Oregon]]. Ngo has commented on the irony of having to confront in the [[United States]] what his parents fled from in their homeland. | Ngo's mother belonged to a middle-class family who owned a jewelry business. After the collapse of the [[South Vietnam]] in 1975, their family home and business were confiscated by the Communist regime because the family were classified as [[bourgeois]] [[capitalist]] exploiters. His father worked in [[law enforcement]] in a village in South Vietnam. Both families were imprisoned in Communist re-education camps in the [[Maoist]] belief that hard labor and reeducation would reform counter-revolutionaries until becoming good [[socialist]] citizens. Both experienced unprecedented suffering and [[poverty]] after their time in the camps and fled along with tens of thousands of others on small boats off the southern coast of Vietnam in the late 1970s. They met one another in a [[refugee]] camp in [[Indonesia]] and eventually settled in [[Portland]], [[Oregon]]. Ngo has commented on the irony of having to confront in the [[United States]] what his parents fled from in their homeland. |