ILMA Compoundings July 2017 - 44

PORTRAIT
Peter Nguyen
Production Manager, Amtecol
"Be straightforward and honest. I've always been
on my own, ever since I was younger - going
through life you learn responsibility and you learn
to work hard and to respect people. When I came
to Amtecol, Bill, the owner, who is also my father-inlaw, taught me a lot about how to be progressive in
life. It's been nice to sort of follow in his footsteps."

COMING TO AMERICA
"I was born in Vietnam. My earliest memory was escaping
Vietnam at the age of 5. My mom had everything packed, and
in the middle of the night, at around 2 o'clock in the morning,
she woke my brother and me up and said, 'We gotta go.' After
we met my dad at a harbor, we all hopped onto a tiny boat,
probably about 26 feet long and made out of wood. It had two
decks, one on the bottom and then one on the top that was
completely open with no covering. There were probably 50 or
60 people on the boat. We spent two days and two nights at
sea. Everyone on the lower deck was completely seasick. It got
so stuffy and everyone was throwing up and it was just a mess.
"An hour and a half after we left, the captain himself became
seasick, so my dad had to jump up and steer the boat. We didn't
have any maps, so he just looked at the North Star in the sky
and followed that. We eventually landed in Thailand, where
we spent two years in a refugee camp. The first refugee camp
we stayed in was right near the ocean, which made it seem like
a mini-vacation for us. It was really cool - it was an isolated
camp, and there were other refugees who made it to the island.
We stayed there for 12 days, and after 12 days they relocated us
to another refugee camp, which held about 10,000 people.
"We came to California in 1980 after my aunt was able to
sponsor us. So, I grew up in Oakland for the first five years, and
then we moved to San Jose. When we first came over, my aunt
was already living there. We shared a one-bedroom apartment with my aunt, my uncle and their daughter. That meant
that with my family (me, brother, Mom, Dad) there were seven
people in that tiny apartment. Later, my dad got a job doing

JULY 2017

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Peter and his family on vacation in Honolulu.

maintenance work for that same apartment complex we lived
in, which meant that gave us the privilege of our own apartment in the apartment complex."

TWO WEDDINGS & A LARGE PHONE BILL
"I met my wife while she was visiting America. It was love at
first sight. After two weeks in America she had to go back
to Vietnam. For the first six months, our relationship was
long-distance. I was in the U.S., and she was in Vietnam. It was
pretty difficult. Technology back then was completely different
compared to now - back then I had to use phone cards, and I
was racking up bills close to $1,000 a month just so that I could
call and talk with her. Six months after we met I flew to Vietnam, and that was when we had our first wedding. Most of her
family was in Vietnam, and my dad's side of the family was still
there as well, so [the wedding] was for them. Six months after
we got married, we had our second wedding here in the U.S.
for all of our friends and family here."

MUSIC FOR MEASURE
"In my spare time, I really enjoy listening to music and taking
old CDs and converting them to lossless files. A lossless file is
a conversion of the original file from the CD. From a lossless
file, you can hear for example, maybe 15 different tones or
instruments, and on an MP3 you can only hear three different
tones - so it's a big difference."

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ILMA Compoundings July 2017

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