"Vuong's evocative first name is one that his mother informally bestowed on him in childhood as a word that could connect her Vietnamese immigrant child to the birthplace she missed. He was born Vinh Quoc Vuong on October 14, 1988, in Ho Chi Minh City, the one-time capital of the former South Vietnam and formerly known as Saigon.
Vuong was born 13 years after the end of the Vietnam War but it both shaped his family and created an opportunity for them to safely leave: Rose, his mother, was barely 20 years old when he was born and was the daughter of a US Navy service member who had married Vuong's paternal grandmother. That American grandfather had returned to the United States for a short visit but was unable to reenter the Southeast Asian country when the Vietnam War ended suddenly and calamitously in the spring of 1975...
When Vuong was still an infant the family's half-American status was discovered and they were forced to flee the country. Aid workers affiliated with the Salvation Army assisted Vuong's mother, grandmother, his Vietnamese father, and other family members on the first leg of their journey to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where they spent several months before they were resettled in Hartford, Connecticut. Unmoored by the dramatic uprooting, Vuong's father eventually left the family and Vuong was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked as a nail technician..."
Excerpt from: "Ocean Vuong." Newsmakers Online, Gale, 2020. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1618007048/BIC?u=ctstate&sid=bookmark-BIC&xid=07414fa7. Accessed 3 June 2024.