Andrew X. Pham

Andrew X. Pham is an author, and also the founder of Spoonwiz.

The younger years of Andrew Pham’s childhood were spent in Vietnam. He was born in Phan Thiet, a town renowned for its fish sauce. Before the Vietnam War, Andrew’s father worked double shifts as a school teacher. Andrew’s mother did laundry for her neighbors to earn extra money to support their struggling household. During the war between the North and the South, Andrew’s father earned money by working for the Nationalist army in the propaganda department, that is until he was captured by the Vietcong and forced to stay in the Minh Luong Prison reeducation camp for several grueling months. When he was released, Andrew’s father returned to his family and began to plan an escape to America. They chartered a boat to smuggle them across the border into Malaysia. And so Andrew, his mother and father, his aunt Dung, his older sister Chi, and his three younger brothers Huy, Tien, and Hien, boarded a thirty-foot boat with a fishing crew that nearly fell apart beneath them on the open sea before they were rescued by an Indonesian freighter ship.

Andrew’s family stayed in a refugee facility called Jakarta in Indonesia for eighteen months. The First Baptist Church of Shreveport, Louisiana took the Pham family under their wing and loaned them airfares to America, found Andrew’s father work, and rented them one of the church properties. A few months after moving to America, word reached the family that Andrew’s opium addicted grandfather had died in Vietnam. The news was a heavy blow for Andrew’s father. Andrew’s mother delivered Kay, the sixth child of the family, shortly thereafter.

After nine months in Louisiana, the Pham family decided to move to California, so that they could be closer to Andrew’s father’s relatives. The only place they could afford was in a bad neighborhood in San Jose: Locke Drive. They regularly escaped the dangerous neighborhood by taking day trips to the beach. The children all had to deal with their father’s temper and old-world disciplinary methods. Thong, Andrew’s father, beat his children because it was the way he knew how to show love. However, one day Chi’s high school teacher saw bruises and Thong ended up being arrested for child abuse. Chi left her family, dropping the charges to her father, after escaping from her detention facility and wasn’t seen again until after her sex change operation. The Pham family let her fade into the background, and she became the family’s secret shame. Andrew was a bit of a deviant in high school, and his friends were like him: alienated and in the minority. They got into fights with the other minority groups regularly. Andrew went to UCLA to study engineering after high school. When Chi came back to her family, she was a he, and went by the name Minh. After several months of listless behavior, Minh committed suicide. His tragic death was the catalyst for Andrew’s journey to Vietnam and self-discovery.

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