By Phuong Tran, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When Nghi Nguyen finished his American medical residency in the 1970s, he had two job offers — one in Oregon and another in Pittsburgh.
Nghi Nguyen (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
A fellow doctor at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center warned him that Pittsburgh’s pollution was so bad that it would cover his medical jacket with soot when he went outdoors, but “the employer from Pittsburgh offered me a good package and invited me to visit. The city itself reminded me so much of Dalat [a picturesque city nestled in the central highlands of Vietnam], so I decided to stay.”
Like many other immigrants to Pittsburgh, he never left.
Now in his seventies and semi-retired from his last job as head of anesthesiology at Alle-Kiski Medical Center, Dr. Nguyen has raised four children — all of whom are doctors, lawyers or hold master’s degrees — and spends much of his time baby-sitting his eight grandchildren.
He was part of the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants who came to the U.S. at the end of the Vietnam War.
When he arrived at Camp Pendleton in Southern California in 1975, he and his family were exhausted by the long flight from Guam to California and by living in tents at the refugee camp, where it was hotter during the day and colder at night than they were used to.
Still haunted by the horrors of war and overwhelmed by the imminent collapse of South Vietnam, they also were wracked by uncertainty over their future in a new land.
But he had the good fortune to be sponsored by William R. Rassman, an American doctor who had known him during the war when Dr. Nguyen was in the Medical Corps of the Republic of Vietnam and remains his close friend to this day. Dr. Rassman sponsored him and his family, which allowed Dr. Nguyen to move to Vermont.
There, he studied for the two tests that all international medical graduates need to pass to enter residency or fellowship programs in the United States — the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates certification and the Federal Licensing Examination.
While American medical students get to take the equivalent tests sometime during their years at medical school, Dr. Nguyen had to take them on two consecutive days in a language he still was not fluent in.
“That was really stressful to me,” he said. “You are allowed around one minute for a question, and because I wasn’t a native speaker, I had to take some time off that allotted limit for translation before I could come up with an answer. The test itself was long and hard, and to a foreigner like me, the language barrier made it much more challenging.”
Despite those difficulties, he passed the tests and got into Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country.
“Because I had no way back, I just kept pushing ahead,” he said.
He began working at Alle-Kiski Medical Center, then known as Allegheny Valley Hospital, in 1979.
“For 30 years, I worked like 100 hours per week. I worked even on holidays, whenever they called me in. My children hardly ever saw me home.”
Recalling those years, he looked affectionately at his wife, My Hanh, and said, “She was the educator of our household. Thanks to her, our children all grew up to be good and successful. And in some sense, I would say that she has brought me up, too.”
Dr. Nguyen wasn’t prepared for how gloomy the city felt when the first snow fell. Like other expatriates, Dr. Nguyen longed deeply for the warmth of family connections in winter.
Read the full article by Phuong Tran from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
