by Cuong Vo

Created on: March 08, 2007   Last Updated: August 21, 2011

Men will meet three important women in their life time. Women who will shape their destinies and change their lives. In the vast majority of us, "Mom" usually falls in as one of these women. I am no different.

I will never know everything that my mother had to endure to raise me. What I do know, is enough to move mountains and tremble the skies. My mother was an refugee. She didn't speak a single word of intelligible English when she stepped on to American soil. I was in her stomach at that time, and I really don't remember much about the first years of my life. I do know that my first years of being were my parent's first years of living as Vietnamese attempting to be American. In all my 22 years of life, it only recently occurred to me what she had to do to get my family to where we are today. My father played a part as well, but while he was out winning the bread, mother had to deal with 5 unruly children.

She instilled us with a sense of our heritage but also allowed us room to find our own identity. She worked long hours into the night while we were asleep, oblivious to the world of the grown ups. I know that I hurt her many times as a child. When she disciplined me, I told her that I hated her. It was the only weapon at my disposal. She never stopped. She hugged me and just kept right on. Her sense of right and wrong has taught me alot. Even when we were in the most dire of situations, she just prayed and stayed on her path. When she took us out into a world that was foreign to her, she clutched us close. As the people on the street looked and jeered, she held her head high and set one foot in front of the other and just kept right on. Life for my mother was never the same when she left that dock in Vietnam. I know that if it wasn't for the little life that clung to her chest and the one growing in her belly, she never would have made that journey. She left behind everything in her life that she had known to pursue a possibility. She didn't do it for her, she did it for us, she did it for me.

My mom is one of the most influential people in my life, as she should be. The woman who gave me life and taught me how to live deserves so much more than my admiration, she also has my love.

Learn more about this author, Cuong Vo.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.