Vicky Nguyen's new memoir is a love letter to her parents, and the country they brought her to as refugees in 1980: the United States.
In her book, "Boat Baby," publishing April 1, the NBC News chief consumer investigative correspondent details how she arrived in Oregon as an infant, grew up in California and worked her way up at local news outlets across the country before she landed at 30 Rock.
Nguyen, 46, sits in her office wearing an olive-green dress and pink UGG boots — her signature shoe, which she references in her book (and even sometimes wears on TODAY) — and tells TODAY.com about why she decided to write a memoir.
"At the time, I think I was in my early 40s," she says of when she was first approached with the idea of writing her own book. "And I thought, I'm not sure that I have enough to say yet."
It wasn't until her TV agent insisted that Nguyen's family story was special that she began to think more seriously about compiling it all in a book.
"When I look at what my parents sacrificed, and I think about the story of the 2 million boat people who fled Vietnam between 1975 and 1992, it actually is a really important story to document," she says.
Nguyen adds that growing up, she never read stories like hers. She says she had heard of other families' stories, but in her community, the experience wasn't often formally talked about or written about.
"That really solidified my decision that, yes, absolutely, there is a story here that is important to tell, at least as a tribute to my parents and also as a love letter to the United States of America," she says.
"Because I really, truly feel in no other country can someone go from being a boat baby refugee to a network news correspondent at some of the most beloved American institutions, NBC, Nightly News and the TODAY show, right in one generation. Like that just doesn't happen in a lot of different places," she continues.
Coming to America
Nguyen's story in the U.S. begins with how she got there: Her mother, Liên Đỗ, worked at a U.S.-based adoption agency in Vietnam, while her father, Huy Nguyễn, served in the South Vietnamese army fighting against communism alongside American troops.
After she was born in the summer of 1978, her parents decided to flee Vietnam, landing at a refugee camp on an island off the coast of Malaysia in 1979.
While at the camp on Bidong Island, Nguyen's mother wrote to her employer, Holt International Children's Services, asking if they could sponsor her family.
After spending 10 months at the camp, Nguyen's family got the call that it was time to leave: Two families who worked at Holt had decided to help.
Nguyen, her mother and her father landed in Eugene, Oregon, with an apartment pantry fully stocked with staples, including fish sauce, Nguyen says, wondering how the agency's workers were able to locate the item back in the '80s.
Nguyen says that the experience of moving into a home with some of their favorite items reminds her that communities across the country can come together when people need it most — even in divisive times.
"Your friends, your neighbors, the communities that make up so many American towns and cities all across this country are filled with people who share a lot in common — people who want the same things for their families, and people who are at heart, really kind and generous," she says.
Nguyen says the process of writing her own story, and going back and learning more about her parents' lives before she was born, has helped her to see that even through tough times, her family has stuck together through it all.
It's one of the reasons she decided to dedicate the book to her mom and dad, which reads, "To my mother, Lien, and my father, Huy, for reasons that will be abundantly clear by the end of this book."
"It is a tribute to them, and it is dedicated to them for a reason," she says. "There is no me, none of my success, none of my accomplishments, none of who I am is possible without everything that they did for me, but also how they contributed to shaping who I am."
Growing up Vietnamese American
In "Boat Baby," Nguyen documents her family's journey in the U.S. After bouncing between Nevada and a few cities in California, her family ended up in Santa Rosa for most of Nguyen’s childhood, where in high school she would decide she wanted to pursue a career in medicine — and meet her future husband, Brian.
In college, her dreams shifted from medicine to journalism, and she secured her first job at Central Florida News 13 in Orlando, Florida, after graduating from the University of San Francisco.
And in Orlando, her relationship would be put to the test, as her now-husband was completing medical school in California while she worked on the opposite side of the country.
"I feel like we went through the long distance, the two very demanding career paths, and we chose each other," she says. "I think that actually having that scaffolding helped each of us do the best that we could in our respective challenging careers, because we had the relationship part figured out. We had the partner."
"Going through all of that, and then really making a conscious decision at the most challenging part of our relationship, living on separate coasts, to stay together and to proceed, that showed us we were rock-solid," she adds.
And after stints at news outlets in Reno, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona, she returned to the Bay Area to work for NBC’s affiliated station out of San Francisco, before she was tipped off to a potential job opening at NBC News in New York in 2018.
After making it through a brutal amount of interviews, which she describes in her book are nicknamed the "NBC Wheel of Death," Nguyen was convinced she would be offered the job.
But it was her husband who ended up being one of her biggest roadblocks to the gig of a lifetime, she wrote in the book, as he wasn't sure if he wanted to uproot their entire family to move to New York City.
NBC sent her an offer, and after some negotiations, Nguyen accepted and moved her entire family — her husband, their three daughters, plus her mother and father — to New York City in 2019.
And on Nguyen's first day with the network, she was greeted by TODAY's Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin, as Craig was covering for Hoda Kotb while she was on maternity leave.
"What a premonition," Nguyen says of Craig's eventual rise to the co-anchor chair.
"Craig’s book about his dad was definitely helpful for me as a guide in writing and thinking about the ways you talk about your parents when they’re still alive and you’re writing about them," she says, adding Craig and Savannah have supported her as she prepares to publish her own book.
"In terms of their warmth and how much they welcomed me and made me feel comfortable from Day 1 to now, almost six years later, you couldn’t ask for better colleagues and role models," Nguyen says.
Just as she began to get settled in her new role, the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, resulting in Nguyen being one of the only correspondents in Studio 1A. Nguyen also reported on the rise of discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders at the time.
Nguyen says she was able to recognize that her identity as an Asian American journalist could help her cover certain communities in beneficial ways — a realization she describes as "freeing."
"It was nice to be able to give myself permission to bring a little bit more of my own background and perspective into the reporting, because we could all agree that discriminating against people based on their race is wrong, attacking people, abusing people, pushing down elderly people of any race or ethnicity is wrong," she says.
Nguyen adds: "Being able to tell those stories and feel supported, and feel like I wasn’t telling those stories just because I was Asian American — I was telling them because they needed to be told."
25 years of service journalism
As Nguyen shares more about her current position at TODAY and how it has impacted her life so far, a news broadcast plays on mute behind her.
"I feel like I’m living the dream in terms of healthy parents, healthy kids, and getting to do work that I think is really meaningful and impactful, and serving the public," she says. "I’m so grateful every day that this is what I get to do."
"I always leave space and room open for other ways I can be of service and use all the skills that I have garnered in 25 years as a journalist to tell stories and to bring information that helps people," she continues. "I just feel so lucky that I get to learn every single day to distill that information and then pass it along to the TODAY show audience. It doesn’t get better than that as a journalist."
She adds that the release of her book has made her feel not only closer to her own family, but others in her community, as well.
"I just ultimately hope that when people read the book, they laugh, they see themselves in it, they are reminded that we have so much more in common than we realize, and I hope it brings them some joy," she says. "I think it’s important for people to recognize that we all have interesting stories to tell about how we got to be who we are, and what a big part our families play in all of that, too."
"I hope people feel like they’re having a conversation with me, and they walk away with some useful, practical advice for their own lives, and that they see themselves in our shared experience as Americans," she adds.
The reaction to the book so far has been special, she says, both with readers and her own family members.
“I think readers are seeing my mom and dad as I hoped they would: brave, resilient, optimistic. We know family can be messy and we have our ups and downs, but I’m grateful every day because my success is their success,” she says.
“They’re still helping me today to be the best mom, journalist, person I can be,” Nguyen says.
