American Dreamers

Hoang Tran looked up at her son and trembled, her eyes wide with emotion. Then very slowly she raised her hand to his shoulder, leaving it there like a sparrow perched on a rocky promontory. "I've waited 17 years for this day," she said. "From the moment my son was born, I look forward to the day he graduate from school. Grandmother, grandfather, everybody wait for this one day."

Mike Nguyen's day finally arrived May 23 at the Portland (Ore.) Civic Auditorium, when he graduated from Benjamin Franklin High with honors. It is a symbol of an American passage that the 1990 Franklin graduating class of 251 contained as many Nguyens as Smiths—four each—although Mike's name was called so often, there seemed to be an army of Nguyens. He was listed among the members of the National Honor Society, was one of 15 graduates receiving highest academic honors because of his 3.88 grade point average and also was named one of four student recipients of the school's award for outstanding citizenship.

A choir sang You'll Never Walk Alone, and then a school official announced that Mike would be leaving Portland in the fall to play football at UCLA. On a full scholarship. "My boy is leaving me now," Hoang said. It wasn't until then that it became obvious her heart was breaking.

The gold braid worn by the school's honors students spread across Mike's broad chest like latticework, and unlike the other graduates in the hall, he seemed about to burst out of his maroon cap and gown. Though his body is almost perfectly formed, he is an athlete who looks about a size larger than the clothes he is wearing at the time. Even his skin has developed its own latticework of cracks and stretch marks around the shoulders. His mother believes that by constantly lifting weights Mike has simply strained the limits to which his Vietnamese frame can carry his outsized muscles.

After the diplomas had been handed out, another graduate walked up to Mike, shook his hand and said, "You'll never be too big a star for me, bud."

The wide receiver who right away will challenge for playing time at UCLA next season is named Mike Nguyen, but when Hoang Iran and her late husband, Hung Nguyen, fled South Vietnam during the calamitous final hours before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, the two-year-old child they carried in their arms was called Huy Nguyen (pronounced Whee Win). Hoang, who like most Vietnamese women retained her maiden name, was the daughter of a captain in the South Vietnamese army. Born to a life of comparative privilege, she had two live-in maids who attended to her every need. But war was never far away.

One day, when Hoang was six years old, she was walking through a field when a bomb fell out of the sky and exploded not far from her. "I didn't know what had happened to me, and I kept walking until my leg began to feel all wet," she says. She passed out and lay unconscious in the field that night, and was eventually discovered the next day in a pool of her own blood, more dead than alive.

When Hoang was 17, she married Hung, an officer in the South Vietnamese navy, and not long after their wedding he was riding in a jeep with three other sailors when it struck a mine and was blown to pieces. Hung was the only one not killed by the blast.

On April 29, 1975, North Vietnamese troops encircled Saigon. Hung returned home just before midnight that night. "He said the communists were taking over the country, so we got to get on ship and stay out in ocean until the fighting is over," Hoang recalls. "After that we can go home. But we never did go home again. I didn't really want to go, even just to get on the ship. So my husband took out his gun and made us go."

Carrying their two children—Mike and his infant sister, Susan—Hoang and Hung made their way through the darkened streets of Saigon to the South Vietnamese naval base. "When we got to the dock, there were million people there," Hoang says. "People were shooting each other, fighting to get on ship."