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From Saigon to Success - Dr. Khanh Nguyen lives the “American Dream” in Colts Neck
05/02/2008 - By Teja Anderson
Journey to Freedom
However, there are those who have overcome many hardships to find success and happiness. If that is one interpretation of the “American Dream” then Khanh Nguyen more than qualifies.
Each and every one of us lucky enough to be living in this country probably has our own idea of what the “American Dream” means. For some of us it may be wealth…to others it may be fame or simply happiness. There is little doubt that this is indeed a land of opportunity, and to be born a U.S. citizen is to be born with many rights and freedoms. However, there are those who have overcome many hardships to find success and happiness. If that is one interpretation of the “American Dream” then Khanh Nguyen more than qualifies.
He was born in South Vietnam in the 1960’s, where he grew up in the isolation of several different military bases. While one home was hit by enemy mortar, Khanh, his siblings, and their mother were constantly relocating to other houses, trying to find a safe haven, while his father was out in the battlefields for weeks at a time. Khanh and his family were among the lucky few to escape their homeland the day before Saigon fell into Communist hands. With the help of the American military, he then traveled across the ocean and overcame the seas of prejudice and differences, arriving in this country as a teenager, speaking no English, and with just his family and the clothes on his back. In a mere 6 years, Khanh would be graduating with honors from high school and continuing on to medical school at the prestigious Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Today, he lives in Colts Neck and is a successful anesthesiologist. He is happily married to Mandy, his wife of 16 years, and they have two children, Gabrielle, 9, and Tristan, 8. Two years ago, Khanh and five partners formed what has become a thriving medical group in Red Bank – Innovative Ambulatory Anesthesia Associates, LLC.
Dr. Khanh Nguyen was kind enough to sit down with Living In Colts Neck and share his childhood memories and the story of his family’s struggle, first in war-torn Vietnam, and then as they started at the very bottom to make a new life for themselves in this country.
LICN: Where were you born?
KN: I was born in a small village outside of Saigon called Soc Trang, on a military base.
LICN: What are your earliest childhood memories?
KN: Well, the first memory that I have that is the most vivid was when I was about 5 years old, in 1967, when my family was living at a military base in My Tho and our house was hit by a mortar round in the middle of the night. We were sleeping and suddenly we heard this loud explosion. Things started falling down, and my mom came in and got us and we all crawled underneath the bed. Now, you have to know that a bed in Vietnam is not like a bed in America. We didn’t have a mattress; it was just a slab of wood and a straw mat. So it really wasn’t offering us any protection. It was just that we were all together – huddled together it was protection of our minds, not of our bodies.
LICN: So you knew that there was a war going on around you?
KN: I guess so. I was aware that some people were trying to kill each other. I didn’t really know who the sides were. I knew that my father was on one side and that he was fighting someone on the other side.
LICN: What was your father’s military position?
KN: I think at that point he was a lieutenant or a captain. He was frequently out in the battlefield. But I was too young to understand the implications of war. I just knew that he went to work and my mother took care of us and he would be home one day.
LICN: On the military base that you were on, were there other families and kids that were in the same situation as you?
KN: Not really. We didn’t have any interaction with other kids. We didn’t have a chance to go out and play with other kids; we just had our brothers and sisters to play with. There were five of us, and we just had the house and the four walls that contained our yard and an outhouse. Even when we moved to Saigon it was the same. We just stayed in our own house and didn’t have any interaction with other kids that weren’t in our family.
LICN: So what happened after the mortar incident?
KN: Well, my father was out in battle and he heard about it, but he didn’t know the outcome. He didn’t know if we were alive or not. He was so worried for his wife and kids, and he didn’t know if we were alright until he saw us. He had been so concerned that he decided that it was time to look for a job in the capital. So right away we moved to Saigon.
LICN: So in Saigon it was a lot safer and very different. Saigon was a major city, right?
KN: Well, we had a house with a big gate, and all the houses had these big sliding gates and you were locked in. Safer? Not really, because we were only there a couple months before the Tet Offensive.
LICN: What was the Tet Offensive?
KN: Tet is like New Year’s here. But there…there is a time of preparation…three, four days before. I remember my mom was cooking and making us all new clothes and we were all getting really excited because it’s a time when you go and visit with all the relatives and go socializing, and we don’t give gifts but you get the envelope with some money in it. It is a very traditional time, one of the most important holidays in Vietnam. The whole city basically shuts down to prepare, buy flowers, cook food, and make decorations for the house. So what happened was…around midnight it was the custom to light firecrackers and bring in the New Year. I remember I heard the firecrackers, but something wasn’t right. There should have been clapping and more fireworks, but instead there was all this confusion and scrambling. The fireworks were the signal for the surprise attack by the North Vietnamese army to come in; they started an offensive war on the whole country of South Vietnam. With the aid of China and the Soviet Union, they were trying to root out the Americans and capture the city of Saigon. So after that night we moved almost every day from one safe house to another – we were always moving. My father would have a jeep and a couple of bodyguards and move us to the next hiding place.
LICN: Once the Tet Offensive was over and Saigon was still under South Vietnamese rule what did you do?
KN: Well, the city was pretty much in ruins; it had to be rebuilt. Our house was gone. We had to stay with relatives until my father was able to get us to a relatively safe location next to the University and the Presidential Palace. We stayed there until I was about 12.
LICN: What did you do about school?
KN: School opened whenever it was safe. My father would either drive us to school and pick us up himself or have someone else do it because he was so worried for our safety. So again, we really didn’t play with the other kids, just came right back to our house, our compound…concrete walls with barbed wire on top.
LICN: Sounds like a prison.
KN: Yes, I guess so, but we had the five kids and we played together, so it didn’t seem that bad.
LICN: And, you were protected from what was building up outside, the unrest and the eventual fall of Saigon?
KN: Well, we knew that there was unrest. We heard about a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire as a protest. We heard that there were student demonstrations going on. We got tear gassed all the time because they were tear gassing the students who were demonstrating outside our house. We heard about one of our own planes bombing the Presidential Palace and we wondered about that. We knew something serious was going to happen. We read in the newspaper that a plane trying to evacuate a group of orphans had crashed on takeoff, and that the North Vietnamese were moving closer. We would go to the top of my uncle’s building and look out at the country, and you could see the smoke and the bombs going off and it seemed to be coming closer. Then on April 29th my father and my two uncles were talking and they were getting ready…they had their guns. My one uncle also had five children and my other uncle was just married. They got us all into two jeeps and we headed to the Saigon harbor. It was a slow trip because the city was full of garbage and abandoned cars in the road; we had to pick our way through the obstacles. When we got to the harbor, I remember some guy came running up and asked for our jeep; he was begging and we just left it for him…with the keys and everything.
LICN: What was waiting for you in the harbor?
KN: Well, I still don’t know if it was planned, but first we ran and climbed on this freighter and sat around for hours and nothing happened. Then my father said, “Let’s go!” and we got off and went across the dock to a military barge and climbed on. After a little while, a tugboat came out of nowhere and hooked itself up to us and started dragging us down the river. We went on all night, our families and maybe only 20 other families on this huge barge. The whole way we could see the war going on along the banks…gunfire and smoke and explosions. Once I saw this helicopter coming right over us, and then it veered suddenly and I could see this trail of light and I knew it had almost been hit by a rocket.
LICN: Did you realize how much danger you were in?
KN: Actually, it was like being in a movie. It was neat. But then in the morning, it was April 30th and the country had fallen to the Communists; we arrived at this coastal city, but we just kept going out to sea.
LICN: So just a few of you were escaping? Was the boat almost empty?
KN: Well, when we passed through the coastal city, people were coming out to the barge, in boats, rafts, in anything that would float. We kept picking up passengers. By the time we were heading out to sea we had maybe a thousand people…standing-room-only…people hanging on to the sides.
LICN: Weren’t your parents afraid the boat would sink?
KN: No. That wasn’t their worry. If we’d sink, we’d drown…the family together. I think their worry was that we would be captured by the Communists, and that would have been worse.
LICN: So the barge made it out to the American ships?
KN: Yes, the American fleet was waiting for us. Everyone tried to push ahead and get on the ship, but my parents made us wait our turn and that turned out well because by the time we got on, the cargo hold was filled up and we got to stay on the deck. Of course, there was no shelter from the sun and the rain on the trip to the Philippines.
LICN: Were you glad to be on land?
KN: Well, when we got off the ship, the first thing they did when you walked off the plank was to pull open our pants and spray us with some chemical. Then they sprayed our hair, too. There was one huge tent with rows and rows of cots. My brothers and sisters and cousins – we were all too afraid to take our clothes off in the showers. We just wore them and let them dry.
LICN: How long were you there?
KN: One week. Then we took another boat ride to Guam. We were there for about a week, too. Then a military plane took us to Hawaii; no heat, no seats, more tents, more cots, a little more privacy. It was exciting. For us kids, it was an adventure. The parents…I’m sure they were worried. And my mother was pregnant. Then [we took] another military plane to Pensacola, Florida. Again, no heat, noisy, web seats….
LICN: So, finally you arrived on the mainland, in America at last!
KN: Yes…in a refugee camp. We were there for 3 to 4 months, waiting for a sponsor. My cousins had family in Canada who sponsored them a month before us, and we were so sad to be parted we were all crying. But my father said now that we are in America, we should stay in America. That’s how the family got split. Then a Baptist church sponsored us to come to North Augusta, South Carolina. It was in the Deep South.
LICN: Had the people there ever seen an Asian person before?
KN: When I look back now, no, probably not. They hadn’t. The school there was very different than what I knew. They had recess; I had never been told to go out and play. I didn’t speak English at all. A teacher tried to communicate with me in French that I should go outside. I remember going outside to the playground, and half the kids were on one side and half the kids on the other and I didn’t know what to do. The white kids were on one side and the black kids were on the other, and I didn’t know which group I was supposed to be on. So I went back inside.
LICN: Was it like that in your neighborhood, too?
KN: The smartest thing that my father did was that he made us integrate. He made us go outside and play with the other kids. It was the first time we had ever been told to go outside the house. He pushed us out and locked the door behind us. He was very smart; that’s how we learned English. We were there for 4 years.
LICN: Then another move?
KN: Yes, to Rockville, Maryland, in 1979. That was my parents’ last move. They are still living there. My father saw that it would be a better chance for us and for him to advance our schooling and careers. He was able to get a job working for Xerox. He had been going to night school while working two jobs and had gotten a degree in engineering.
LICN: That is amazing. Did this last move pay off?
KN: Yes, I think so. They had much better classes there at the high school level. They had AP classes. I was excelling in all my classes and testing, except English. I was able to get into Catholic University in Washington, DC. From there I went to Penn State College of Medicine.
LICN: You knew already that you wanted to be an anesthesiologist?
KN: No. I wanted to be a surgeon…a neurosurgeon. I was so gung ho that I did 3 years of residential surgery rotation.
LICN: So what happened?
KN: Well, I jumped over to anesthesiology a year after I got married. You see, my wife, Mandy, when we married she moved here from Canada. She left all her family, all her friends, everybody in Canada. I was supposed to be her support structure here. But when I was doing the surgical residence, I barely saw her, and then when I did, I was so tired I was falling asleep right in the middle of dinner. I could see the strain that it was putting on her; I was like my father, disappearing out on the battlefield. So the way I see it is that family is the most important. You have a job so that you can have a good family life, not the other way around. The best thing to do was pick something so that I could dedicate more time to my wife and family, so I picked anesthesiology.
LICN: How did you meet Mandy?
KN: Well, it was sort of an arranged thing with my parents.
LICN: An arranged marriage?
KN: Not quite that, but the first time we met, the meeting was a setup. They made it seem like it was a coincidence, but it was planned. We went to see how maple syrup was made in Canada and she was there with her parents; then we had dinner together.
LICN: So, you liked her?
KN: Yes, she caught my attention. I liked the way she talked and the way she looked, and when I got back to Hershey, Pennsylvania, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So I got permission to call her and made a date.
LICN: So you drove 8 hours for a first date?
KN: Yes. Well, not just any date…but the courtship went on for about 5 years before we got married.
LICN: So you brought her back to Pennsylvania?
KN: No. We went to Newark. My residency was in Newark at the UMDNJ University Hospital of Newark.
LICN: How did you end up here in Colts Neck?
KN: Well, it was a very difficult time for anesthesiologists to get jobs. But I really liked the field and I really had excelled in it. I think it was my calling. I became a “best” resident. My chairman came to me and offered me a job on the faculty. So I took it and stayed there for 2 years, but there was a lot of politics. One day one of my co-workers told me about a job in Red Bank that would be perfect for me. She said it was the perfect position for me and they would love to have me! So I went to see it…Riverview Medical Center. I said to Mandy, “I really like this hospital; they have a lot to offer. Let’s move.” And she said, “Okay, whatever you want to do.” That was in 1997, and in 1998 we moved into this house.
LICN: What is the smartest thing you ever did?
KN: Besides marry Mandy? At my parents’ insistence, in the summers during college, I quit my job at McDonald’s to volunteer at the National Institutes of Health. They felt that this would solidify my chances of getting into a good medical school, and they were right. I was eventually offered a paying position and was even able to have four articles published that I had authored or co-authored. Without this I wouldn’t have had the credentials to get into medical school.
LICN: Did you have any one teacher or colleague who most influenced you?
KN: Yes. Dr. Jerry Shoukas, the chief anesthesiologist in East Orange at the V.A. Hospital. He told me, “Treat your patients like your family.” He taught me not only how to be a good physician, but a good person as well.
LICN: What rule or law [regarding medicine] do you think should be changed?
KN: Malpractice laws. First, there should be a cap on the amount of money people should receive in damages; but more importantly, you should not have a jury of laypeople who know nothing about medicine judging doctors. The trial should be done with a judge and a medical jury. Then it could be on a fair, objective. and not subjective level.
LICN: Do you have a motto?
KN: “Let’s do it!” You know…seize the day.
LICN: Would you ever go back to Saigon?
KN: Yes, to show my kids, but as a tourist. I no longer have any family there.
LICN: What hobbies do you have?
KN: Photography, fishing, collecting watches, collecting wine.
LICN: I’ve seen your wine cellar and it’s quite impressive.
KN: Well, I have about 700 bottles of wine. I collect for pleasure drinking – for special occasions with my family and friends. I decided right away that for such a small collection I couldn’t collect wine from all around the world, so I focus on just one region – Bordeaux, France. What’s great about Bordeaux’s wines is that there are the ones that you drink immediately and the ones you have to let mature.
LICN: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
KN: Here, still working hard. Also working to advance my group practice, and helping my children get themselves established and guiding them to be good citizens and good people.
LICN: What is your greatest fear?
KN: Another war in my backyard.
Each and every one of us lucky enough to be living in this country probably has our own idea of what the “American Dream” means. For some of us it may be wealth…to others it may be fame or simply happiness. There is little doubt that this is indeed a land of opportunity, and to be born a U.S. citizen is to be born with many rights and freedoms. However, there are those who have overcome many hardships to find success and happiness. If that is one interpretation of the “American Dream” then Khanh Nguyen more than qualifies.
He was born in South Vietnam in the 1960’s, where he grew up in the isolation of several different military bases. While one home was hit by enemy mortar, Khanh, his siblings, and their mother were constantly relocating to other houses, trying to find a safe haven, while his father was out in the battlefields for weeks at a time. Khanh and his family were among the lucky few to escape their homeland the day before Saigon fell into Communist hands. With the help of the American military, he then traveled across the ocean and overcame the seas of prejudice and differences, arriving in this country as a teenager, speaking no English, and with just his family and the clothes on his back. In a mere 6 years, Khanh would be graduating with honors from high school and continuing on to medical school at the prestigious Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Today, he lives in Colts Neck and is a successful anesthesiologist. He is happily married to Mandy, his wife of 16 years, and they have two children, Gabrielle, 9, and Tristan, 8. Two years ago, Khanh and five partners formed what has become a thriving medical group in Red Bank – Innovative Ambulatory Anesthesia Associates, LLC.
Dr. Khanh Nguyen was kind enough to sit down with Living In Colts Neck and share his childhood memories and the story of his family’s struggle, first in war-torn Vietnam, and then as they started at the very bottom to make a new life for themselves in this country.
LICN: Where were you born?
KN: I was born in a small village outside of Saigon called Soc Trang, on a military base.
LICN: What are your earliest childhood memories?
KN: Well, the first memory that I have that is the most vivid was when I was about 5 years old, in 1967, when my family was living at a military base in My Tho and our house was hit by a mortar round in the middle of the night. We were sleeping and suddenly we heard this loud explosion. Things started falling down, and my mom came in and got us and we all crawled underneath the bed. Now, you have to know that a bed in Vietnam is not like a bed in America. We didn’t have a mattress; it was just a slab of wood and a straw mat. So it really wasn’t offering us any protection. It was just that we were all together – huddled together it was protection of our minds, not of our bodies.
LICN: So you knew that there was a war going on around you?
KN: I guess so. I was aware that some people were trying to kill each other. I didn’t really know who the sides were. I knew that my father was on one side and that he was fighting someone on the other side.
LICN: What was your father’s military position?
KN: I think at that point he was a lieutenant or a captain. He was frequently out in the battlefield. But I was too young to understand the implications of war. I just knew that he went to work and my mother took care of us and he would be home one day.
LICN: On the military base that you were on, were there other families and kids that were in the same situation as you?
KN: Not really. We didn’t have any interaction with other kids. We didn’t have a chance to go out and play with other kids; we just had our brothers and sisters to play with. There were five of us, and we just had the house and the four walls that contained our yard and an outhouse. Even when we moved to Saigon it was the same. We just stayed in our own house and didn’t have any interaction with other kids that weren’t in our family.
LICN: So what happened after the mortar incident?
KN: Well, my father was out in battle and he heard about it, but he didn’t know the outcome. He didn’t know if we were alive or not. He was so worried for his wife and kids, and he didn’t know if we were alright until he saw us. He had been so concerned that he decided that it was time to look for a job in the capital. So right away we moved to Saigon.
LICN: So in Saigon it was a lot safer and very different. Saigon was a major city, right?
KN: Well, we had a house with a big gate, and all the houses had these big sliding gates and you were locked in. Safer? Not really, because we were only there a couple months before the Tet Offensive.
LICN: What was the Tet Offensive?
KN: Tet is like New Year’s here. But there…there is a time of preparation…three, four days before. I remember my mom was cooking and making us all new clothes and we were all getting really excited because it’s a time when you go and visit with all the relatives and go socializing, and we don’t give gifts but you get the envelope with some money in it. It is a very traditional time, one of the most important holidays in Vietnam. The whole city basically shuts down to prepare, buy flowers, cook food, and make decorations for the house. So what happened was…around midnight it was the custom to light firecrackers and bring in the New Year. I remember I heard the firecrackers, but something wasn’t right. There should have been clapping and more fireworks, but instead there was all this confusion and scrambling. The fireworks were the signal for the surprise attack by the North Vietnamese army to come in; they started an offensive war on the whole country of South Vietnam. With the aid of China and the Soviet Union, they were trying to root out the Americans and capture the city of Saigon. So after that night we moved almost every day from one safe house to another – we were always moving. My father would have a jeep and a couple of bodyguards and move us to the next hiding place.
LICN: Once the Tet Offensive was over and Saigon was still under South Vietnamese rule what did you do?
KN: Well, the city was pretty much in ruins; it had to be rebuilt. Our house was gone. We had to stay with relatives until my father was able to get us to a relatively safe location next to the University and the Presidential Palace. We stayed there until I was about 12.
LICN: What did you do about school?
KN: School opened whenever it was safe. My father would either drive us to school and pick us up himself or have someone else do it because he was so worried for our safety. So again, we really didn’t play with the other kids, just came right back to our house, our compound…concrete walls with barbed wire on top.
LICN: Sounds like a prison.
KN: Yes, I guess so, but we had the five kids and we played together, so it didn’t seem that bad.
LICN: And, you were protected from what was building up outside, the unrest and the eventual fall of Saigon?
KN: Well, we knew that there was unrest. We heard about a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire as a protest. We heard that there were student demonstrations going on. We got tear gassed all the time because they were tear gassing the students who were demonstrating outside our house. We heard about one of our own planes bombing the Presidential Palace and we wondered about that. We knew something serious was going to happen. We read in the newspaper that a plane trying to evacuate a group of orphans had crashed on takeoff, and that the North Vietnamese were moving closer. We would go to the top of my uncle’s building and look out at the country, and you could see the smoke and the bombs going off and it seemed to be coming closer. Then on April 29th my father and my two uncles were talking and they were getting ready…they had their guns. My one uncle also had five children and my other uncle was just married. They got us all into two jeeps and we headed to the Saigon harbor. It was a slow trip because the city was full of garbage and abandoned cars in the road; we had to pick our way through the obstacles. When we got to the harbor, I remember some guy came running up and asked for our jeep; he was begging and we just left it for him…with the keys and everything.
LICN: What was waiting for you in the harbor?
KN: Well, I still don’t know if it was planned, but first we ran and climbed on this freighter and sat around for hours and nothing happened. Then my father said, “Let’s go!” and we got off and went across the dock to a military barge and climbed on. After a little while, a tugboat came out of nowhere and hooked itself up to us and started dragging us down the river. We went on all night, our families and maybe only 20 other families on this huge barge. The whole way we could see the war going on along the banks…gunfire and smoke and explosions. Once I saw this helicopter coming right over us, and then it veered suddenly and I could see this trail of light and I knew it had almost been hit by a rocket.
LICN: Did you realize how much danger you were in?
KN: Actually, it was like being in a movie. It was neat. But then in the morning, it was April 30th and the country had fallen to the Communists; we arrived at this coastal city, but we just kept going out to sea.
LICN: So just a few of you were escaping? Was the boat almost empty?
KN: Well, when we passed through the coastal city, people were coming out to the barge, in boats, rafts, in anything that would float. We kept picking up passengers. By the time we were heading out to sea we had maybe a thousand people…standing-room-only…people hanging on to the sides.
LICN: Weren’t your parents afraid the boat would sink?
KN: No. That wasn’t their worry. If we’d sink, we’d drown…the family together. I think their worry was that we would be captured by the Communists, and that would have been worse.
LICN: So the barge made it out to the American ships?
KN: Yes, the American fleet was waiting for us. Everyone tried to push ahead and get on the ship, but my parents made us wait our turn and that turned out well because by the time we got on, the cargo hold was filled up and we got to stay on the deck. Of course, there was no shelter from the sun and the rain on the trip to the Philippines.
LICN: Were you glad to be on land?
KN: Well, when we got off the ship, the first thing they did when you walked off the plank was to pull open our pants and spray us with some chemical. Then they sprayed our hair, too. There was one huge tent with rows and rows of cots. My brothers and sisters and cousins – we were all too afraid to take our clothes off in the showers. We just wore them and let them dry.
LICN: How long were you there?
KN: One week. Then we took another boat ride to Guam. We were there for about a week, too. Then a military plane took us to Hawaii; no heat, no seats, more tents, more cots, a little more privacy. It was exciting. For us kids, it was an adventure. The parents…I’m sure they were worried. And my mother was pregnant. Then [we took] another military plane to Pensacola, Florida. Again, no heat, noisy, web seats….
LICN: So, finally you arrived on the mainland, in America at last!
KN: Yes…in a refugee camp. We were there for 3 to 4 months, waiting for a sponsor. My cousins had family in Canada who sponsored them a month before us, and we were so sad to be parted we were all crying. But my father said now that we are in America, we should stay in America. That’s how the family got split. Then a Baptist church sponsored us to come to North Augusta, South Carolina. It was in the Deep South.
LICN: Had the people there ever seen an Asian person before?
KN: When I look back now, no, probably not. They hadn’t. The school there was very different than what I knew. They had recess; I had never been told to go out and play. I didn’t speak English at all. A teacher tried to communicate with me in French that I should go outside. I remember going outside to the playground, and half the kids were on one side and half the kids on the other and I didn’t know what to do. The white kids were on one side and the black kids were on the other, and I didn’t know which group I was supposed to be on. So I went back inside.
LICN: Was it like that in your neighborhood, too?
KN: The smartest thing that my father did was that he made us integrate. He made us go outside and play with the other kids. It was the first time we had ever been told to go outside the house. He pushed us out and locked the door behind us. He was very smart; that’s how we learned English. We were there for 4 years.
LICN: Then another move?
KN: Yes, to Rockville, Maryland, in 1979. That was my parents’ last move. They are still living there. My father saw that it would be a better chance for us and for him to advance our schooling and careers. He was able to get a job working for Xerox. He had been going to night school while working two jobs and had gotten a degree in engineering.
LICN: That is amazing. Did this last move pay off?
KN: Yes, I think so. They had much better classes there at the high school level. They had AP classes. I was excelling in all my classes and testing, except English. I was able to get into Catholic University in Washington, DC. From there I went to Penn State College of Medicine.
LICN: You knew already that you wanted to be an anesthesiologist?
KN: No. I wanted to be a surgeon…a neurosurgeon. I was so gung ho that I did 3 years of residential surgery rotation.
LICN: So what happened?
KN: Well, I jumped over to anesthesiology a year after I got married. You see, my wife, Mandy, when we married she moved here from Canada. She left all her family, all her friends, everybody in Canada. I was supposed to be her support structure here. But when I was doing the surgical residence, I barely saw her, and then when I did, I was so tired I was falling asleep right in the middle of dinner. I could see the strain that it was putting on her; I was like my father, disappearing out on the battlefield. So the way I see it is that family is the most important. You have a job so that you can have a good family life, not the other way around. The best thing to do was pick something so that I could dedicate more time to my wife and family, so I picked anesthesiology.
LICN: How did you meet Mandy?
KN: Well, it was sort of an arranged thing with my parents.
LICN: An arranged marriage?
KN: Not quite that, but the first time we met, the meeting was a setup. They made it seem like it was a coincidence, but it was planned. We went to see how maple syrup was made in Canada and she was there with her parents; then we had dinner together.
LICN: So, you liked her?
KN: Yes, she caught my attention. I liked the way she talked and the way she looked, and when I got back to Hershey, Pennsylvania, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So I got permission to call her and made a date.
LICN: So you drove 8 hours for a first date?
KN: Yes. Well, not just any date…but the courtship went on for about 5 years before we got married.
LICN: So you brought her back to Pennsylvania?
KN: No. We went to Newark. My residency was in Newark at the UMDNJ University Hospital of Newark.
LICN: How did you end up here in Colts Neck?
KN: Well, it was a very difficult time for anesthesiologists to get jobs. But I really liked the field and I really had excelled in it. I think it was my calling. I became a “best” resident. My chairman came to me and offered me a job on the faculty. So I took it and stayed there for 2 years, but there was a lot of politics. One day one of my co-workers told me about a job in Red Bank that would be perfect for me. She said it was the perfect position for me and they would love to have me! So I went to see it…Riverview Medical Center. I said to Mandy, “I really like this hospital; they have a lot to offer. Let’s move.” And she said, “Okay, whatever you want to do.” That was in 1997, and in 1998 we moved into this house.
LICN: What is the smartest thing you ever did?
KN: Besides marry Mandy? At my parents’ insistence, in the summers during college, I quit my job at McDonald’s to volunteer at the National Institutes of Health. They felt that this would solidify my chances of getting into a good medical school, and they were right. I was eventually offered a paying position and was even able to have four articles published that I had authored or co-authored. Without this I wouldn’t have had the credentials to get into medical school.
LICN: Did you have any one teacher or colleague who most influenced you?
KN: Yes. Dr. Jerry Shoukas, the chief anesthesiologist in East Orange at the V.A. Hospital. He told me, “Treat your patients like your family.” He taught me not only how to be a good physician, but a good person as well.
LICN: What rule or law [regarding medicine] do you think should be changed?
KN: Malpractice laws. First, there should be a cap on the amount of money people should receive in damages; but more importantly, you should not have a jury of laypeople who know nothing about medicine judging doctors. The trial should be done with a judge and a medical jury. Then it could be on a fair, objective. and not subjective level.
LICN: Do you have a motto?
KN: “Let’s do it!” You know…seize the day.
LICN: Would you ever go back to Saigon?
KN: Yes, to show my kids, but as a tourist. I no longer have any family there.
LICN: What hobbies do you have?
KN: Photography, fishing, collecting watches, collecting wine.
LICN: I’ve seen your wine cellar and it’s quite impressive.
KN: Well, I have about 700 bottles of wine. I collect for pleasure drinking – for special occasions with my family and friends. I decided right away that for such a small collection I couldn’t collect wine from all around the world, so I focus on just one region – Bordeaux, France. What’s great about Bordeaux’s wines is that there are the ones that you drink immediately and the ones you have to let mature.
LICN: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
KN: Here, still working hard. Also working to advance my group practice, and helping my children get themselves established and guiding them to be good citizens and good people.
LICN: What is your greatest fear?
KN: Another war in my backyard.
Favorite Restaurant: Le Fandy, in Fair Haven
Favorite Music:
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”
Favorite Movie:
Star Wars
Pet Peeve:
People who give me more excuses than results
Three people you’d like to dine with:
Warren Buffett, Steven Spielberg, and Ronald Reagan
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