Linh writes: This past March was ten years since our family got off the airplane in Des Moines. My parents wanted to mark it somehow, and I said, you should write it down, because the boys don't remember the beginning and someday their kids will ask. My dad said, in English, "Okay, you type." So this is my parents' story in their words, with me translating. Where I've added something, I've marked it. The boys did the HTML, which they learned from a book from the library, and if the page looks funny on your computer, that's on them.

Ba writes: We came to Iowa on March 14, 1989: my wife, myself, Linh who was eight, Minh who was four, and Tuấn who was a baby. We left Vietnam in 1987 and were in a camp in the Philippines for almost two years, waiting. A Lutheran church in Des Moines agreed to sponsor us. We did not know where Iowa was. A man at the camp who had a map showed us. It was in the middle. We said, good, the middle is safe.

Now we have a house on the east side, a restaurant, three children who talk back to us in two languages, and a great many friends who have never been to Vietnam and who came to our Tết party anyway. This is the story of how that happened, so that we do not forget, and so that the people who helped us know that we remember.

Má writes: When we came it was March and there was still old snow along the roads, gray and dirty, and I thought it was sand. Linh touched it at the airport and pulled her hand back and cried, and the church people laughed, kindly, and one of the women took off her own gloves and put them on Linh. Her name was Mrs. Halvorsen. She is still our friend. She is eighty-one now.

The church had rented us an apartment and filled the refrigerator. I did not know what most of the food was. There was a large block of orange cheese. There was bread that was soft like a pillow. There was a jar of peanut butter, which I thought was a kind of bean paste, which is not wrong. For the first week I cooked rice on the stove and we ate it with the eggs and the cabbage and a bottle of soy sauce that another Vietnamese family, the only other one we knew of then, brought to us on the second night. I cried when I saw the soy sauce. My husband tells everyone this story. It is true.

Ba writes: The first real snow came in November. Big, slow, all day. We stood at the window for an hour. The children went out in it in the wrong clothes and came back wet and happy and I thought, this is a good country, the sky gives you something for nothing. Then in January it was twenty below zero (Fahrenheit; I did not know Celsius from Fahrenheit for a year and it did not matter, both were too cold) and the car the church had found for us would not start, and I stood in the parking lot with the hood up not knowing what I was looking at, and a man from the next building came out in his slippers with jumper cables. I did not have the words to thank him. I shook his hand for a long time. He said, "Welcome to Iowa," and went back inside.

I learned three things that winter. Plug the car in (they have a heater for the engine, imagine). Wear two of everything. And when somebody helps you, remember their name, because you are going to need to help somebody yourself someday, and you should know how it is done.

Linh adds: I learned English that year in Mrs. Dunlap's third grade, mostly from a girl named Jennifer who decided I was her project. I could read before I could talk. Mom and Dad went to English classes at night at the community college and my dad got a job at a meat-packing plant, on the line, and my mom sewed for a dry cleaner. I was the one who talked to the landlord, the school, the doctor. I was nine. Every immigrant family has one of these kids. I don't recommend it, but I wouldn't give it back either.

Má writes: In Saigon my mother sold phở from a cart near the market, and I grew up stirring the pot, so I knew one thing very well. For five years in Iowa I cooked it for our family and for the church suppers, where the Lutherans ate it politely and then came back for more, not politely, with bowls. Mrs. Halvorsen said, "Why don't you sell this?" Everybody says that to a cook. But the church said it, and then the bank said it, and a man from the church who had owned a hardware store went over the numbers with my husband four nights in a row, and in May 1994 we opened Saigon Kitchen in a little place on the east side that had been a sandwich shop. Eleven tables. My husband quit the plant. I quit the dry cleaner. We were terrified.

What we make: Phở is beef noodle soup, but that is like saying a church is a building. The broth is beef bones simmered all night, with onion and ginger charred black over the flame first, and star anise, cinnamon and cloves, and it must be clear, and it must be hot enough to cook the thin slices of raw beef laid on top of the rice noodles when the broth is poured on. It comes with a plate of bean sprouts, Thai basil, lime and sliced jalapeño, and you add what you like. Iowans add everything and then ask for more jalapeño. I did not expect this.

Bánh mì is a sandwich on a French roll, crisp outside and light inside; the French left us the bread and we improved the filling. Ours has grilled pork or Vietnamese cold cuts, a spread of pâté, pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, cilantro, and jalapeño. It costs less than a bowl of phở and the men from the tire place across the road eat two.

We also make spring rolls, fried rice, bun (rice noodle bowls) and, on Fridays, my mother's cà phê sữa đá, the strong coffee dripped over sweet condensed milk and ice, which has converted several Lutherans away from the church coffee.

Ba writes: The first year we nearly closed twice. The second year a writer from the newspaper came and wrote a small article and on the Saturday after there was a line outside, and I stood in the kitchen door and looked at the line and my wife said, "Stop looking and cut the onions." Now we have a second cook, my wife's cousin, who came in 1996, and two of the boys' friends bus tables on weekends, and I know the first name of every man from the tire place.

Linh adds: I worked the register every day after school from age thirteen until I left for college. I can carry four bowls of phở. This is on my résumé.

Má writes: Linh is nineteen and a sophomore at Iowa State University in Ames, studying accounting, because she has been doing our books since she was fourteen and decided she might as well get paid for it. She comes home most weekends to work the register and to correct my English, both of which I allow. She is the first person in either of our families to go to a university. When we drove her to Ames last August I did not cry until we were back on the interstate, and then my husband had to pull over.

Minh is fifteen and a sophomore at East High, and plays soccer, which I understand, and wants to play football, which I do not. He is taller than his father, which nobody in our family has ever been. He says he wants to be an engineer. He has taken apart the restaurant's second refrigerator twice and put it back together once.

Tuấn is eleven, still in middle school, and he is the American one: born in a camp, raised in Iowa, speaks Vietnamese like a tourist and English like a radio. He made most of this page. He wants it known that he also chose the colors (red and gold, for luck, and because he says the page "needed to pop").

Ba writes: People ask if we are afraid the children will forget Vietnam. Linh remembers. The boys remember what we tell them and what they eat. That is enough. They are Iowans. I was afraid of that once. Now I think it is the whole point.

Má writes: Tết is the Lunar New Year, the biggest holiday of the year for Vietnamese people, and it falls in late January or February by the Western calendar. This year it was February 16, 1999, and it began the Year of the Cat (in Vietnam it is the Cat; in China it is the Rabbit; do not ask me why, it has always been so). Next year it will be February 5, 2000, the Year of the Dragon, which is a very good year to be born in, so I have told Linh to hurry up and get married, and she has told me she is nineteen.

For the first few years we kept Tết at home, quietly, with the few Vietnamese families we knew. Since the restaurant opened we close it for the day and hold a party instead, and every year more people come who are not Vietnamese at all. We clean the house completely before the new year (you must not sweep on the first day, or you sweep out the luck). We put out a tray of candied fruit and seeds. We make bánh chưng, the square cakes of sticky rice with mung bean and pork wrapped in leaves and boiled for many hours; in Iowa there are no banana leaves in February, so we use the frozen ones from the Asian grocery and it is nearly the same. We cannot get the yellow apricot blossom, hoa mai, that means Tết in Saigon, so we buy forsythia branches from the florist and force them open in warm water, and they are yellow, and that is close enough. The children receive lì xì, lucky money in red envelopes, from every adult, and the Lutheran children who come receive it too and have learned to bow. Mrs. Halvorsen brings a Jell-O salad. It is now traditional.

Linh adds: The best moment every year is watching an Iowa farmer in a seed cap eat bánh chưng for the first time, decide he likes it, and ask for the recipe. Mom says the recipe is "two days." He usually laughs and takes another piece.

Ba and Má write: We are not able to name everyone, and some would not want to be named on a computer, so we will say it this way.

To the church that sponsored us, and especially to the committee of six who met us at the airport with coats, and to the family that gave up their basement for the two weeks the apartment was not ready. To Mrs. Halvorsen, for the gloves, and for everything since. To the man with the jumper cables, whose name was Gary, and who moved to Arizona in 1992; if anyone knows him, tell him. To Mrs. Dunlap and Jennifer. To the teachers at the community college who did not laugh at our English and to the foreman at the plant who did. (We are past it.) To the man from the hardware store who did the numbers with us four nights in a row and would not take a dinner for it, and now eats at Saigon Kitchen every Tuesday and is not allowed to pay. To the neighbors on our street who, in the flood summer of 1993 when the whole city was without water for days, shared their bottled water and their bathtubs full of it with a family they had known for four years and could barely talk to. To the customers, who are also the neighbors. To Iowa, which is in the middle, and safe, as the man with the map said.

Ten years ago we had two suitcases and a baby. We know what was given to us. We are trying to give it back. The soy sauce is always in the refrigerator, for whoever comes next.

The Nguyen family, Des Moines, Iowa, September 1999