She Held Me

What my mother taught me about presence before I had words for it.

She was 22 years old and she never put me down.

Fifteen days on the South China Sea. A wooden boat carrying close to 80 people, lost, no destination certain, no country yet willing to claim them. My father was there. My five year old sister was there. And my mother was dehydrated, sick, and still nursing me — this baby she had carried out of a falling country in the dark, quietly, so no one would hear us leave.

I was 20 months old. I don't remember any of it.

And yet.

There is a kind of knowing that lives below memory. Below language. In the body, in the blood, in whatever moves through us before we have words for it.

I have spent my entire adult life learning to name that knowing professionally. Nervous system regulation. Somatic awareness. Presence under pressure. I have sat with executives and leaders and people in the hardest moments of their lives and I have helped them find the still place underneath the noise.

I have always known where I first learned it.

Not in a training room. Not from a credential.

On a boat. At 1 years old. In my mother's arms. Before I knew what fear was, I was held through it.

My family was Catholic. They left with faith and almost nothing else.

My maternal grandmother had left Vietnam before the fall of Saigon, already gone by 1975, already building a life somewhere else. When we were rescued by a Kuwaiti commercial ship and brought to the refugee camps in Singapore, she was the one who sponsored us. She was the one waiting.

We landed in Utah. The Mormon community there gave us clothes. They were kind in the way that quiet, practical kindness is kind — without ceremony, without expectation. My parents accepted it the way they accepted everything in those years. With gratitude and without much fuss. There was too much to do.

I have thought about that stretch of time often. The camps. The sponsorship. Utah. The particular texture of starting over with nothing in a place that looks nothing like home.

My mother moved through all of it holding me.

I feel very American. I also feel very Vietnamese. When I spent years in India studying, I felt very Indian.

People find that surprising. They expect someone with my origin story to need a fixed place to stand, a single identity to anchor to.

But I think my beginning produced the opposite.

When you start your life being carried across open water by someone who refuses to put you down — you learn early, in the body, before the mind can interfere — that home is not a place. Home is the willingness to stay present when everything around you is uncertain. Home is the person who holds on.

I have been building that home inside myself ever since.

I don't know exactly what my mother felt on that boat.

She doesn't narrate it the way I might. That is also something she gave me — the understanding that some things are carried without being explained. That presence doesn't require performance. That you can move through the unsurvivable without making a speech about it.

What I know is the fact of it.

She was 22. She was sick. The water had no bottom and the darkness had no guarantee. My father was there, holding what he could hold. And my mother held me.

For fifteen days she held me.

I have walked into a lot of rooms in my life. Boardrooms, conflict rooms, grief rooms, rooms where people have forgotten how to speak to each other. I have sat across from people in the kind of pressure that makes most people want to leave.

I have never once felt like I couldn't stay.

I know where that came from.

It didn't come from training or methodology or years of practice, though I have all of those things.

It came from being held on the water before I was old enough to be afraid of it.

It came from her.

And I have spent the rest of my life trying to offer other people some version of what she gave me on that boat.

Not rescue. Not answers.

Just the certainty that someone is not letting go.