Madison Nguyen became the first Vietnamese American woman in California to serve on an elected school board and on San Jose’s City Council in 2005. She tells Bay Area Innovators host Steve Ispas her background and motivation for becoming a public official.
Madison Nguyen was only 4 years old when she and her family left their country for the United States after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Her parents wanted to escape the communist country so their family could have better education and economic opportunity.
“In the middle of the night, my parents woke all of us up, and there were seven kids at the time,” said Nguyen. “They woke all of us up to board my dad’s fishing boat. And my dad only had a compass. He was a fisherman, but he knew that in order to get out of Vietnam, we needed to … come to America.”…