Chapter 1

My name is Hugh Nguyen. My Vietnamese name was Huy. I was born in Saigon, Vietnam, with a cataract in my left eye. As a result, my right eye has been my primary source of vision throughout my life.

My mother was a nurse. She came from a small town in Bình Định Province, a central coastal province of Vietnam. She was an excellent student, particularly in mathematics and biology. In my opinion, she worked so hard because she wanted to pass the high school exit examination, known as Tú Tài, and continue her education in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam at the time.

My father was from Tân An, the largest town in Long An Province in southern Vietnam. He was also an excellent student. He passed the high school exit examination with honors and eventually became an officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the armed forces of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

The war changed my father profoundly. He had once been a shy, studious young man from a devout Catholic family. But during his years as a soldier, he became an alcoholic. I imagine that, for many soldiers, alcohol may have provided a temporary escape from the stress and trauma of war.

One of my father’s sisters, my youngest aunt, was also different from the other members of our family. She rarely spoke, even when I met her as a child. Looking back many years later, after studying psychopharmacology in pharmacy school, I began to wonder whether there might have been a neurodevelopmental component in my father’s family that had influenced me as well. At the time, however, I had no understanding of genetics, neurodevelopment, or how complicated the relationship between heredity and mental health could be.

Chapter 2

My father met my mother when he was a patient at Chợ Rẫy Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Saigon. He had come to the hospital because of a recurring wound related to his military service during the Vietnam War. My mother was the nurse who took care of him.

At the time, my mother was twenty-eight years old—an age when, in Vietnamese society, many women were already married and had children. There was also a Vietnamese superstition that men should avoid marrying women born under the zodiac sign of the tiger because such women were considered strong-willed and difficult to control.

My mother was from Bình Định, a province famous for its tradition of martial arts. In the eyes of some people, this only reinforced the stereotype of the strong and formidable Bình Định woman. As a result, many of the men who worked with my mother at the hospital were apparently hesitant to become romantically involved with her.

My father was different.

He was a former South Vietnamese soldier—the side that had lost the Vietnam War—and had recently been released from a reeducation camp. He was unemployed and trying to rebuild his life under the new Communist government. Yet none of that seemed to stop him from pursuing my mother.

In the fall of 1978, my parents were married with the blessings of both families.

Chapter 3

After their marriage, my mother was assigned a tiny apartment by her employer, Chợ Rẫy Hospital, in District 5, the Chinatown district of Saigon. The apartment was small, and my grandparents—farmers from Bình Định Province—quickly realized that it would not be large enough once my parents started having children.

So my grandparents began looking for a larger home.

They eventually found a relatively spacious house in an alley in Saigon. At the time, many houses in Saigon were narrow and tall, built almost like vertical rectangles. But this house was different. Tucked away in an alley, it reminded my grandparents more of the homes they knew in rural Vietnam.

It turned out to be one of the best investments they ever made.

I was born shortly after they purchased the house, in the summer of 1979. A little more than a year later, my younger brother, David, was born.

For a while, life could not have been better for my father. Because he was unable to find work under the new Communist government, he became a stay-at-home father and took care of my brother and me while my mother became the family’s breadwinner.

But unemployment was difficult for my father. During the 1980s, he continued to turn to alcohol as a way of coping with his circumstances. In retrospect, I sometimes think of alcohol as his own form of “antidepressant”—not a medication prescribed by a physician, of course, but a substance he used to temporarily numb the emotional pain of unemployment, displacement, and the aftermath of war.

I did not understand any of this as a child.

I simply knew that my father drank.

It would take many years—and eventually my own education in pharmacy and psychopharmacology—for me to begin looking back at my childhood and asking a very different question:

Why did some substances seem to change the way people felt and behaved, while the medications I eventually took for my own depression and OCD often failed to work?