2,750. That is the approximate number of books that my Dad had read before April 30th, 1975. And the reason how he knows that statistics is as harrowing as it is inspirational.

No one has more influence on my love for books than my Dad. Growing up in a humble 360-square-foot home in Vietnam, we didn’t have much, but the book shelves were always well stocked. As a teacher, Dad said, “Books are your best friends. Treat them well.”

And he always treated them as if they were treasures. He made sure they were protected with book covers and taught us to never step on them or throw them on the ground. Any disrespectful gesture we displayed towards printed pages would be met with the reproachful wrinkled brows that creased across Dad’s weathered, sun bronzed forehead.

He would never take his books for granted because just a few short years before, he watched helplessly as his treasures of knowledge were forcefully taken away.

Amidst the chaos of April 30th, 1975, my dad was separated from his immediate family, who were able to evacuate Vietnam on one of the refugee boats and eventually settled in the US. Fortunately, my grandfather, a high-ranking officer from the defeated regime, was able to escape on that boat and avoid the certain vengeance that would have been wrought upon him from the Communist victors. Unfortunately, my father, his son, did not. And so, for the next decade, my father painfully paid his father’s unpaid political debt.

And his payment started with his beloved book collection, when the Communist forces raided their house and confiscated what they deemed as materials that promoted “phản động” (reactionary) ideologies, even though many of them were books of love poetry. In the aftermath, the Communist officer in charge of this raid reported his findings:

Approximately 2,750 “reactionary” books were confiscated from the house.

But like the resilient Phoenix that rose from the ashes, Dad never stopped reading and learning, even if it meant risking arrest. During the next decade, he collected tattered Vietnamese-English dictionaries and taught himself English next to dimly lit oil lamps.

This was a skill that would later catapult him to become a highly paid teacher to the same people who once treated him like a prisoner, when the US-Vietnam trade relations began to improve in the early 1990s, and Vietnam desperately needed his English knowledge in the new open economy.

And as Dad always said, “With our knowledge, We shall rise.”