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.”
They were stranded at sea for about a week before being rescued by a Philippine freighter and taken to a refugee camp in the Philippines. They stayed there for several years before they were sponsored by a Lutheran church to arrive in Scottsdale, Arizona.
In the early ‘80s, she and her family moved to Modesto, California. Since their English was not good, and they were poor, they worked in the agricultural fields.
“They went out there, and they started working at 5, 5:30 in the morning, every single day, seven days a week,” she said.
By 12 to 13 years old, she also joined her family in the fields to make ends meet.
“We thought that life in America at that time was way better than what we had in Vietnam. I got to go to school. I attended public schools throughout my life and until I went away to college. I got to play sports with my friends. I had free lunches at school, and we had subsidized housing,” she said.
One summer when she was about 13 or 14, she and her parents were picking apricots. Her dad accidentally knocked over a crate of them and the foreman yelled profanity and made racist remarks. Since Nguyen understood English, she got upset and talked back at him, saying he should not talk to her father that way and that their family worked for him every summer. The foreman grew more upset and threatened to take their jobs away.
“So upon hearing that, my father was really afraid. So he pulled me aside right away, and he said, look, just leave it alone,” she recalled. “We’re OK, we can’t lose this job. This is our only job that provides for the family.”
Nguyen decided she wanted to do something for farmers so they would not be subject to such treatment again.
“That was the first time I actually realized that if I wanted to change something, that I need to be a part of it,” she said.
The first time Nguyen ran for public office was in 2000 for a position on a local school board, Franklin-McKinley Board of Education. She wanted to bring change to the school system. At the time, she was a PhD student of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“I ran against three incumbents, and I was the only challenger, and I received the most votes. So, it was just breathtaking. At that time, it was unbelievable. I thought, this is something I wanted, that was something I wanted to do, but I didn’t know I was going to get elected,” Nguyen recalled. “But at the same time, I felt like, OK, this is going to be a brand new journey for me, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that I serve the community in the most righteous way.”
She said it felt ironic because her parents escaped for better opportunities in the United States, not to get into politics.
“To them, politics was always viewed as very negative ... as a lot of corruption happening with government officials,” she said. “So when I told them that I wanted to run for public office here in America, truth be told they were not excited.”
Because of that, she did not talk to them much about her journey running for school board or City Council. But she felt somewhere in their hearts, they were supportive of her, even if it was not articulated.
“After I was elected, they felt very proud, because they realized that this is what I wanted to do,” she said. “Running for public office, serving the public, was something that I was very passionate about, and I still am. So today, obviously they’re very proud of what I’m doing.”
Nguyen has a passion for working with the community and affordable housing developers for low-income families and seniors, so she decided to be an elected official.
“I am a big proponent of building more, working with the state delegations, working with our federal delegations, to bring funding back from the federal government, so that we can build more affordable housing for our working families and also for our seniors,” she said.
Her work comes with challenges.
“How can I work with as many people in my community to make sure that their voice is being included in the decision making process, and that is a very hard thing to navigate, because everyone has different opinions about different issues, right?”
Nguyen says she is against communism and wants to live in a democracy where people have the freedom to vote and express their feelings.
“If we can somehow advocate for those freedoms in other countries, in the remaining communist countries, then we should do that. And I think that that’s one of the reasons why a lot of Vietnamese American families left Vietnam to come to this country,” she said.
“Like many families in our community, I’m frustrated with what I’m seeing out in our community, the rise in homelessness, the rise in crime, and a lack of affordable housing,” said Nguyen. “People are feeling unsafe. There’s so many incidents of retail thefts, smash and grab activities that are happening in the community. And so you have to wonder. You have to ask yourself, like, why is this happening again?”
During her time as a council member, Nguyen said one of the accomplishments she was most proud of was building over 1,000 affordable housing units in her district alone. Three new parks and two shopping centers were also built at that time.
“I would drive along the streets with these affordable housing units, and I see families out there. I see seniors walking around the parks. It just makes me smile that, hey, I had something to do with that, that I helped make that happen,” said Nguyen. “That’s what local politics is about, just being able to improve people’s quality of life.”
