Vietnam Native Who Fled Country During War Returns Home

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Tomorrow on this program - the story of a man who fled South Vietnam in 1975 befor the communist North took control. He was only 17 at the time, and after 30 years in the United States, he still felt the pull back to his birth country.

NGUYEN QUI DUC: I've always wanted to come back to live in Vietnam to sort of finish the man that I was meant to be - disrupted and interrupted to go to America and become somebody else. And after about 30 years, I wanted to get back to Vietnam. I wanted to live here.

BLOCK: And Nguyen Qui Duc has chosen to live in Hanoi, the very seat of the government that turned his life upside down.

DUC: I always see Hanoi as the capital of a long history of Vietnam, not just the Communist capital. And enough time had passed that I had romantic notions of Hanoi from reading the books of the '30s and '40s that I studied in school. It was all very romanticized.

BLOCK: And now he feels he is finally home. His full story tomorrow on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.