Andrew X. Pham is an author, and also the founder of Spoonwiz. The younger years of Andrew Pham's childhood were spent in Vietnam. He was born in Phan Thiet, a town renowned for its fish sauce. Before the Vietnam War, Andrew's father worked double shifts as a school teacher. Andrew's mother did laundry for her neighbors to earn extra money to support their struggling household. During the war between the North and the South, Andrew's father earned money by working for the Nationalist army in the propaganda department, that is until he was captured by the Vietcong and forced to stay in the Minh Luong Prison reeducation camp for several grueling months. When he was released, Andrew's father returned to his family and began to plan an escape to America. They chartered a boat to smuggle them across the border into Malaysia. And so Andrew, his mother and father, his aunt Dung, his older sister Chi, and his three younger brothers Huy, Tien, and Hien, boarded a thirty-foot boat with a fishing crew that nearly fell apart beneath them on the open sea before they were rescued by an Indonesian freighter ship.
