One day, sometime in the 1990s, my aunt and grandmother were out running errands when they were accosted by a man who hurled angry racist slurs at them. My aunt, ever so sassy, calmly retorted: "My family pays more taxes in one year than you pay in 3 generations," and they walked away, leaving the man speechless. It was one of grandma’s favorite stories to retell repeatedly.

Some today may accuse my aunt of being elitist, but she earned her right to every word in that sentence. In October of 1975, after spending 6 months in a refugee camp, my grandparents and 4 of my aunts and uncles arrived on US soil with only the clothes on their backs, without speaking a single word of English. My aunts and uncles were between the ages of 11 and 17 at the time.

My grandfather worked in construction at 2.55 per hour, and my aunts and uncles picked up part time jobs at the pizza parlors and retail stores. They carried each other through adversities as a family, while still saving to send money back to Vietnam to help my Dad and second uncle who unfortunately failed to evacuate on the boat on that fateful day.

Due to his staunch Confucian values and pride, grandpa refused to accept public assistance for more than the initial few months. Whether you agree with him or not is irrelevant. If you want to send him your dissent, I'll give you the address to his gravesite.

A few years later, all 4 of my aunts and uncles graduated with honor from the University of Tulsa. Both my uncles ended up working as aerospace engineers at the FAA. Some of you have flown on aircrafts that my uncles have inspected and approved. My aunts became software programmer and educator, and they both married the young men who they met in the refugee camp - both are engineers. Simply put: they paid their dues, and they paid some more.

You should never disrespect the strength and resilience of refugees who survived war and overcame their trauma to rise to the top of educational and professional success in a country where they had to learn the language from zero. Because whatever mental fortitude you think you have from the comfort of your warm sofa, you have never endured one iota of the trauma they went through before they even reached their teens.

You, who have never gathered your husband's remains into a copper pot with your bare hands because he was a collateral damage of war. You, who never had to carry your children on your back to cross the 17th parallel line on foot. You, who never had to cram yourself into a flimsy fishing boat like sardines, throwing yourself at the mercy of the angry ocean, only to witness this:

"Then, a ship chartered by the US government came to pick up war refugees in the international water outside of Vietnam. People were hopeful and those capable rushed to the wall of the barge to try to be the first ones off. Unfortunately, the wall was not strong enough to handle them all at the same time and collapsed. Many people fell into the water and some died instantly when they got crushed between the big ship and the barge. It was a horrible sight, happening right in front of my eyes." - The words of my grand-uncle Nguyen Phuc Hung, who became an engineer for the Public Service Company of Oklahoma.

So no, we will not apologize for our success, because god knows we clawed our ways up that mountain with bloody hands and arrows lodged in our backs. And my aunt deserved every single word of that comeback, because she wasn't wrong.