Ing. Anh Tuan Nguyen

“It was hard for me to get used to it because it [Snina] was a little town. I felt like everybody was watching me and that everybody was gossiping about me. I did not feel well. I still wanted to return to Poland, to come up with something but I did not stand a chance. I did not have a home, a family, anything there. Poles would help me but I did not have money to start with and to be there. Snina was getting me down. I was depressed about where I ended up. It was really amazing in Poland and suddenly horrible socialism [was everywhere]. I had never imagined that before. Red posters were everywhere. I felt like I was in a Russian school where we did not see anything else either. I wanted to get away from Snina at all costs.”

“I was looking for a way out. Hungarian, Bulgarian and many Poles had been my friends up to that point and they suddenly told me that I could not be friends with them anymore. I could not deal with it. I preferred European way of thinking over the Vietnamese one. I lived in Warsaw since I was a child. My Vietnamese vocabulary was limited to what I had known thanks to my dad and mum, I did not attend a Vietnamese school. I sometimes had hard time communicating with Vietnamese and they laughed at me because of it. I did not like going out with them. I am not a sportsperson and I did not want to play football with them. I was looking for a way how not to spend time with them. I discovered a group of Vietnamese rebels at that time. They had long hair and wore flared trousers.”

“When I was starting the studies at university, they imposed a condition that I could not go to the cinema, I could not meet foreign friends, I could only meet other Vietnamese and that I had to attend meetings or workshops with Vietnamese students. They supervised us. When we wanted to go to the cinema, we had to be two or three Vietnamese friends to be able to assess if the film was politically correct or not. I had to go playing football with them and they basically could not meet people of other nationalities neither, even though it [Poland] was a fraternal socialist state. They considered everything to be espionage or something like this.”