 Young Nguyen was a young breaker who lived in Brooklyn, New York in the 80’s the Nguyen family was fully against their teen sons obsession with rap and break dancing, and didn’t allow him to bring it home with him. Around that same year he met a DJ by the name of Simone, and instantly fell in love with her, knowing his parents wouldn’t approve of their relationship just based off of her race; he kind of hid the relationship until she ended up pregnant. And her parents as well as his put their foot down, and explained that the two either get married, or that Yong would be disowned from the family. So marrying the young girl, the two settled into a low-income apartment now having to work and go to school for his growing family.
And on July 14, 1990 although they were only told they were having one baby, there came two one two minutes after the other. The first was named Leia Raine Nguyen and she took after her father, after his breaking days was over he went back to school to major in art, and being that Leia was the eldest as he learned to draw he began to have little sessions where he would teach her how to draw. As she grew older her father graduated and got himself a better job, and the family packed up and moved out of Brooklyn, and into Washington, DC into a new and bigger house specifically for their new family. Everything seemed peaches and cream around the house, Simone and Yong were as loving as ever, but Yong began to stay away for longer amounts of time, claiming it was work. And Leia who expanded her love of art taking her sketch pad outside, to draw things that she saw which included, birds, bugs, trees just a little bit of everything.
Like twins, Leia was attached to her younger sister by the hip they were practically inseparable but at the same time, Leia was a big daddy’s girl and she thrived on his acceptance of her. By the time the girls were in grade school it was pretty apparent how different each of the twins were from each other, while one twin was musically inclined of course because of their mother Leia was more artistic and considered the “lazy one” because it didn’t seem like she was putting in as much effort into her work, and the only class she actually enjoyed was art. She managed to pull in A’s and B’s in all of her classes, and got honor roll in elementary but home life was becoming drastic and her A’s and B’s weren’t enough to keep her father to stick around.
By Seventh grade the sweet family life had taken a turn for the worse, when Yong openly admitted to cheating, and wanting a divorce, and wanting Simone, and the girls out of the house. To escape the pain she would spend time in her sister’s room drawing and keeping to herself it was a sort of a form of expression something to keep her mind and ears from returning to the sound of the fighting going on. When things became a little to hectic in her life, she went outside into the city of DC and sat in the park and drew whatever she saw, even in the dead of winter it was easier to draw then to deal with her life, because she could escape into her drawings and even at eight years old she had become a pretty good artist even picking up the art of tagging by hanging out with a few guys on the street who were graffiti artists.
And at home the bombs just continued to fall when the papers were signed and the girls were kicked out, Yong didn’t care for little Leia or her sister or her mother anymore, and homeless Simone packed up her daughters and moved to Key West, Florida where Simone’s mother now resided in a retirement village. And all while living there Leia had no contact with her father, he had started a new family, and didn’t find it a part of his life to contact the ones he had first.
So growing up she harbored resentment against her father, because her mother was suffering and in tears over her failed marriage, and living with her mother whom didn’t make her feel bad or give her the lecture, she just helped her take care of the two girls.
Now as an adult she graduated from high school with honors, and went to the university of Florida majoring in Art History, it wasn’t until the end of her freshmen year that she had gotten a call from her best friend asking her to come to north Carolina to study with her, that and because UNC had an impeccable art program which got her to where she was. And then there was her boyfriend, the two had been going to the same school for four years, including their one year in college together they decided to pack up and go to school at UNC where her credits transferred over making her an incoming sophomore.
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