spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow I ended up here on Hollywood's biggest stage," he said. "They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it's happening to me. This is the American dream."
He is the first person of Vietnamese origin to win an Oscar, and one of two nominated this year - the other was Hong Chau in The Whale, whose family also fled from Vietnam on a boat.
Yet in Vietnam the official reaction has been subdued. Reports in the media, which is nearly all state-controlled, have said little about Ke Huy Quan or his background.
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Some have stressed the actor's ethnic Chinese ancestry, rather than his Vietnamese origins. He was born in the southern Vietnamese capital Saigon in 1971, his family part of a commercially successful ethnic Chinese minority, of the kind seen in many South East Asian cities. None mentioned his flight from Vietnam as a refugee, in the mass exodus of the so-called "boat people".
Thanh Nien newspaper wrote only that "he was born in 1971 to a Chinese family in Ho Chi Minh City [the official name for Saigon] and then moved to the US in the late 1970s".