A Vietnamese-American Father Quits Cold Turkey After 22 Years

My name is Van Nguyen. I am 47 years old and I live in Houston, Texas, in the Midtown area, not far from where I first landed when I came to this country at fifteen. I smoked for twenty-two years. I quit cold turkey four years ago, and I have not touched a cigarette since.

I want to tell you this story the way I would tell it to a friend sitting at my kitchen table: honestly, without leaving out the parts that are uncomfortable.

Coming to America, Picking Up the Habit

My family left Vietnam in 1993. I was fifteen. We came to Houston because my uncle was already here, and Houston has one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the United States. The neighborhood around Bellaire Boulevard, what people call Little Saigon, felt enough like home that landing there didn’t break us entirely.

But school was a different country. I spoke very little English. I looked different. I worked extremely hard to be invisible in ways that would not make me a target, and I worked extremely hard in ways that would make people include me. Smoking was one of those second things. There were a group of older Vietnamese boys, a few years ahead of me, who smoked. When they offered me a cigarette in the parking lot behind the school one afternoon, saying no felt like the wrong move. So I said yes.

I want to be clear that I’m not blaming them or blaming my circumstances. I made the choice. I kept making it every day for the next twenty-two years. But that’s how it started: a fifteen-year-old kid who wanted to belong somewhere.

The Culture of Smoking Among Vietnamese Men

In Vietnam, and in much of the Vietnamese community in Houston, smoking among men is simply normal. It is not considered a problem in the way it is framed in mainstream American health culture. You offer cigarettes to guests. You smoke after a meal. You smoke when you’re having a serious conversation, a business conversation. At weddings, at funerals, at New Year. There is a social grammar to it that doesn’t translate if you haven’t grown up in it.

I am not saying this to excuse anything. I am saying it because any Vietnamese man reading this will recognize exactly what I mean, and any non-Vietnamese person reading this should understand that for me, quitting wasn’t just about breaking a physical habit. It was about renegotiating my relationship with a whole set of social rituals.

For twenty-two years I smoked Marlboro Lights, about a pack a day. My wife, who was born here and grew up American, had asked me to quit more times than either of us could count. I always said I would. I never did.

My Kids Said What My Wife Couldn’t

We have three children. My oldest daughter, Linh, was seventeen when she sat down with me one evening and said she wanted to talk. My two younger ones, both born in Houston, both very American in the way second-generation kids are, sat with her. Linh had written some notes on her phone.

She told me she was afraid I was going to get sick. She told me she didn’t like coming home to the smell. She told me that her friends didn’t like coming to our house because of the smoke, and that this embarrassed her, and she felt bad for feeling embarrassed. Then she told me she loved me and that she needed me to be healthy because she wasn’t ready for anything to happen to me.

I did not say much that night. I thanked her and I went and sat in the garage for a while. I am not a man who cries easily, but I cried that night.

The thing about hearing it from your kids is that it lands differently than hearing it from anyone else. My wife’s concern I could deflect, not because I didn’t believe her but because I had been deflecting it so long I had gotten efficient at it. Linh caught me without my defenses up.

I smoked that night, and the next day, and for about two more weeks. Then on a Sunday morning in the spring of 2022 I woke up early, made coffee, and decided that today was the last day. I didn’t announce it. I finished the pack I had, told myself that was it, and I was done.

Cold Turkey, the Vietnamese New Year, and One Very Long Night

The first week was physical misery. Headaches, irritability, not sleeping well, picking fights with my wife over nothing and knowing while I was doing it that it was withdrawal and not being able to stop. She was patient with me. She had waited twenty-two years for this.

But the real test came six weeks after I quit. Tet. Vietnamese New Year. My extended family was gathering at my aunt’s house in the Alief neighborhood, thirty-some people, and among the uncles and older male cousins, smoking is as embedded in that celebration as the food is. The cigarette after the meal. The cigarette while the kids are opening their envelopes. The cigarette outside while the men have a separate conversation from the women.

I walked into that gathering and within twenty minutes someone had offered me a cigarette. Not to be difficult — just because that’s what you do. I said no thank you, I quit. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has said something slightly strange, said something like “good for you” in a tone that meant he didn’t entirely believe me, and lit his own.

I went through that entire gathering without smoking. I stepped outside once not to smoke but just to breathe cold air and remind myself why I was doing this. I thought about Linh and the notes on her phone. I went back inside.

That was the hardest night. Not because anyone pressured me, but because the pull of the ritual was so strong it was almost physical. The smell of cigarettes mixing with incense and food and the noise of family — my whole nervous system associated that combination with lighting up. Getting through it without giving in was the moment I knew the quit was real.

What Has Changed

Four years now. My lungs are better — I used to wake up coughing every morning and that stopped within about three months. I have more energy. I run in the mornings sometimes now, which I could not have done before.

But the change I didn’t expect was in the community. Other men in my circle watched me quit and stay quit. My brother-in-law asked me how I did it. Two of my cousins quit in the year after I did. One of them called me when he was struggling and I talked him through it. He’s been smoke-free for two years.

My daughter Linh is in college now. When she comes home, the house smells the way she always wanted it to. That is not a small thing to me.

To Anyone in the Same Position

If you are Vietnamese, or from any culture where men smoking is just the air you breathe — I understand what the obstacle feels like. It is not just habit. It is identity and ritual and belonging. I’m not going to tell you those things don’t matter, because they do.

But here is what I know: the people who love you need you healthy more than they need you to perform the rituals. And you can find your own version of belonging that doesn’t involve destroying your lungs.

I did it cold turkey because that’s how I am built — I’m not good at gradually, I need to cut the thing off completely. That is not the only way. NRT patches work for many people. Chantix worked for others I know. The method matters less than the decision to actually try.

You are not alone in thinking quitting is impossible inside your culture. It is not impossible. I am the proof.