How Atlanta’s Huyen Nguyen turned caregiving into a mission of community
The night before Huyen Nguyen was supposed to leave Georgia for her Google internship, her mother had a stroke.
She was a junior at Emory and was preparing to leave home (and the state) on her own for the first time.
Nguyen delayed leaving by a week, trying to understand what was happening and be there for her. Nurses told her to go.
Her mother, Phi Nguyen, would have round-the-clock support while she was away, and securing a promising job was how she might provide for her long-term.
On June 22, 2015, Nguyen boarded a plane to San Francisco.
“I still have guilt around that,” she says quietly. “What difference could I have made if I stayed?”
It’s a question she’s still sitting with.
From Buford Highway to Emory University
Nguyen grew up off Buford Highway and graduated from Meadowcreek High School, in unincorporated Norcross, long recognized as one of the most diverse schools in the state.
By the time she came through in the mid-2000s, the hallways held dozens of nationalities and languages, and a student body where being of Black and Vietnamese descent was pretty unremarkable.
From Texas to Trinidad, nearly everyone was from somewhere else. And in that somewhere-else-ness, she enjoyed the ease of belonging without having to explain yourself.
It wasn’t until she got to Emory in the fall of 2012 that the absence of that ease registered.
She remembers an undergrad orientation where she kept hearing classmate after classmate say they were from Long Island. “I was like, how are all these people from the same place?” she remembers, laughing.
She went in planning on pre-med, but then did the math on the years and loans required to see an M.D. through.
“My primary goal was to help my mom stop working as soon as possible,” said Nguyen, who was raised by a single mother. “I reasoned it was going to take 11 years to do all of that, which felt way too long.”
So she pivoted to a business school track, still set on “doing something to help people,” just on a faster timeline and with an eye to social entrepreneurship.
Finding purpose at Google
Following her internship and graduation, Nguyen got a return offer from Google to move to the Bay Area full-time, the kind of opportunity that’s hard to turn down when you’re the first in your family to finish college and your mother just survived a stroke.
In the Bay Area, she trained clients before sunrise, commuted to Silicon Valley, worked her day job, commuted back, then did it all again. Inside the company, she joined the Black Google Network, and while she didn’t yet have language for health equity, she knew things for fellow members felt different.
For one, she noticed that many Black colleagues weren’t taking advantage of robust wellness resources that others seemed comfortable using, from mental health sessions to self-care perks. So she built a survey, asking Black Bay Area Googlers how they were doing and what would actually get them to use them.
The answers confirmed what she’d suspected.
Two things kept surfacing: stigma and debt. People weren’t using therapy because Black and Brown families and communities had long told them to pray about it, push through it, not complain about hardship from inside a place of privilege. And, despite the high starting salaries, many were also drowning quietly in student loan debt.
She built programming inspired by the responses, inviting Black therapists to facilitate wellness sessions, running financial literacy workshops and even quarterbacking a corporate-sponsored loan forgiveness initiative.
Without realizing it, she was doing the work that would later define her career.
But her success on paper didn’t lift the emotional weight she was carrying, either, particularly about being so far from home and missing day-to-day time with her mom.
There was a moment, looking down at the water on a San Francisco pier, when she recognized something was off: the silence and stillness below felt a little too appealing. She tried therapy for the first time.
What held her together from week to week was Bounce SF, a free outdoor community fitness group where she volunteered as a coach on weekends.
It also reminded her what community could feel like.
“In a weird way, it allowed me to not feel guilty,” she says, “because I was taking care of myself and just happening to also meet great people and have fun at the same time.”
Returning home to Atlanta
She found her way back to Atlanta because of her mother, too.
While visiting Google’s Midtown office, her mother struck up a conversation with a woman in the restroom and told her she wished her daughter could come home.
The woman was Tamara Mobley, a Google higher-up. She told Nguyen to keep an eye on openings in Atlanta. Months later, Nguyen joined her team.
What began as a chance encounter became a years-long mentorship and an opportunity to return home.
Balancing career and caregiving
For a little while following her return, Atlanta was light. Her mother had moved to Texas with a fiancé. Nguyen lived with a friend, taught free community workouts in Grove Park and let herself be a carefree 22-year-old for a bit.
Then, in 2019, her mother’s relationship ended, and she needed to move in. There were already two tenants in Nguyen’s Bankhead home. Now there was also her mother, adjusting to her body in a house that suddenly felt too small for everyone in it. Then the pandemic happened.
The arguments were real. Nguyen went back to therapy. This time she stuck with it.
She traces the instinct to handle everything alone back to her mother, watching her carry it all after a divorce, and even further back, to her mother’s own childhood.
Born to a Vietnamese woman and a Black American soldier in postwar Vietnam, her mother learned self-reliance early after enduring years of bullying. That resilience stayed with her through a stroke at 42 and helped shape the daughter who was watching.
Caregiving takes a village
The résumé tells one story. Ask Huyen Nguyen who she is, and she’ll give you a different answer.
Community coach. Health equity consultant. Caregiver to a parent far earlier than she ever expected.
“Not in order of importance,” she says. “All three, all the time.”
What she’s learned since is that caregiving doesn’t require going it alone. It requires negotiation.
Yes, I can do that. But can it wait until after this meeting or until Saturday?
Can we combine it with a joyful experience like checking out a new smoothie bowl spot?
Usually, the answer is yes.
It also requires asking for help. When Nguyen travels, she sends friends a shared “village doc” spreadsheet where they can sign up to walk the dog, cook with her mother or simply stop by and say hello.
It requires, in other words, a village. And a willingness to be a villager.
Her mother has her own way of putting it.
“I’ve gone through a very hard life, so I can do anything,” Phi Nguyen said.
Phi Nguyen’s been a stroke survivor more than a decade, and she and Huyen navigate daily life together.
Huyen drives her mother to physical therapy and handles much of the commuting and physical logistics. Phi Nguyen, in turn, cooks beautiful vegan meals for her daughter.
Asked what she’s learned about her daughter through it all, she doesn’t hesitate. Then she chuckles.
“She’s very, very strong. And very smart,” Phi Nguyen said. “And sometimes even cute, too.”
Creating community through Hills4ATL
On Monday nights at Old Fourth Ward’s “The Hill,” Huyen Nguyen coaches more than 100 people through Hills4ATL workouts.
Midway through class — a mix of bodyweight exercises, jogging circuits, and lots and lots of planking — Airin Boykins is conquering stairs.
It’s her second year attending Nguyen’s classes, and she remembers her first clearly.
“I thought I was about to die,” she says, laughing. “But I just never gave up on myself because I had goals.”
What kept her coming back was the feeling she left with.
Nguyen closes every class by inviting everyone to place a hand over their heart, take a breath, and take a moment to appreciate that they made it through.
“That is one of my favorite parts,” Boykins said. “You just have that breath of fresh air where you realize, hey, I made it through. And I feel great about myself.”
For anyone on the fence, Boykins has simple advice:
“Just come out,” she said. “Don’t worry about what the next person is doing. Everyone had to start somewhere.”
It was the same instinct she brought to Google a decade ago: notice something, understand it through data, then advocate. She just didn’t have a name for it then.
“I can’t go through life without doing my part to give people a sense of belonging,” Nguyen says. “Knowing what my mom has been through, part of my work is honoring her experience.”
Nguyen knows what it means when that door stays shut. In high school, she asked a coach if she could try out for the school’s new swim team. She didn’t know how to swim, but asked anyway. The coach’s answer? It’s a swim team, not swim lessons.
But the following season, another coach opened tryouts to anyone willing to show up. By graduation, she was swim captain.
“Someone just had to let me try,” she says. “Giving people a chance to try makes so much of a difference.”
She thinks about that now when she’s with her mother. After the stroke, Phi Nguyen heard from the world — and sometimes, even people who loved her — that there were things she simply couldn’t do anymore. Huyen pushes back, gently and often. She asks her mother to try first before stepping in to help. More often than not, her mother surprises herself.
There have been a lot of crossroads, she says. The career pivots. The morning she left for the internship. The day her mother moved back in. At each one, she’s learned to ask herself the same question.
“Am I doing this out of love, or am I doing this out of fear? If the answer is love, you’re moving in the right direction.”
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