familiar faces
■ by Madelyn Rosenberg
Sonia Johnston’s family in Great Falls Park, November 1980 (Sonia is second from left)
An American Dream GROWING UP IN South Vietnam, Sonia Nga Johnston wanted to learn English so she could communicate with the American soldiers she saw on the streets of Can Tho. It was her passion, she says. One day, Johnston (whose name then was To Nga) noticed a soldier carrying a bag on his shoulder. “My Mamasan do laundry,” said the 14-year-old, attempting to make conversation by finding something in common. The soldier fol22
lowed her home, assuming she meant that her mother did laundry for soldiers. “My mother said, ‘I don’t know how to do American clothes!’ ” Johnston recalls. But she took his laundry anyway. The soldier kept coming by, and others, too. “That’s how we started,” says Johnston, now regional president for John Marshall Bank in Arlington County. She still laughs at the misunderstanding. “We started doing a laundry business
January/February 2021 ■ ArlingtonMagazine.com
and I started learning English [from the customers]. When you learn a foreign language, you cannot be shy. You have to be willing and able to make mistakes.” From then on, she was always armed with a Vietnamese-English dictionary. Little did she know English would become her ticket out of a country ripped apart by war. During her teenage years, Johnston’s language skills earned her a
COURTESY PHOTO
At 23, she arrived on U.S. soil with little more than the clothes on her back. Today she’s a bank president.
