When Kenny Lam was a young child taking his first trip on an airplane, he was overwhelmed with curiosity. Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long to get his first view inside a cockpit.

“I was so curious about what the cockpit looked like,” he says. “And the pilot of the commercial aircraft saw my face and was like, ‘You wanna see what it’s like in there?’ I was so surprised they were able to let me in.”

After a few minutes of fiddling with knobs and buttons — the pilots must have been careful to switch off the airplane’s systems, Kenny says — he knew he wanted to be a pilot himself one day.

Now a freshman at Utah Valley University, Kenny studies aviation and enjoys bringing his Vietnamese and Chinese heritage to his education through UVU’s Asian Initiative.

“As an Asian who was born in the U.S., I feel like I’ve been whitewashed,” he says. “And there’s not really a way to connect in Utah County — I don’t think there’s a lot of Asian things that happen often here. Joining the Asian Initiative was the first step in maintaining what I felt like I was losing over the years.”

Kenny’s parents moved from Saigon in Vietnam (also known as Ho Chi Minh City) to Los Angeles to give their family a better chance at success. They both spoke Vietnamese, but Kenny says they taught him Cantonese growing up instead, thinking it would be more useful and common in the United States than Vietnamese.

Kenny says they were probably right, but it had the unintentional effect of leaving him feeling somewhat isolated and disconnected from part of his heritage. And even as a child, he remembers bringing homemade food to school for lunch, where other kids would make fun of him because it smelled different.

“It’s just kind of disheartening to you, right?” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘I just want to eat like a normal kid. I want to be as normal as a normal white boy.’ But when I grew up, I realized my mom and dad put so much time into that food.”

Coming to UVU has helped Kenny find acceptance and commonality from Asians and other UVU students.

“I’m jumping straight from high school into university life,” Kenny says. “And what I like about college so far is that everyone is working toward the same goal. Everyone’s willing to help you push and move on to your goal. I’m willing to actually walk up to someone and say hi. Everyone’s accepting.”

While Kenny’s still early in his college career, he says he’s already found community and friendship by participating not just in the Asian Initiative, which is run by UVU’s Multicultural Student Services center, but also in several other clubs and activities.

As a first-generation student, he says those connections are key.

“Getting involved in groups and getting connected with people, being involved with the school more, it’s motivation to keep on going,” Kenny says. “Would you rather spend the night in your room just studying or maybe building that one connection that could influence the rest of your life?”

Though he still has several years before graduation, Kenny plans to obtain his pilot license and build up hours as an instructor before branching out into commercial airlines or corporate charter piloting. In the meantime, he plans on enjoying student life as both an Asian American and a UVU Wolverine.