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Like, man, it has been years and years.
So I first got this message from men on LinkedIn.
The first thing I thought was, oh man, men.
I hadn't talked to them in 20-something years.
In 2023, Jordan Hickey And Justin Ewing heard from an old classmate.
His name is Minh Nguyen.
So what did the message say?
It was like, I'm doing a project.
I'm reaching out to all the different... alums that I can think of.
And so it wasn't super specific.
I think it was just like I'm trying to connect with past students and to kind of just see where everyone is in their lives.
Min Win was trying to reach every single person he'd gone to school with.
Were you surprised when you heard that Min was doing this project?
Yes.
I kind of shocked, honestly.
Eden Smith.
We went from first grade all the way through high school together.
Our lives were kind of running side by side, but not always super intertwined.
So you weren't best friends?
No, no, not at all.
Min told Eden he'd like to meet up for coffee.
He said he wanted to learn about Eden's life since they left high school.
This didn't seem like something he would do.
He was always kind of more reserved.
Shy is not the word. but he was a more reserved type person.
Eric Flowers went to elementary through high school with Min.
It was very, it was a very surprising thing.
Min was probably the last person I would have expected to do something like this.
This is the sort of project I think you would expect of a president of the student council.
This is a project you would expect of somebody who had been Social butterfly, super outgoing, all of that.
And that really was the opposite of who Min is.
Min was the smart kid.
Min was the smart kid.
He has like this incredible photographic memory where he does not forget anything.
This is Min.
Hi Min, thank you very much for doing this.
Yeah, of course.
Well, let's just start with you introducing yourself.
My name is Min Nguyen.
I am.
You know, I'm a self-declared Pokemon master first, and a eye doctor and optometrist, and I've been practicing for the last 14 years or so.
Due to some events in my life, I started on a journey to Find out what happened to a lot of people I used to know.
How many former classmates have you met up with so far?
I have met up with over 350.
The high school you, let's say, or you 20 years ago, could have imagined sitting down to talk to all of your classmates.
What would you have thought?
Absolutely not.
Were those years in middle and high school a good time in your life?
I'm not one of those that would say that the high school years were the best days of my life.
I won't say that elementary and middle school were the best or the worst, but I will say that they made me who I am.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's right.
I mean I hated high school.
I had a terrible time in high school, but I can't tell you that I regret having that experience, because I think it helped me now be the person I am.
And I wonder, if I had had such a wonderful experience in high school, whether that would have served me as well.
I feel that.
While I was growing up, I spent more time observing everyone and not as much living my own life.
I learned how to tell jokes a lot just from watching other people interact with each other and understanding what set of phrases and words that I could use to make people laugh.
I remember watching the more popular kids interact with other people.
I remember a lot of people and That's one of the things that a lot of people tell me.
How do you remember all these people?
I'd like to think it's because I've just watched them grow up.
And even when I talk with them now, I still have an image of them as kids in my head and how they were.
I think that's to me kind of seeing the beginning of a story and then wondering what happened to that story and now seeing, 20 years later, what became of that story.
I'm Phoebe Judge.
And this is love.
We'll be right back.
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After graduating from high school in 2005, Min Win went to college in North Carolina and then medical school in Houston.
And then he started working as an optometrist in Plano, Texas, near Dallas, where he had grown up.
But then, in 2021, he started to feel unwell.
I went for general doctor's visit.
And based off my blood work, my labs, they said, and I quote, a lot of this looks wrong.
And during the course of that, They diagnosed me what they believed to be type 2 diabetes, but I lost 40 pounds.
I was losing 10 pounds a week for a month.
And to me, that did not seem right.
And every time I brought it up, they kept telling me I was not eating enough, that I just needed to listen to what they're saying.
I got sent to so many specialists.
I had so much blood work done that I just kept making it a joke, telling the phlebotomist that I promise I'm not doing any drugs.
And after about a year of that, I didn't feel in control of my life anymore.
I didn't have answers of my condition, and all these other doctors kept telling me I was wrong.
It got so bad that Min thought he might not recover from whatever was going on with him.
And he started thinking about the people he'd grown up with.
I wanted a little bit of control over my life.
I wanted to answer something that had been in the back of my mind for so long.
What happened to some of these people that I used to see every day?
He posted on his Facebook page that he'd love to catch up with people from school.
He wrote, feeling rather nostalgic lately.
I wasn't telling anyone about my story at the time.
I just put it into the world and I had had radio silence for a while and then someone just reached out to me.
And after that, Min started reaching out to more people directly.
How did you find them?
Um, you know, everyone has access to social media.
You'd imagine.
You'd imagine that'd be the easiest route.
But growing up in a time where social media wasn't a thing, I thought to myself well, what would my younger self would have done?
I actually found my old laptop and found that I had put in an Excel sheet everyone's phone numbers that I knew and I contacted them that way and from there It's been a lot of word of mouth where people have told other people, people have said reach out with Min.
People have said, you know, Min just wants to sit down and talk and catch up.
Is that okay?
And that's where I found. it to be the best rather than just me cold calling or cold contacting.
And rather than scroll on social media, rather than just read about their lives, I wanted sit down and talk with them and hear about the last 20 years of their lives and their experiences.
Min says he thinks working as a doctor has made it a bit easier for him to talk to people.
They don't teach you how to talk to people when you get out of school, you just.
You have to learn how to do so in practice.
And I think that, after talking to so many patients one on one, there's a sense of ease and a sense of comfort.
So it absolutely made it easier.
But my first few meetings, my first few conversations where I was nervous, I was thinking to myself Oh God, what am I doing?
How is this going to be?
But after the first half a dozen, I think I felt more comfortable with it.
Min insists on meeting people in person.
When people have suggested they just do a Zoom instead of meeting up, Min's answer has always been no thanks.
There is more genuineness to the in-person conversation the facial expressions, the hearing of a person's breath when they talk, more so than just in a Zoom conversation, more than just in a phone call.
Do you ever meet with someone who's a jerk?
Absolutely.
I've met with so many people of all ranges.
I've met up with someone that even told me that they didn't want to meet up with me.
I've had people that I've reached out with that have flat out said I'm not interested, and I have to believe that they have their reasons.
Eden Smith had first heard about Min's project from another former classmate.
It turned out she and Min... live close to each other.
We met at a coffee shop in my neighborhood and a couple of my girlfriends from high school joined.
I think we were probably one of the first 20 or 30 people that he talked to.
Min asked everyone the same questions.
He wanted to know how they would describe themselves.
Did they go to college?
And what was their job?
Eden told him that she's a VP of operations, that she got a degree in accounting and that she has three kids.
Flowers, another classmate, told Min that he's now a football coach at a high school in Dallas.
Eric was into both sports and theater when they were in school together.
I remember him as he was... the athlete.
I remember his mom being the loudest of the PTA moms.
And we would always know when she's there because she would always fuss and love over Eric.
And every time that we had an elementary school play, she would always cheer the loudest for Eric when he was up there singing his solo.
I remember Eric got the solo in The Phantom of the Opera, and I remember him singing that.
It was loud, boisterous and over the top.
In 2023, Eric heard about Min's project from a friend who had already met with Min.
And then Eric happened to run into Min. at the doctor's office where Min works.
They made plans to meet later at a coffee shop.
And Min started asking him questions.
How's your life?
How's your personal life?
How's your romantic life?
How's your family life, your professional life?
Min was really, really intrigued about every single thing that came out of my mouth, because he would ask me follow-up questions and he would say oh, dive a little bit deeper into that.
He had actually caught me at a good time my life.
If he had asked me all these questions about six or seven years earlier, I probably would have lied to him.
I genuinely probably would have lied to him, because I wasn't in the place where I wanted to be.
I wasn't in the place that I thought I should be.
Eric told men what happened.
I was playing arena football in Bloomington Illinois, and I ended up tearing my knee in the preseason and I ended up getting surgery and the surgery just didn't work.
I had gained about an extra, 15 pounds.
So at that point I was three 30 cause I was an offensive lineman.
So I was a naturally, I was a, I had to be big to play offensive line.
And I got called into my coach's office and I got released.
I was driving to back from Bloomington to Dallas on a 14 hour trip to come back to stay with my parents and trying to figure out what I was going to say to them.
I've got no money.
I've got a truck that's paid off. but it was paid off with student loans.
So I'm not really paid off and trying to figure out how I'm going to try to figure out how I'm going to make it happen.
And then two weeks later, I am a bouncer at a nightclub.
And I am opening the doors at a 24 hour fitness.
I would bounce back from the gym to the bar, back to opening the gym.
That back to the bar.
Back to the gym, back to the bar.
That six to eight month period was the lowest point of my life.
This conversation with him was very meaningful to me, because I hadn't known what had happened to him.
I think the most important thing is not necessarily learning how to talk to other people, but just listening to them and seeing what they say.
First,
Sometimes his classmates ask Min questions about his life too.
Sometimes they don't.
And Min says he's fine with that.
Some of these individuals will go on to tell me about their lives, the struggles in their life passing of moms or dads, struggles with cancer.
And these are people that I haven't spoken a single word with in 20 years or more.
A lot of these conversations are one shots.
So I think that's why they feel the willingness to just say everything.
And then sometimes we leave with someone mentioned to me kind of a cathartic moment where they've told me their entire story and They tell me you know Min, I didn't realize I needed to share that story with you, but I did and it meant a lot.
We'll be right back.
Support for this show comes from Odoo.
Running a business is hard enough.
So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?
Introducing Odoo.
It's the only business software you'll ever need.
It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.
CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more.
And the best part?
Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.
That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you?
Try Odoo for free at Odoo.com.
That's O-D-O-O dot com.
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In 2024, Min Win met up with Justin Ewing.
They'd gone to elementary and middle school together.
We just got some lunch, but, you know, there wasn't much eating, especially me.
I didn't have time to eat because I was just asking him so many questions and talking to him.
It's like before you know it, 45 minutes have gone by and I've barely eaten anything.
Min told us he remembered Justin as being into sports, and he was popular.
Min said he was surprised that Justin remembered him.
When they met up, Justin had just had a daughter.
They talked about Min's health.
And Justin, who'd had a career in the military, told Min about how his life had changed since he'd been on a night mission in Afghanistan years ago.
I was using night vision and unfortunately, the element that we were with was a bunch of engineers with a lot of white lights.
They had a bright light shining on the ground, looking for explosives and looking for suspicious activity and stuff.
It was blinding my vision, because night vision and white lights don't really work well together, and so I couldn't really see, and That was unfortunately the last thing that I remember is saying I couldn't see.
I fell into a hole, Pretty much just broke my body as bad as you can break it.
Justin had to be lifted out of the hole in a harness.
Then the harness snapped and he fell again.
He was evacuated by helicopter.
Eventually I was flown to three or four places to Germany, to Walter Reed in Maryland and then to San Antonio in Texas.
And that's where I woke up and for the first time realized I had been injured.
And so I had to kind of piece together what what you know what had happened.
And from there sort of began my recovery.
I spent a couple of years just getting back to walking again and recovering and then eventually getting retired from the military, from it.
I think men peripherally.
Maybe he knew something had happened to me and it had caused sort of maybe the end of my military career.
But I don't think he knew any details at all because it just wasn't really out there.
But I think that was, you know, that was impacting him in a big way, too.
That's a lot to hear.
Right.
I was telling him my whole story.
It's like that's a lot to hear from someone, you know.
It's a lot of trauma and stuff like that.
You know, he would tell me about some of his health stuff how, like going through that health experience kind of like shaped what he thought was important going forward.
And so like we had such a similar experience.
And so we would talk about a little bit about that, you know, about kind of what our experiences, how they affected us and shaped us into what was important now and how we were going to live our lives going forward.
They also talked about school.
He was smart to bust out a couple of yearbooks.
I have no idea where mine are.
I think maybe my mom maybe has a couple somewhere, but I have no idea.
So for me it was like going through it for one of the first times and immediately seeing faces and memories just flooding back.
When Min was in school, he was too uncomfortable to ask his classmates to sign his yearbook.
But he asks them now.
And when he talks with them he says he sometimes gets this feeling that's hard to describe, remembering himself back then as a kid.
He says it's kind of like if you go to a restaurant you haven't been to in a long time and you recognize a smell you'd forgotten about.
Min's doctors have found out what was causing his symptoms.
Min was diagnosed with a gene mutation that had resulted in a rare type of diabetes.
He's now on the correct medication and he's traveled all over the country to meet with old classmates.
Santa Monica, New York, Denver.
I'm in Northwest Arkansas.
Jordan Hickey.
And I mean, as it so happens, apparently there are a few alumni in the area.
And so Min told me that he was going to drive up from Dallas And he was going to drive up here and try and meet with a handful of people when he was in town.
You know, Dallas is probably a solid five hour drive.
And so men drove up here.
Sometimes Min posts photos from his meetings with old classmates on his Instagram.
He also asks people to fill out a short survey that he can post along with the photos.
The survey asks for people's job titles, but also asks people to list fun facts about themselves and words of wisdom.
Jordan Hickey's fun fact was that he and his wife can gossip in public because they both speak Urdu.
A fun fact about you is that you're a Pokemon master.
That is my number one fun fact, yes.
What are some other fun facts about you if you had to answer your own survey?
I don't know.
I think I'm, I tell people all the time, I think I'm one of the most boring people in the world.
When I started talking with him I was so intrigued by sort of the journey I think that he had taken through his life.
Jordan Hickey is a freelance journalist.
And, after he met with Min Jordan, wrote an article about Min's project for a magazine in Dallas called D Magazine.
He got to spend a lot of time with Min while he was working on the article.
Yeah, he might have been that wallflower kind of a type kid you know in elementary and middle and high school, but he didn't stay that way because of men.
I reconnected with lots of these people that I had not spoken with in years and years and years.
Like one guy in particular who, like he, was a close friend of mine in like elementary and middle school.
Apparently we are now both really interested in fancy coffee and travel and good food and drink all that kind of stuff.
And this friend of mine and I, we've been texting on a regular basis.
And that would not have happened had it not been for men just kind of coming out of nowhere, materializing out of nowhere, and kind of reigniting this interest in the people that we had mostly forgotten.
Min has organized group meetups for old classmates in Plano and Denver.
I think what's interesting is you have kind of funny, weird, hidden memories about people.
You talk to Jordan Hickey, and when I connected with Jordan for the first time.
I was like, man, I remember in fourth grade, Jordan, that you would draw these worm cartoons.
Like that was a memory.
I kind of forgot existed.
It's the men effect where it made me kind of say I want to reach back out and get back in touch with people that have touched my life and just see where they are.
My fiance tells me I have a knack for bringing people together.
Min met his fiancée Megan back in 2017, playing Pokémon Go.
He says they kept showing up at the same places while playing the game.
The next year, they went on their first date.
They went to the Cheesecake Factory.
It was Easter Sunday, and Min says it was the only place that was open.
Years later, Min proposed.
He had decorated the house, while Megan was out of town, with photos and other things that made up a sort of timeline of their relationship.
And in the backyard, he put up a bunch of candles in the shape of a pokeball.
They went on their honeymoon a few months after our interview.
Love is created by Lauren Spore and me.
Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane.
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
This episode was mixed by Michael Raphael.
You can learn more about the show on our website, thisislovepodcast.com.
And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisislovepodcastcom slash newsletter.
Consider supporting our work by joining our membership program.
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I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.
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