How a South Carolina kid reporter got a job with Time magazine

Christopher Nguyen is an elite reporter.

He’s only 10.

And he hasn’t really started his new gig, which was announced Friday by the Time for Kids magazine, a product of the famous news weekly used in classrooms nationwide.

Christopher was one of 12 kids selected to be a reporter this school year, his fifth-grade year in the Manatees classroom at Sea Pines Montessori Academy, where he has been enrolled since he was 18 months old.

He had to write two stories and submit a video to earn one of the slots among some 300 applicants.

He won’t get paid, but they’ll pay his expenses if he goes out on assignment.

“I want to interview someone important in government,” he said as his classmates worked in a quiet classroom Tuesday morning. “Or an astronaut. I want to interview an astronaut.”

That would be gold at the end of a most unlikely rainbow for Christopher’s family.

His grandfather was an attorney with the National Police in Saigon when he and two sons escaped at a moment’s notice on a fishing boat when communists took over in 1975. He said he would have been killed. They landed on Hilton Head Island with virtually nothing in 1977. He ended up owning a restaurant and, for nine years, worked tirelessly to get his wife and four daughters to America. When they were reunited at the Hilton Head Airport, Christopher’s mother, Lynn, the baby, was about his age.

Today, Christopher is the apple of a close-knit family’s eye. And he’s on a roll.

He has three agents: two for acting and one for modeling.

And he’s into voice-overs.

That started with classes in Atlanta.

“Then we just made a little studio in a closet, and now I’m getting off the ground,” he said.

His voice is in a national commercial for Duck Tape and another one on Pandora.

He also reads for audio books featuring Mr. Peabody and Sherman for kids in China learning to read English.

He does the weather reports for his school television station.

And when head of school Melinda Cotter made sure they all knew about the call for reporters by Time for Kids last May, Christopher made the plunge.

“It makes me teary-eyed,” Cotter said. “It’s so refreshing to see a student follow that passion. That’s the best part. He follows his dreams until he gets it. He’s coming into his confidence.”

Over the summer, Christopher came to school four times to work on his assignments for Time: brainstorming, pre-writing, final draft, and then the typing of it.

He had to submit a story about local news, so he interviewed Hilton Head Island town manager Steve Riley about Hurricane Matthew.

That got him into the 20 finalists, and he was assigned a story on the theme of unsung heroes.

He wrote: “A​ ​Miracle​ ​on​ ​Bull​ ​Creek: An​ ​Unforgettable​ ​Rescue​ ​Made​ ​by​ ​Hometown​ ​Hero,​ ​Trip​ ​Sloan.”

Sloan, a friend of his father’s, rescued a dog that ran off at the sound of Fourth of July fireworks and survived two days in the waters near Bluffton.

Christopher interviewed the dog owners, who were from out of town. He interviewed Sloan in a boat and members of the Marine Rescue Squadron at the Bluffton Library. He cited statistics from the PetAmberAlert website that prove Chelsea the dog’s rescue was a miracle.

He also had to submit a video, in which he was to tell five amazing things about himself. He was able to mention his diversity, with a Caucasian father and Vietnamese mother; his acting; his talents as a pianist and violin player; and his love of science, and fishing in the backyard.

Christopher is now reading the Hardy Boys series and “The Trials of Apollo.” He likes it when they can do “free writing” in their journals at school so he can explore his own version of fantasy.

But his favorite subjects are math and science. He wants to grow up to be a structural engineer or architect.

And he can tell you that freedom of the press is guaranteed in our Constitution.

It’s one of the freedoms that his family escaped to with high hopes and great personal sacrifice.

This story was originally published August 30, 2017 at 7:24 AM with the headline "How a South Carolina kid reporter got a job with Time magazine."