Nguyen appeared on the season 7, episode 3 of the SBS genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are? in which he learned of his previously unknown Hakka Chinese ancestry through his maternal grandfather, an immigrant from Guangdong. Though his mother had known about this for decades, for unspecified reasons she had hidden this information from Nguyen. The program also revealed information about the involvement of Nguyen's ancestors during the Indochina and Vietnam Wars.