Southeast Asian Archive Preserves Part of Our History

It’s a picture that combines hope with anxiety--15 women, men and children of the Laotian Hmong culture, wearing dusty sandals and dressed in a wide variety of donated clothes. A single extended family waiting in a Thailand refugee camp for their chance at passage to the United States. You see in their faces the uncertainty of this transition, yet the knowledge that, so far, they have remained together.

The picture is just one of scores of items and documents donated the past year to UC Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive, located at the campus’s Main Library.

The university began the archive about 10 years ago as a way of capturing the history of the Southeast Asian immigration here in 1975 and then again in the 1980s.

“Our interest was local history, and what happened in the refugee camps certainly is a part of our history here,” said Anne Frank, director for the archive. She had previously specialized in local history as part of the library staff.

Many of the Southeast Asian students who first visited the archive had been youngsters who left their homeland by boat at great peril. They were searching for records of their beginnings here. But now, Frank said, many of the Southeast Asian students who visit were actually born in the United States. They only know their ancestral homeland through their parents and are anxious to find ties to a country they’ve never seen.

Among the interesting new materials is a collection donated by Mitchell Bonner of San Francisco, who worked with many of the refugees. Dozens left their meager yet telling personal items behind in their motel rooms during relocation--clothes, artifacts, woodwork. Another large collection, some 500 documents and periodicals, was donated recently by Van Le of Huntington Beach, a former State Department consultant.

While the library at first concentrated on the transition era, it has since widened its scope to document many aspects of Southeast Asians living in the United States.

“We will take almost anything that sheds light on any of the Southeast Asian cultures,” Frank said.

If you stop by there, I recommend you ask Frank about the captivating photo collection donated this year by Brigitte Marshall, who worked as a volunteer in refugee camps in Thailand in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Right now, most of them are in boxes, but eventually they will make a magnificent display. The family I first mentioned was photographed by Marshall. They settled with relatives in the Fresno area.

While interviewing Frank, I browsed a bit at some of the hundreds of books in the collection. One paperback, by high school students in Rancho Cordova, was called simply “A Journal of Newcomers.” The students’ stories brought back memories of that difficult time when families often had to flee here a few at a time. Wrote one student, Minh Hoang:

“People have to separate, which bring big suffering between the family, husband from wife, father from son, father from daughter. Such deep mental depression.”

Wrote student Thuy Nguyen:

“We left Vietnam in 1985 on the boat. We had 16 children and 20 adults. We sailed 7 days on the ocean. We were very hungry and thirsty. Our boat had one baby. Someone said the baby couldn’t live more than two days. The next morning, everybody felt sad; the baby passed away.”

The Southeast Asian archive isn’t just for students. Others who are interested in the history of the Southeast Asians’ arrival in America are welcome. Our history.

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All for Bev: Ever wonder how many would show up if someone decided to throw a tribute in your honor? On Monday, the ballroom at the Doubletree Hotel in Orange was filled with 420 close friends of Beverly Nestande, the tireless campaigner for Olive Crest, which runs 13 group homes in the area for abused children. Nestande, 61, has fought her way through a series of cancer surgeries the past two years, yet hasn’t stopped her efforts on behalf of numerous children’s causes.

She agreed to the tribute only on condition that it become a fund-raiser for Olive Crest. Organizers who spoke listed more than 50 local causes or groups that Nestande has been involved in. Almost all of them had someone there to honor her. The tributes could have gone on all day.

The Rev. Orland Barela told about Nestande getting him involved with a leadership group in Orange. “She didn’t ask me; she put me there,” he said. That brought a huge laugh, because everyone knew that was Nestande’s energetic style.

Don Verleur, who founded Olive Crest with his wife, Lois, said, “Bev walks to her own heartbeat.” Emcee Ed Arnold, the KTLA-TV Channel 5 sports anchor, told Nestande: “No one here can even carry your purse, or fill your tennis shoes.”

The kicker to the event was two announcements by Olive Crest board chairman emeritus Darrel Anderson. He and his mother, Marion Knott Montapert, were donating $100,000 to Olive Crest. Also, one of the group homes will now be called the Beverly Nestande House.

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At the Movies: If you want to be among the first to see the new Stadium 25 theaters in Orange, you’d better stop at the toy store first. Admission for Wednesday night, when all its 25 screens will be open to “family” movies at 7, is a new unwrapped toy or children’s book. The donated items will be turned over to the Marines’ Toys for Tots drive.

The theaters--the most in Orange County at one location--are located on Katella Avenue near Main Street, site of the old Stadium Drive-In theaters.

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Wrap-Up: The Southeast Asian Archive is on the library’s third floor, Room 360. The hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, or you can call for an appointment. You can also find all its past newsletters, and see a sampling of its materials, by checking out its Web site, which happens to be a whopper: https://pitcairn.lib.uci.edu/sea/seahome.html. I tried it; it works.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com