Vietnamese refugees recall their warm welcome

During the holidays, Phuong Pham is reminded of a Vietnamese proverb: Whatever tree you eat from, remember the one who planted it.

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FOR THE RECORD:
Vietnamese documentary: An article that ran in Friday’s Section A about a documentary film being made about Vietnamese refugees misspelled Margaret Mimnaugh’s last name as Minmagh. —

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More than 30 years ago, on the day Saigon fell to Communist forces, Pham and his family scrambled aboard a South Vietnam ship bound for the South China Sea. Pham, carrying only some photos and a small bag with clothes, thought he had lost everything.

But after arriving at a U.S. refugee center in Pennsylvania, Pham was matched with a nearby parish that became his family’s sponsors. Parishioners found the family an apartment, donated a car, helped Pham find a job.

Pham spent his first Christmas in America in the living room of the McGlynns, one of the families in the church. The McGlynns showered his children with toys; Pham had nothing to give in return.

Over the next three decades, the Phams became lifelong friends of their sponsors. They spent nearly every holiday together. “Without them, we would not be here today,” said Pham, 63, who settled in Hershey, Pa. “We appreciate so much what these people have done for us.”

Pham’s story is among those that will be featured in a documentary about the first wave of refugees who fled Vietnam in 1975 and were taken in by American families and churches. The film, “Sponsored ‘75,” follows sponsor families who helped refugees gain a foothold in the United States.

“We wanted to see how their lives have changed from having been mixed in together,” said Kenneth Nguyen, 34, one of the Los Angeles-based filmmakers involved in the project. He is looking for potential subjects throughout the country, including Southern California. “This is an important chapter in our people’s history that we wanted to capture.”

Nguyen said the documentary is especially relevant today, as the United States resettles thousands of refugees from conflicts in Iraq and other countries.

In the days after the April 30, 1975, Communist takeover, images of Vietnamese citizens scrambling onto U.S. military aircraft or fleeing on small boats were seen in newspapers and television screens across the United States.

Nearly 130,000 Vietnamese fled their homeland that spring, most of them former South Vietnamese government or army officials who worked closely with Americans during the war and feared reprisals by the Communist Party and members of officials’ families. In their home country, they were highly educated and well-to-do. In the United States, they had to start over.

Many Americans were initially wary of the newcomers who arrived after the unpopular war. A Gallup poll in May 1975 showed that only 36% of Americans were in favor of Vietnamese immigration. Many feared job losses and increased public welfare.

But the Ford administration passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975, which helped refugees resettle with churches and volunteer families. The sponsors provided food, clothing and shelter until the refugees became self-sufficient.

The Vietnamese were assigned to four “tent cities” set up on military bases, including Camp Pendleton. While there, they took vocational classes and waited for sponsors.

Pham, his wife, Dung, and his children, ages 5, 4, 2, and 1, were assigned to Ft. Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, where they lived in barracks along with thousands of other refugees. “I had no idea what the future would hold,” said Pham, a former petty officer in the South Vietnam navy.

After 90 days, with the weather becoming unbearably chilly for the Vietnamese, Pham and his family were sponsored by the parish at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Hershey, about 100 miles from Philadelphia.

A group of about 20 parishioners volunteered to help the Phams. They held donation drives for clothes and furniture, signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment and raised money to pay rent.

Margaret Minmagh got involved after seeing images of Vietnamese in “devastating conditions, in cargo boats and inadequate food.”

“Vietnam was pretty much our war,” said Minmagh, 70, whose doctor husband was drafted during the war and served stateside. “We wanted to do what we could to help out now that the Vietnamese were here.”

Dennis Michael, another volunteer, remembered Pham’s wife looking scared and the children very thin. Pham was excited and talkative, even though his English, learned from American GIs, was limited.

Committee members took turns taking the Phams to the supermarket, teaching them English, getting clothes for the children. They helped enroll the children in school. Someone eventually donated a station wagon.

Some members helped Pham find a job at the nearby medical center, and he worked nights at a supermarket. One year after arriving in Hershey, Pham told the sponsors he could pay his own rent.

“I didn’t want to rely on people helping us,” he said. “But they always asked us if we needed anything else.”

Judy McGlynn said the Phams threw dinner parties with Vietnamese food to thank the sponsors. The McGlynns and the Phams eventually took vacations to North Carolina’s beaches nearly every year.

“Believe it or not, they’re from Vietnam, but our families are a lot alike,” said McGlynn, 63.

“It was a blessing that they came into our lives.”

Many refugees eventually left their sponsor families and moved to areas with larger Vietnamese communities, such as Orange County’s Little Saigon, now home to the largest Vietnamese population in the United States. But Pham and his family decided to stay put.

“We fell in love here,” he said.

Pham’s four children grew up. Three went to college, and another to the Navy. The sponsor families attended the children’s weddings.

Stories such as the Phams’ are important because they are a “reminder for future Vietnamese generations of how we got here,” said Johanna Tran, 31, who is working with Nguyen on the documentary.

“Thousands of lives were changed by the kindness of strangers,” Tran said. “The memories are being lost and there needs to be a way to document them.”

For Nguyen, the documentary is personal because his family was sponsored in 1975. Nguyen’s parents moved to California when he was young, so he grew up not knowing his sponsors. But his parents told him stories of the kindly Kenneth Spangler family in Pennsylvania and told him he was named after the patriarch. He visited the Spanglers in 1996 to thank them.

Nguyen is still working on the documentary but the project is becoming more urgent, he said, because many sponsors are getting older and some have died.

“The wonderful lives we are living is because we were able to stand on the shoulders of giants who were willing to open their doors and help out our community,” Nguyen said. The sponsors “just knew there was a group of people in need, and they opened up their lives and brought us in.”

my-thuan.tran@latimes.com