Vietnamese Refugee, 17, Heading for Harvard

It is April, 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. Communist forces from North Vietnam have captured the city, and Republic of South Vietnam officials and anti-communist leaders are being rounded up and imprisoned.

A sorrowful 6-year-old boy, Y Minh Pham, watches as his father, a medical doctor and staunch anti-communist, is arrested and taken to a concentration camp.

Five years later, Dr. Tung Ngoc Pham is freed and allowed to return to Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. Still a determined anti-communist, Pham plans to flee with his son Y Minh. Father and son board an overcrowded fishing boat with 150 others, and in May, 1981, their odyssey to freedom begins.

Y Minh bids goodby to his mother and younger brother and sister, who cannot leave with them. At age 12, he is leaving most of his family and his native country for an uncertain future.

After a stay at a refugee camp in Malaysia, Y Minh and his father gain admittance to the United States in September, 1981. They settle in the growing Vietnamese community in Westminster and Pham begins his efforts to bring his wife and remaining children to the United States.

It is April, 1986. Y Minh is an 11th-grade honors student at Westminster High School. He has applied for admittance to Harvard, the nation’s most prestigious university. Harvard is so impressed with the 17-year-old’s academic record that it admits him immediately--a year before Y Minh is to graduate.

“No, I won’t have a high school diploma when I enter Harvard next September,” said Y Minh Pham, as he was interviewed last week at Westminster High.

A shy, soft-spoken young man, Y Minh appeared embarrassed that his teachers had notified the news media of his unusual early admittance to Harvard.

“I applied to both Harvard and Yale, because they both have early admittance,” said Y Minh. “I did not really expect it, but I made it. I’m glad, though.”

Harvard not only admitted the youth early, it also granted him a $16,000 scholarship for tuition, room and board. The university also arranged for a work-study program so that Y Minh can earn another $1,000 for other expenses.

A visitor marveled that Y Minh will leapfrog from junior in high school to freshman at Harvard. Polite, but always precise, Y Minh clarified: “I may be a sophomore when I enter Harvard if I pass enough advanced placement exams.”

Y Minh already has taken, and passed with flying colors, some advanced placement exams. “He got a 5--as high as you can get--on his Advanced Placement European History,” said one of his teachers, Carol Sebastian. She added that the youth had also scored the highest possible marks on an advanced mathematics exam.

Asked about his grades at Westminster High, Y Minh cast down his eyes and said, “I have As and a few Bs.” A school official, Audrey Carson, interjects: “Actually, Minh has the second highest GPA (grade point average) in our entire high school district, which has six schools.” She noted that the district comprises Westminster, Edison, Marina, Ocean View, Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach high schools.

Carson said Y Minh’s overall GPA is 4.8, with a 4.0 being all As. (GPAs higher than a 4.0 reflect extra credit for the academically harder honors courses, many of which Y Minh is enrolled in.)

Sebastian, who teaches history, has been a “dutch aunt” figure to Y Minh. She, like his other teachers, is impressed with his ability. But Sebastian also talks tough to the young man, urging him to smell the flowers along the academic way. “He’s a hard worker,” said Sebastian. “I just want Minh not to be too hard on himself.”

Y Minh smiled. “Oh, I have hobbies,” he said. “I play tennis. And I play the piano.”

But he conceded that he attacks his studies with intensity. One teacher said that Minh “grades himself against himself--he’s always pushing himself.”

One of the Bs that Minh has made, to his chagrin, is in an honors computer class. “He was pretty unhappy about that,” said his computer teacher, Nan Aune. “Actually, he’s a very good student--between an A minus and a B. He’s highly motivated. Very competitive.”

Aune noted, as have scores of other teachers in Orange County, that Vietnamese students as a rule are diligent in any class. “The Indochinese students come to class to learn,” said Aune.

Y Minh said he is grateful to the United States and Westminster High School for affording him the opportunities he has had for a good education. “This country is so great for its freedom and its democracy,” said Y Minh.

He added that although he has not firmly picked a college major yet, it will be in one of two fields in which he thinks he can help pay back his adopted country. “I am thinking of either going into medicine or government,” he said. In either career, he added, he hopes to be of service to the United States.

Y Minh said that despite the traumas of his early life, his world is now an amazingly happy one. “My mother and brother and sister were able to come to the United States and join us last December,” he said. Minh’s father, after initially having to take lesser jobs, is now completing a medical internship in Los Angeles and is expected soon to be able to practice medicine again.

And Harvard waiting on the immediate horizon.

“I’ll miss my family, but I hope to do well there,” said Y Minh.

Said Aune, his computer teacher: “Here’s a young man of 17 going on 21. I don’t think he’ll have a problem.”