‘Vietnam Always in Thoughts’ : Cooking, Rituals Fill the Gaps in New Homeland

Every day as a child, Hanh Tran remembers hearing the unearthly screams and groans of tortured prisoners from a French prisoner of war camp next to her home in Thu Duc, a small Vietnamese village 11 miles from Saigon. When a French officer from the camp visited, she recalls hiding under a table.

“My father whispered to me how we had to be nice to him,” she said, “but I screamed at the top of my voice: ‘I won’t come out and meet a soldier who beats my people.’ ”

Luckily there were no repercussions from that incident. For Tran, it was another event in a climate of fear that had been hanging over Vietnam through years of French and U.S. intervention.

Her father, who taught at an elementary school, and her mother, a businesswoman in Thu Duc, made sure their 16 children were extremely careful to whom they talked.

“We knew about the secret police and people disappearing,” she said. “It was terrifying. You never knew who would be next.”

Tran, 42, left her native country to come to the United States in 1967--the height of the Vietnam War--”because it was an utterly hopeless situation there.” Today she spends much of her time helping recent Asian refugees as a board member of San Diego’s Union of Pan Asian Communities. She also is a financial planner for CIGNA Corp. and has received numerous awards for top service and salesmanship.

Only one of her sisters remains in Vietnam. The rest of the family is scattered throughout Canada and France.

Honoring Spirits

“Vietnam is still always in my thoughts,” she said. “Despite being ravaged by war, it is a beautiful country. You have an expression about America being the land of mom and apple pie. Well, our expression for Vietnam is a land of mountains and rivers. When I think of home I think of Vietnam’s natural beauty and what was once a peaceful, simple way of life.”

Tran married San Diego native Fred Sanders in 1978, but she continues to practice many deeply ingrained cultural traditions of her homeland.

One of the most important is honoring the traditional spirit guardians who protect the country’s forests and waterways. Vietnamese have an affinity to these spirits and Tran prepares a special altar to them with candles and incense and makes symbolic offerings of food.

“It is very important for us Vietnamese to recognize and pray to the spiritual forces that protect the natural beauty of our native land,” she said. “We draw much inner strength from this bond.”

Similarly, just before each New Year, she continues the centuries-old tradition of ancestor worship which she learned from her father.

“This starts with a complete house cleaning, somewhat on the order of spring house cleaning. Except we do it just before the New Year. The intent is to make our home as nice as possible before we invite the spirits of our ancestors to visit. Then we prepare a special table with foods that symbolize prosperity and wealth. Fruits such as pineapples, tangerines and red apples are especially appropriate, served with tea.

“This remembering the past plays a crucial role in my culture’s continuity,” Tran said. “The elderly feel very comfortable because they know that when they die they will be remembered by each subsequent generation.”

Variations of this ceremony also occur when important decisions must be made by a family or village. If it’s a village matter, the feast usually takes place on a table in front of the local temple where participants call on the spirits of former leaders to guide them in making a decision.

Another way Tran preserves her Vietnamese culture is through cooking. Like many first-generation Asian immigrants, she has never been able to acquire a taste for the processed and imitation foods Americans seem so fond of, especially luncheon meats out of cans and packages.

“We are used to eating food that comes directly from the sea or the fields,” she said. “For me, cooking favorite Vietnamese specialties, such as egg and shrimp salad rolls, is sometimes the best way I can feel I am at home again.” Along with her husband, who is a willing participant in both cooking and consuming Vietnamese foods, the couple will often spend up to eight hours preparing elaborate ethnic dishes for guests.

“It serves another purpose, too, because I find I can totally relax from the pressures of my work by going into the kitchen and cooking,” she said.

Tran vividly recalls her own difficulty in adapting to the United States, and those memories motivate her work with San Diego’s Union of Pan Asian Communities, which offers social services and nutrition programs for about 35,000 recent Asian recent immigrants, most who have arrived in San Diego in the past five years.

“I strongly relate to these people and their problems, and I want to do something to help them ease the pain,” she said. “Being new to this country for an Asian means waking up in the morning and feeling the cold, hearing a language you don’t know and being in a culture you can’t relate to. It’s a tremendous shock and can cause overwhelming feelings of loneliness and confusion, especially for the elderly.”

Leaving Home

Tran left her country when she could no longer tolerate the ceaseless war that was destroying normal life. She quit her philosophy studies at the University of Saigon after feeling guilty about not being usefully employed and soon got a position as an interpreter with the U.S. Embassy, traveling throughout the country with American doctors and nurses.

“Everywhere we went there were dead and wounded. And I could see opportunists, like vultures, making money from the war. It was sickening.”

When her initial efforts to obtain a visa from the U.S. Embassy failed, she personally confronted Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker during a Sunday church service and pleaded for the chance to come to America.

“He was taken by surprise but motioned to an aide to take my name, and that’s how I got through the red tape to get permission to come here. I was able to get a scholarship to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, and my parents gave me enough money so I could afford the flight.”

She will never forget her last day in Vietnam.

“No cars were allowed to go to the Saigon airport because of security,” she said. “I had to go by special bus. At the pickup point where the bus was waiting, I got off my cousin’s motorcycle and saw my family waiting to say goodby. I walked straight past them without even looking.

“I knew if I looked back I could have never left them. I could hear all of them crying but I just couldn’t look back.”

Once on her plane, she broke down and wept uncontrollably.

She started classes at Wilson College the day after she arrived in the United States and stayed there four years to major in economics and minor in history.

“The biggest initial shock was the weather,” she recalled. “Fall in North Carolina was colder than anything I’d ever experienced. I lived in the dorms and went crazy listening to the sound of their steam heaters whistling all night. That really made me realize how much I was in a foreign land.”

She never got used to the cold sandwiches students ate all the time, and when she got the chance she cooked her own meals of rice and cabbage.

At first she’d be thrown into confusion when she was introduced to people and they said “see you later.”

“I kept wondering when that ‘later’ was, and I felt terrible because no one gave me a specific time.”

Another culture shock was observing students openly kissing.

“That is something you just don’t do in public in Vietnam. I was so embarrassed whenever I saw that.”

She took refuge in the school library and tried to sneak back to her dorm just after the 10 p.m. curfew “so I could avoid seeing all the kissing when boys said good night to their dates.”

She went on to the University of North Carolina to further her education in business and then got a job as a merchandiser with Sea World in Florida. She was promoted to manager and sent to San Diego in 1976. (It was there that she met her husband-to-be.) Three years ago she joined the CIGNA Corp.

Starting Over Recalling her own struggles, she sees the biggest challenge for recent immigrants as reestablishing their identity in a new environment.

“You may have been a general in Vietnam or a successful businessman,” she said, “but that means absolutely nothing when you have to start all over again here.”

Through the Pan Asian organization, she tries to help rebuild shattered lives.

“The younger ones assimilate into the U.S. society very fast. As soon as the kids go to school they make new friends, listen to rock music and learn to enjoy American food. But the older people don’t have that opportunity,” she said.

“For seniors the big problem is isolation. They basically stay at home and don’t go out to work or do things. Their world is shrinking and they feel very much that they are losing touch with the younger generation. They notice their grandchildren speaking English, which is foreign to them, and maybe talking back and being disrespectful, which is unheard of in Vietnam.

“In my work with the Pan Asian group, we try to get the older ones together at community centers and bring them out of their isolation. As far as the younger generation losing their cultural identity, I don’t see that happening. American ways are not really dissolving the typical strong Oriental family unit. The bond is still very strong. The young, even though they can adapt easily to new things, don’t want to lose their roots. We will remain strong in our own heritage because it is what gives us our true identity.”