Dreams Are Real for Vietnamese Outcast

Summer’s come early and hot, so hot that tenants are gathered in the air-conditioned lobby of the YWCA Hotel for Women in Santa Ana and the administration is ignoring its own posted warning that only 10 minutes of sitting is allowed.

On an outdoor balcony a few floors up, there is no relief. Tenants wander out to sit briefly with a book or a conversation partner, but they don’t last long. The heat is cruel.

And it seems apt.

A Vietnamese woman, 67 years old, tiny and wrinkled with a resigned shrug to her gait, appears suddenly and says something to Xuan Vu in Vietnamese. Xuan, pronounced Swan, is whom I have come to see.

At 18, she’s on the opposite end of the spectrum of life personified by this woman, nearly half a century older than she. That is, in a physical sense. But in another sense, their hardships unite.

The woman offers Xuan a cigarette; Xuan declines, and the woman taps the pack my way. After I shake my head no, she shuffles off.

Yesterday, Xuan explains, she took this woman to the Social Security office in the hope of getting help, but it slipped through her fingers again. The woman’s daughter in Utah will not send money, the others are in Paris, and she has no other family, no job, no money--and she speaks only Vietnamese. Her home, temporarily, is here at the YWCA.

Xuan, too, lives here now. She is no longer a ward of the court, no longer a foster child. The day after her 18th birthday--that would be Feb. 13--she came here, officially too old for her group home.

And she stopped taking Prozac, prescribed for depression, because nobody could make her now.

Xuan’s family--her mother, father and three brothers--are not far from this way station. But once again, that’s just in the physical sense. Estranged is the understatement that describes their relationship now.

That’s because Xuan told.

She didn’t mean to, really, but last year when she couldn’t stop crying for two days, not even at school, and when she wouldn’t eat, and she wouldn’t talk, people became worried.

And when they took her straight from Santiago High School to Social Services, and then to Child Protective Services, and then to the mental hospital, well, it all came out. Incest and other abuse. She had brought shame to her family. Her parents called her a liar. They still do.

Xuan, who arrived as a refugee nine years ago, has tried to kill herself more than a few times.

Only you wouldn’t know that now, sitting on this sweltering balcony, watching this young woman smile and sometimes squint in emotional pain, running her fingers through her dark, shiny hair. She wants to be a pop star one day, write and perform her own songs, produce. Madonna is an idol.

Madonna’s picture clipped from a magazine, along with arty Calvin Klein ads and another of Marky Mark grabbing at his underwear crotch, are taped to the back of the door to Xuan’s room. Xuan will be allowed to stay at the Y for another two months. She pays $350 a month.

She has two sales-cashier jobs, 24 hours a week at one place, 20 hours at the other. The bus takes her back and forth, Santa Ana to Fullerton and back again. Her schedule is forever changing, but usually she ends up working seven days a week.

Right now, there’s only time for three hours a week of school at Fullerton Junior College. She is taking real estate, for fun.

On the dresser in Xuan’s room is a small bowl that is home to Woody, her red Chinese fighting fish. There are also perfume samples and a snapshot of Xuan and her cousin, smiling big, their cheeks pressed together. You can almost hear somebody yelling the equivalent of “Cheese!”

But Woody is the symbolism that lives.

“If you put two of them together, one must die,” Xuan says. Unlike Xuan, however, Woody’s valor hasn’t been tested yet.

“Yeah, I freak out sometimes,” Xuan says, talking fast, looking off. She says that thoughts are threading fast through her mind. Her fingers turn circles to illustrate her point.

“I’ve got to do this if I don’t want to be homeless. I’m going to graduate from the university, prove to my parents that I can do it. I will be the first in my family to graduate college.”

When Xuan graduated from high school, while she was still in the mental hospital, she asked a cousin to take her diploma and show her father. “He told me to take the diploma and throw it in the sewer,” she says, looking down.

Yes, Xuan is lonely. She would like to have a cute little dog, but for that she needs her own place. She would also like a car. So the constant work is necessary; she is gratified that it exists. People have given her a chance, and she will not let them down.

She hasn’t yet.

*

Wendy Welch, the assistant manager who hired Xuan at Michael’s Arts and Crafts, says she could tell right away that Xuan was very intelligent and friendly and that she could do the work.

And when she walked into the store with Don MacAllister, a former foster child who founded the Sunshine for Children foundation, she knew that Xuan really needed a job. She gave it to her on the spot.

“I just had a good feeling for her,” Wendy says. “There was something about her that I really liked. And my heart kind of went out to her. She wants to succeed and get ahead.”

Xuan says the time she spends alone leaves her with her thoughts. They are disturbing sometimes. She calls them deep.

Is she different than anybody else? Xuan doesn’t think so.

“I believe in myself,” she says.