WESTMINSTER : Dream of a Better Life Is in Ashes

When a 45-minute fire gutted his martial-arts school in Little Saigon last month, Quoc Huy Ha said he felt his hopes for a better life in the United States for himself and his two sons had gone up in the flames.

“I lost everything in that fire,” said Ha, who came to the United States in 1979 after spending three years in a Communist prison and nine months in a Malaysian refugee camp.

“I’m too old to start all over again,” said Ha, in his 50s, who ran the Vo Dao Vietnam Dojo at a strip mall on Bishop Avenue for five years until it burned on Sept. 22.

Since early this month, the school has conducted classes for its 90 students at the gym of the Boys and Girls Club of Westminster. But there are no mats, mirrors and other training equipment, students say.

Ha said he would need at least $100,000 to move to a new location and buy the same equipment lost in the fire.

“All we have are these burned belts,” he said, showing what’s left of the more than 700 uniforms burned in the fire.

The cause of the $1-million fire has not yet been determined, according to the Westminster Fire Department, but a team from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is helping in the investigation.

The fire became controversial when Ha, his instructors, students and parents, said at a City Council meeting last month that Westminster firefighters did not act fast enough to put out the fire.

A review of the taped conversation between dispatchers and firefighters responding to the fire indicated that firefighters were on the scene three minutes after receiving the emergency call, a Fire Department report says.

Ha said the fire destroyed video cameras, training tapes, trophies, martial arts books and equipment. The school did not have fire insurance, he said.

“My father is a teacher, not a businessman,” said Trieu Chung Ha, 23, a law student at USC.

The younger Ha said his father ran the school not as a business but as a facility to instill discipline and teach the Vietnamese culture to young Vietnamese-Americans.

Parents, who are trying to raise funds, said it would be a big loss to the Vietnamese-American community if the martial arts school is not able to reopen.

Ha, a former lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army who taught martial arts to U.S. soldiers during the war, has set a strict code of discipline for the students at the school, which has drawn praise from parents.

Minh Pham, 44, of Garden Grove whose son, Tuan, 17, has been going to the school for more than two years, said the school is needed to prevent teen-agers from joining gangs or using drugs.

“It keeps him busy on weekends,” said Pham, a program analyst for Chevron Oil Co. in La Habra. “There’s a lot of messy stuff in society.”

Jennifer Kierce, 18, of Garden Grove, the only female instructor, said students are happy to have the Boys and Girls Club gym to train temporarily. But she said it’s vastly different from their old school.

“A school is like a temple,” Kierce said. “It must have the atmosphere to train and stay focused.”