Her English Is Broken, but Not Her Spirit

Kathy Vu apologizes for her fractured English. She worries that the words she wants to get out will become lost in translation. Frankly, some of them do, but this is a story she’s wanted to tell for a long time.

To understand why she didn’t speak up earlier, you have to realize she grew up in Vietnam. Over there, under a Communist government, you didn’t have much freedom, especially as a worker, she says. The boss had all the power. The last thing an employee did was challenge the boss.

“In my country, something very different [than America],” she says. “Bosses have money, have more power and I afraid of people like that.”

That was the mind-set she brought to America in late 1991 when she, her parents, three brothers and a sister joined an older brother already here and lived, the eight of them, in an Anaheim house. When she arrived, Vu, now 36, couldn’t speak, read or write English. “You ask me, ‘How are you?’ I say, ‘I’m fine’ and that’s all,” she says.

She eventually found work as a manicurist--a job she sought because training was easy and it would give her a chance to socialize.

In July 1994, Vu went to work for a salon in Orange called Happy Nails. In her first few months, she says, she made between $300 and $330 a week.

She settled into a six-day, 10-hours-a-day workweek and became her family’s main income source. “I don’t want my brothers and sister to be like me. I want them to have good life,” she says. Her hope was to make enough money to send them to college so, when she got older, they could take care of her.

About a year into the job, she says, Happy Nails owner Henry Huynh began making sexually suggestive remarks to her and occasionally touching her inappropriately. Vu says she felt powerless.

“I care about my job, I don’t want to lose my job, I afraid of him,” she says of the alleged incidents, which escalated until one day in September 1997 when, she says, Huynh grabbed her arm forcefully enough during an argument to leave a mark.

Still, she wasn’t sure what to do. “In Vietnam,” she says, “if you don’t have money, your mouth is closed.”

But others, including some of her regular customers, told her she had rights in America. “I hear lot of laws protect people,” she says. “He cannot do that in this country. I talk to people who say, no, even though he have money, he cannot do that anymore, because law is very fair. That makes me stronger to do it.”

What she did was file a civil suit against Huynh and the company in February 1998, four months after Happy Nails fired her. The firing came in October 1997, a month after the alleged incident with Huynh. Happy Nails claims it fired Vu because she refused to sign a new company policy given to all employees.

When she was fired, Vu was making about $36,000 a year.

Last week, an Orange County jury awarded her $383,400 in damages. It found Huynh liable for battery in the incident in which Vu alleged he grabbed her arm. The jury deadlocked 8 to 4 in her favor--one short of the number needed to find liability--on charges of sexual harassment, sexual discrimination and retaliation in firing her.

When I met with Vu last week, just two days after the verdict, I expected her to be jubilant. She wasn’t, saying the entire experience was stressful.

Sitting in the office of her attorney, Geoffrey Lyon, Vu acknowledged that taking a boss to court was something she never would have imagined doing.

“When I be in court, when I sit in there, I feel safe,” she said. “I have security in there--judge in there, jury in there and lot of people in there I feel protect me, so I feel stronger to say the truth.

“I not strong person at all,” she said. “But I just feel I have to do something fair for myself and other people who work there. But when I do, I nervous. I scared to do that.”

Defense attorney Phu Nguyen, who represented Huynh, is skeptical about Vu’s motivation. He says Vu’s problems could have been resolved “by talking with my clients. . . . I believe she’s taking advantage of the system.”

Nguyen notes that the jury didn’t find Huynh or Happy Nails liable for sexual harassment or discrimination--complaints the store owner denies. The jury award, he says, was “way out of line for a very simple incident,” referring to the grabbing incident for which it did find Huynh liable.

Nguyen acknowledges that Vietnamese culture weighs against immigrants flexing legal muscle against employers, but says that’s changing. “I don’t think it’s unusual anymore. Over a number of years, we have more attorneys who speak Vietnamese who frequently go on radio and talk shows, so in that way the legal system becomes more accessible for people to voice grievances. That also opens a lot of doors for frivolous grievances, as well.”

Nguyen says he hasn’t decided about an appeal. Lyon, who represented Vu, says the three counts on which the jury hung will be retried and that depositions from other employees will be sought.

I ask Vu if the experience changed her, if she learned anything about herself. “I feel I do right thing,” she says. “I feel I grow up in my mind.”

And as for the money? “Money cannot make me heal yet,” she says. “They [jurors] believe me, the things I say, but a lot of things, they not believe me yet. That’s why I’m sad. I cannot heal the injury in my heart.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.