Twists and Turns in Life Stories

For most, the trip from Vietnam to Orange County was not a matter of running toward something but away from something: Death. Fear. Poverty. A sense that the future lies elsewhere. Compelling catalysts, each, for a complete change in life, and for a change in nations.

There is no single story to chart the trajectories of those individual experiences. Some find themselves adrift in a still-foreign culture. Others have settled into a version of the American Dream, raising families in quiet suburbs while holding down white-collar jobs. Still others, most notably the new arrivals and the young, face unformed futures of varying degrees of promise.

Their experiences are at once typical and unusual. In a nation formed by immigrants, every family has a story of arrival. But most know how the story has played out.

For the Vietnamese, whose journeys began in war and continue in peace, there are still pages to read, and chapters to live.

Truong Van Pham: Alone in America

Truong Van Pham’s life didn’t progress according to plan because he really didn’t have one, at least not once the U.S. military pulled out of Saigon on April 30, 1975, leaving his homeland to the Communists and his life in peril.

As South Vietnam crumbled, Pham made his way home through Saigon, a city in chaos, to gather his wife and three daughters and escape before the Communists sealed the borders. His son, he knew, was already safe with an aunt in Massachusetts.

But when Pham arrived home, the house was empty.

“I didn’t know where my family was, and I didn’t know where I was going,” Pham recalls. Gambling that his wife and children had already fled, Pham decided to leave, hurrying off to Da Nang, where he joined some 4,000 other refugees aboard a ship.

Pham lost his gamble. His wife, he later learned, had taken their girls into hiding in Vietnam with other relatives, believing he had been killed. Pham didn’t see them again for 19 years.

After reaching the United States, Pham joined his son in Massachusetts. Over the next few years, the father--working as a printer and computer assembler--and son chased jobs to San Diego and San Jose before settling in Orange County, staying in touch with the rest of his family by mail while hoping to save up enough money to bring them over.

But as time passed, Pham’s children developed lives of their own. His son, a computer engineer, married, and Pham began living alone. Back in Vietnam, Pham’s daughters also married and started families. Pham’s wife developed closer ties to her new grandchildren than to her husband, an ocean away. The plans to reunite in America dissolved.

“I begged my wife, but she wouldn’t go because she said she didn’t know how to speak English and didn’t have any skills,” Pham says. “She always asked, ‘Who is going to feed me?’ ”

And Pham can’t return to Vietnam, fearing not only the Communist government but also poverty. He receives Social Security benefits in the United States; in Vietnam he would have nothing.

So he saves his money, about $150 a month from his $650 in Social Security benefits, until he has enough for a plane ticket home. There he catches up with his family’s lives. But he always returns to his solitary existence in Westminster.

Pham never learned English. Few of his neighbors are Vietnamese. So his daily life has settled into the routine of a daily bike ride to the Asian Garden Mall for conversations with other aging exiles.

The consequences of his isolation are physical as well as emotional. Pham had stomach pains a while back and couldn’t get out of bed for two days. There was no one to miss him, he says. No one to realize that he was sick and to check in on him.

“If I die,” Pham says, “no one would know.”

Nam Nguyen: Hard Work Pays Off

Like Pham, Nam Nguyen’s journey to Orange County began by boat. But he was the captain.

Nguyen grew up in Ba Ha, near Cam Ranh Bay, about 200 miles northeast of Saigon. He dropped out of school after fifth grade when his father, a fisherman and mayor of Ba Ha, was shot by Viet Cong guerrillas.

The father survived but was incapacitated for months. So the son went to work on fishing boats in the South China Sea, spending as many as six days at sea at a time. When the Viet Cong took over in 1975, Nguyen, then 16, passed up his chance to flee to stay with his family.

Three years later, he changed his mind. Without telling his family, he agreed to pilot his employer’s fishing boat, ferrying himself and 27 others to freedom in the Philippines. He returned to school in a refugee camp, got word to his family that he was safe and began mapping out his future.

“My only hope was to finish high school, because that would’ve been the highest education in my family,” Nguyen says. “I didn’t know my destination. There was a lot of uncertainty, lots of contemplation. What or who was going to take us in?”

The answer was a couple of strangers from outside Lincoln, Neb., real estate business partners Dallas Whitford and Don Hartman. Whitford was a Vietnam War veteran; Hartman, a generation older, had family members who suffered under the Communist takeover in China.

Over a three-year period, Whitford and Hartman sponsored more than 60 Vietnamese immigrants. Ten of them were teenagers who moved in with Hartman, his wife and their four children.

Nguyen was among them.

“He’s an outstanding individual,” says Hartman, now retired and living on a small farm in Martell, Neb. “He was very bright, and very conscientious.”

Hartman said Nguyen arrived without English or education but progressed rapidly. As a 10th-grader at Norris High School in Hickman, near Lincoln, Nguyen was the only student in his class to get a perfect score on a test on the works of Mark Twain.

“You can imagine what that was like for a child who knew hardly any English,” Hartman says.

Nguyen remembers those years as difficult. “School was hard at first,” Nguyen says. “I was pushing myself and always comparing myself with people who came over in ‘75, and I’d get angry.”

He struggled with himself, resisting the urge to give up. His diligence paid off. After graduating from high school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and math and a medical degree at Creighton University in Nebraska.

After surgical training in Albuquerque and Pittsburgh, Nguyen moved with his wife in July 1999 to Orange County, where he is chief of the pediatric surgery division at UCI Medical Center in Orange. His wife, whom he met at Creighton, is an anesthesiologist in Los Angeles County but plans to join UCI Medical Center next month.

Part of Nguyen’s motivation to study medicine came from his mother’s death when he was 4, which he blames partly on lack of access to medical care. He hopes to return someday to treat children in his native village.

“I love children, and taking care of them is very rewarding,” he says. “You’re giving them a new life. . . . I feel very fortunate. There were no chances or opportunities in Vietnam. I’d probably be a fisherman still.”

Tina Phan: Head of the Class

Tina Phan’s potential stretches before her, a road yet to be taken.

She was born in Ho Chi Minh City--formerly Saigon--on Feb. 12, 1990, the only child of hopeful entrepreneurs Yen Dang and Hai Phan, who had a small business selling shoes and traditional medicines. As Tina reached school age, her parents decided to leave Vietnam for the sake of the girl’s future.

Although Tina would have been able to finish school in Vietnam,”in the U.S., she has more opportunities,” says her 31-year-old mother, Dang.

The family moved first to Houston, sponsored by the brother of Tina’s father, and stayed for two months before moving in January 1999 to Westminster, where Dang’s parents have lived for six years. Tina enrolled in third grade at L.P. Webber Elementary School.

“In Vietnam, Tina was a good student, but I didn’t think she’d catch up with the American kids,” Dang says. “But now I see her getting awards and teachers praise her, so I’m happy.”

Dang says the adjustment has been difficult for the family as they try to mesh not only with a new culture but also with a new pace of living.

“I was scared of coming to a new land because I didn’t speak English,” Dang says. “I didn’t know the streets. I didn’t have money. I was confused about the way things worked.”

Both parents landed jobs as low-wage computer assemblers, Tina says. Once her mother started working, Tina began going after school to the Boys & Girls Club of Westminster, a few blocks from the small apartment they rent. Her parents quickly saved up $4,000 and bought their first car--a 1991 Honda--taking yet another step toward life as Southern Californians.

Tina has made the transition more easily. While her parents speak little English, Tina has already attained near fluency. She has made friends among her Vietnamese, Latino and white schoolmates.

And earlier this month, the Boys & Girls Club named Tina its Student of the Year for her age group. She is the first Vietnamese youth to win the honor in an organization that until recently had few Vietnamese members, according to director Monique Lawlee.

Tina measures the tangible benefits of her new life in exposure to computers--she’s infatuated with the Internet--watching Saturday morning television cartoons and learning English.

The negatives are the pet dog she left behind, and her relatives still in Vietnam.

“If I have a chance I would like to go back, but I don’t think I want to live there,” she says. She’d like to become a doctor. They make good money, she says. Enough for her to afford the trips home.

But life in her new home is still in flux. Five months ago, Tina’s father left for Tennessee to work as a manicurist. There’s less competition and more money in the work there, where the winters are harsher.

Dang says that if all goes well, she and Tina will join him there sometime this summer, moving yet again along their path to the future.