Ex-Refugee Will Thank America With a Personal Rose Parade Float

Madalenna Lai arrived on U.S. soil in May 1975 after fleeing the Communist takeover of Vietnam in a boat and staying in a Guam refugee camp.

She was 34, penniless and the sole provider for four children, all younger than 10.

Lai quickly created a career for herself, starting beauty shops in El Monte and then in Pomona before opening a cosmetology school in Pomona. She raised her children by herself, although she jokes that at some point some of her children began raising her.

The Vietnamese refugee sees the life she has cultivated in the United States as a gift from the people and country that adopted her, she said. In 1993, she decided to thank as many of them as she could and let the world know how grateful she is.

On New Year’s Day she will do just that to a worldwide television audience estimated at 350 million people and an audience along the parade route of 1.5 million. Amid the floral pomp of the Tournament of Roses will come Lai’s version of a thank-you card: a fully bedecked parade float that suggests the story of the boat people like her who left Vietnam by sea.

In a year in which the Rose Parade is expected to be awash with red, white and blue patriotism--plus University of Nebraska red--Lai’s Vietnam-themed float will carry a simple message from an immigrant: “Thank you America and the world.”

“I love my country,” she said.

Lai was taken in for two years by an American sponsor family before moving to Philadelphia and then Pasadena, where she lived with the support of the U.S. welfare system.

“Then, I go to the welfare people and I say, ‘No more,’ but they want me to stay. They want to help, and that is why I appreciate so much,” said Lai in her halting English. As she spoke, she stood among floats for the more traditional parade participants, service organizations, cities and that of the Rose Queen.

She raised money for eight years to collect the $100,000 she needed to be one of the 52 entries in the 2002 Rose Parade.

Some came in donations of $1, $2 and $20 outside a Vietnamese market in Westminster. She raised much of it by selling her Fontana home this year.

She lived for a few months in the building where she runs her cosmetology school in Pomona. Her daughter has since bought her a home in Pomona, she said.

The design of the float is dominated by a mystical bird that rises from the bow of a boat representative of the fishing launches that carried so many Vietnamese away from their war-torn nation. It is decorated with organic seeds, rice, walnut shells, carnations, mums and, of course, roses.