Vietnamese refugees "Whatever tree you eat from, remember the one who planted it."
Dr. Tri
newcomer to America :)))
Thanks to America Tinker Air Base
FW: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-viet-documentary25-2009dec25,0,1015442,full.story
Vietnamese refugees recall their warm welcome
A film will honor the efforts of sponsors helping families settle in
the United States after a divisive war.
By My-Thuan Tran
December 25, 2009
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During the holidays, Phuong Pham is reminded of a Vietnamese proverb:
Whatever tree you eat from, remember the one who planted it.
More than 30 years ago, on the day Saigon fell to Communist forces,
Pham and his family scrambled aboard a South Vietnam ship bound for
the South China Sea. Pham, carrying only some photos and a small bag
with clothes, thought he had lost everything.
But after arriving at a U.S. refugee center in Pennsylvania, Pham was
matched with a nearby parish that became his family's sponsors.
Parishioners found the family an apartment, donated a car, helped Pham
find a job.
Pham spent his first Christmas in America in the living room of the
McGlynns, one of the families in the church. The McGlynns showered his
children with toys; Pham had nothing to give in return.
Over the next three decades, the Phams became lifelong friends of
their sponsors. They spent nearly every holiday together. "Without
them, we would not be here today," said Pham, 63, who settled in
Hershey, Pa. "We appreciate so much what these people have done for
us."
Pham's story is among those that will be featured in a documentary
about the first wave of refugees who fled Vietnam in 1975 and were
taken in by American families and churches. The film, "Sponsored '75,"
follows sponsor families who helped refugees gain a foothold in the
United States.
"We wanted to see how their lives have changed from having been mixed
in together," said Kenneth Nguyen, 34, one of the Los Angeles-based
filmmakers involved in the project. He is looking for potential
subjects throughout the country, including Southern California. "This
is an important chapter in our people's history that we wanted to
capture."
Nguyen said the documentary is especially relevant today, as the
United States resettles thousands of refugees from conflicts in Iraq
and other countries.
In the days after the April 30, 1975, Communist takeover, images of
Vietnamese citizens scrambling onto U.S. military aircraft or fleeing
on small boats were seen in newspapers and television screens across
the United States.
Nearly 130,000 Vietnamese fled their homeland that spring, most of
them former South Vietnamese government or army officials who worked
closely with Americans during the war and feared reprisals by the
Communist Party and members of officials' families. In their home
country, they were highly educated and well-to-do. In the United
States, they had to start over.
Many Americans were initially wary of the newcomers who arrived after
the unpopular war. A Gallup poll in May 1975 showed that only 36% of
Americans were in favor of Vietnamese immigration. Many feared job
losses and increased public welfare.
But the Ford administration passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee
Assistance Act of 1975, which helped refugees resettle with churches
and volunteer families. The sponsors provided food, clothing and
shelter until the refugees became self-sufficient.
The Vietnamese were assigned to four "tent cities" set up on military
bases, including Camp Pendleton. While there, they took vocational
classes and waited for sponsors.
Pham, his wife, Dung, and his children, ages 5, 4, 2, and 1, were
assigned to Ft. Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, where they lived in
barracks along with thousands of other refugees. "I had no idea what
the future would hold," said Pham, a former petty officer in the South
Vietnam navy.
After 90 days, with the weather becoming unbearably chilly for the
Vietnamese, Pham and his family were sponsored by the parish at St.
Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Hershey, about 100 miles from
Philadelphia.
A group of about 20 parishioners volunteered to help the Phams. They
held donation drives for clothes and furniture, signed a lease on a
two-bedroom apartment and raised money to pay rent.
Margaret Minmagh got involved after seeing images of Vietnamese in
"devastating conditions, in cargo boats and inadequate food."
"Vietnam was pretty much our war," said Minmagh, 70, whose doctor
husband was drafted during the war and served stateside. "We wanted to
do what we could to help out now that the Vietnamese were here."
Dennis Michael, another volunteer, remembered Pham's wife looking
scared and the children very thin. Pham was excited and talkative,
even though his English, learned from American GIs, was limited.
Committee members took turns taking the Phams to the supermarket,
teaching them English, getting clothes for the children. They helped
enroll the children in school. Someone eventually donated a station
wagon.
Some members helped Pham find a job at the nearby medical center, and
he worked nights at a supermarket. One year after arriving in Hershey,
Pham told the sponsors he could pay his own rent.
"I didn't want to rely on people helping us," he said. "But they
always asked us if we needed anything else."
Judy McGlynn said the Phams threw dinner parties with Vietnamese food
to thank the sponsors. The McGlynns and the Phams eventually took
vacations to North Carolina's beaches nearly every year.
"Believe it or not, they're from Vietnam, but our families are a lot
alike," said McGlynn, 63.
"It was a blessing that they came into our lives."
Many refugees eventually left their sponsor families and moved to
areas with larger Vietnamese communities, such as Orange County's
Little Saigon, now home to the largest Vietnamese population in the
United States. But Pham and his family decided to stay put.
"We fell in love here," he said.
Pham's four children grew up. Three went to college, and another to
the Navy. The sponsor families attended the children's weddings.
Stories such as the Phams' are important because they are a "reminder
for future Vietnamese generations of how we got here," said Johanna
Tran, 31, who is working with Nguyen on the documentary.
"Thousands of lives were changed by the kindness of strangers," Tran
said. "The memories are being lost and there needs to be a way to
document them."
For Nguyen, the documentary is personal because his family was
sponsored in 1975. Nguyen's parents moved to California when he was
young, so he grew up not knowing his sponsors. But his parents told
him stories of the kindly Kenneth Spangler family in Pennsylvania and
told him he was named after the patriarch. He visited the Spanglers in
1996 to thank them.
Nguyen is still working on the documentary but the project is becoming
more urgent, he said, because many sponsors are getting older and some
have died.
"The wonderful lives we are living is because we were able to stand on
the shoulders of giants who were willing to open their doors and help
out our community," Nguyen said. The sponsors "just knew there was a
group of people in need, and they opened up their lives and brought us
in."
my-thu...@latimes.com
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