 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
              
|
Vietnam, 25 years later: Former refugee now helps others
Monday, April 24, 2000 By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The coordinator of Catholic Charities' Refugee Services Program loves it when clients tell her, "You don't know what we've been through."
That's because Linh Quach has been through it.
Twenty-two years ago, she was a refugee, just like the people she works to help today.
Her remarkable story, which she rarely tells, goes like this:
The year was 1978. Quach Ngoc Linh (as her name would be written in Vietnam, surname first) was 9 and living with her parents and nine siblings in Saigon.
Life there, so difficult throughout the long war, only got worse after the North Vietnamese communists took over the South Vietnam capital on April 30, 1975.
Linh remembers how her mother used to stretch their meager rice by making it into thin soup.
She remembers how the government kept changing the currency, which was worth less each time, until it was worthless.
She remembers looking out into the intersection where they lived and watching soldiers execute a blindfolded boy, then having to say she'd seen nothing when the soldiers came to the door.
The last straw for her parents apparently was when one of her sisters, at age 16, was drafted into the Vietnamese army.
One rare weekend when the sister was allowed to come home, their father -- a traveling herbalist -- put into motion a plan he'd quietly made: In the dark of night, he left home and went down to a cousin's fishing boat. One by one, and by different routes, Linh and four of her siblings (but not her mother or the other four children) were brought to join him.
By the time the little boat slipped out of port, there were 110 people packed on board. They had to throw food, water, even clothing into the sea to stay afloat.
Their destination: Anywhere but Vietnam.
"It didn't hit me that we were leaving the country," says Quach. For a girl, being one of the "boat people" seemed like an adventure.
After five days, they drifted to an American oil rig, where the crew gave them milk and crackers, but initially refused to let them land.
A terrible storm changed the Americans' minds. They plucked the terrified Vietnamese, one by one, off the wave-tossed boat.
"Amazingly," Linh recalls, "after the last person was picked up, our boat sank."
They all were refugees.
They were taken to a refugee camp in Malaysia and given lumber and plastic tarps to build shelter. In the four months they lived there, the refugee population swelled to thousands.
Still, they felt fortunate: They'd heard horror stories about boats captured by pirates, who killed the men and raped the women.
"Practically every day, my father would take us down to the shore, hoping we would see family members."
Unbeknownst to them, her mother and two sisters also had escaped by boat, but wound up in a camp in the Philippines.
Linh's father, meanwhile, had gone through refugee organizations to contact his sister, who'd married an American GI and was living in the Pittsburgh suburb of South Park. The sister agreed to sponsor him and the five children who were with him through Catholic Charities, one of the organizations that worked to permanently resettle refugees.
After the six of them were accepted, and passed their health screenings, they were put on a plane.
They arrived in the United States on March 23, 1979.
Quach says, "We still celebrate that day 'til now."
But by the time they reached South Park, she was disappointed in America, which -- from everything she'd heard -- she pictured as a bustling metropolis, not as all these trees and green spaces.
She and that half of her family would live with her aunt and uncle for a year, during which time they filed "family reunification" paperwork so her mother and other sisters could join them (One brother had died in the army.).
But it was only about a month after arriving that Linh had to start school here, even though she knew no English.
Little Linh figured that everyone else would speak Vietnamese. "First day of school, I didn't realize it was me who had to change."
How hard was it? "A challenge," she says with a smile. "The only thing I did well was math." She started so late that school year that she had to repeat third grade.
Her 8-year-old brother, Chi, and 13-year-old sister, Chau, also were in school. But older sisters Mai Anh and Xuan, then 17 and 16, had to get vocational training and go to work like their dad, Dieu. He worked at a printing shop, as well as cooked at a Chinese restaurant in Homestead. Her sisters worked at Max & Erma's restaurant, eventually becoming waitresses.
The family moved to a three-bedroom apartment in Castle Shannon, where they were living when Linh's mother, Ba Tran, and sisters Phuong and Chan finally reunited with them after three years. ("I know my mother didn't recognize me," she says.) The oldest sibling, also named Phuong, came seven years later, with her own husband and children.
By then, the Quachs had settled in Mt. Lebanon. At Mt. Lebanon High School, Linh still was one of only a few Asian faces, but people were nice to her. She graduated in 1989.
By then, Linh was more American than Vietnamese. A Sunday school teacher even baptized her as Methodist, something her Buddhist parents may not have even known.
But she took a big step away from her birth culture by being the first to leave home when she decided to attend Lock Haven College in the central part of the state.
"I'm very independent, very Americanized, and I'm sure I put my family through hell," says the young woman who graduated with a psychology degree in 1993.
She'd wanted to counsel children. But it didn't work that way.
When she came back to Pittsburgh, she took a job as a temporary translator at Catholic Charities. The very agency that had helped settle her family here was continuing to assist more Vietnamese refugees.
"To be honest, I didn't want to be here," she says during an interview at the agency's Downtown offices. "I'd become very Americanized, and to work with a resettlement agency, and work mostly with Asians, did not appeal to me at all."
Nonetheless, Quach soon was promoted to case worker, and she was good at it, in part because she could empathize. After two years, she was promoted to her current position, coordinator of Refugee Services, which basically resettles refugees and "helps them be self sufficient as much as we can."
Today she supervises a staff of 13. Three also are former refugees, from Bosnia.
Quach's supervisor, Pittsburgh Diocese Resettlement Director Tony Turo, says Catholic Charities likes to hire former refugees like Linh because they understand refugees' languages and experiences. But he says Quach has a "special talent" to also understand and communicate to refugees the intricacies and expectations of the system.
"There's no arguing with her," he says with a laugh. "She's wonderfully melded her own experiences and her own successes."
Precise numbers are unavailable for 1975 to 1990, but Catholic Charities estimates that it settled 1,500 to 3,000 or more Vietnamese refugees here during those 15 years. It has settled more than 150 of them since 1990. That's when refugees from war-ripped Bosnia began making up the bulk of refugees coming here. Pittsburgh also now regularly becomes the new home of Kurds and other Iraqis, as well as people from the former Soviet Union, Cuba, Burma, Liberia and other countries. "So, it's quite diverse," says Quach.
This year, Catholic Charities will settle only a half-dozen or so Vietnamese. These include some who are just now getting out of refugee camps, plus some who are being released from Vietnamese prisons, as well as some adult children of refugees still in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the total number of refugees the agency resettles keeps rising. Last year, it was 303. This year, the agency is budgeted to help 275, but expects to go over that. By the end of March, it had resettled 80.
Quach says she misses working directly with families as much as she did as a case worker. But she likes her job, and was just accepted to pursue a master's in human resources management at La Roche College in McCandless.
Meanwhile, she's gradually getting more interested in her roots and wants to try to teach herself to read and write Vietnamese.
"Why do you want to do this now?" was the happy question of her parents, who are much less Westernized. Yes, they probably would have liked her to have married a Chinese or a Vietnamese man. But they supported her when, in 1994, she married David Langenbacher, whose roots are German. They live in Bridgeville.
Now all her siblings and their 11 children live in the South Hills, too, not far from their Mt. Lebanon parents, who still say, "We don't have a good appetite if not all of our children are here."
She knows that they're proud of her, and are pleased about her job -- "Dad carries my business card around" -- especially since it allows her to maintain a link to Vietnamese people and language.
"It actually forces me to remember my own experience and to not take that for granted."
She doesn't often get a chance to tell her story. One of the first times she did, for a gathering of English-as-a-second-language teachers in Baldwin a few years ago, she started "bawling," she says, but it was cathartic and made her "grateful for what I have now."
As she wrote back in the eighth grade for a national award-winning essay on freedom, she's grateful for a lot. She's especially proud of her parents.
"To this day, I don't know how he went through it," she says, thinking of how her father fled with five children. "It's a big decision, risking his life to take us to Never-Never Land, hoping we'll have some opportunity wherever we end up."
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
