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Vietnam, 25 years later: Vietnamese immigrants underscore hardship of adjustment
Monday, April 24, 2000 By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer
On and around the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon this Sunday, Thu Xuan Vo and his friends ask that their fellow Americans remember a few things.
One is that before the Vietnam War ended in 1975, there were hardly any Vietnamese immigrants living in the United States. After the communists won the war and took over the country, hundreds of thousands came to this country, but not as most other immigrants have.
Almost every one of them came as a refugee.
"I was a Vietnamese immigrant by force, not by choice," says Thu (who goes by his "first" or given name, which, Vietnamese style, would be written after his surname and middle name: Vo XuanThu).
He'd never dreamed of leaving his homeland, South Vietnam, which was pitted against the communist forces of North Vietnam in the war. But then Americans, who'd fought alongside him, warned him as they left that he should run for his life from the approaching forces.
From that point, Thu's life took the uncharted course typical of refugees: He left everything he had and risked his life for an unknown that he hoped would be better.
Leaving his parents and sisters behind, the 23-year-old Thu fled on a ramshackle raft, from which he was plucked by American rescuers, who sent him to a refugee camp in Guam. After a stay in a regional resettlement camp at Pennsylvania's Fort Indiantown Gap, he was placed in Pittsburgh to start a new life.
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Twenty five years later, Thu -- who has reared three children and runs T&M Cleaning and Tailor Shop in North Huntingdon, near his home in Harrison City, Westmoreland County -- could be a poster child for the American Dream.
But he can't help but sometimes wish that more people understood what folks like him have been through to get here.
"We looked for freedom. That's why we're here," says Thu, who last year was elected president of the Vietnamese Association of Pittsburgh. It currently has about 20 officers and board members, and is supported by most of the approximately 400 Vietnamese American families in the region.
Before a recent meeting, he and other officers talked about their group, its April 30 observance of the 25th anniversary, and other aspects of being both Vietnamese and American in Pittsburgh.
"It's very hard, I tell you, to blend those two cultures," group adviser Dr. Nghi Nguyen says.
Since 1975, about 2 million people emigrated from Vietnam, first escaping boat people like Thu, followed later by political prisoners and others. About half wound up in the United States, many concentrated in places such as Orange and Santa Clara counties in California, which, at 200,000- and 100,000-plus, respectively, have the two largest Vietnamese populations outside of Vietnam.
Pittsburgh's Vietnamese community is much smaller and more widely scattered. There is no Vietnamese neighborhood, though Vietnamese food can be found in some markets, in a restaurant and right on the street in the Strip District.
Some members of the local community are restaurateurs -- Me Lyng in West Homestead and Tram's Kitchen in Lawrenceville both serve authentic Vietnamese fare. Others work in all kinds of jobs, ranging from nail technician to electrical engineer, even medical director of transplantation services (Allegheny General Hospital's Dr. Dai D. Nghiem).
"We're working people, we blend in," says Nghi, who lives in Fawn, near Tarentum, and is an anesthesiologist at Allegheny Valley Hospital. "We keep a low profile on purpose."
He says there are about 1,500 Vietnamese Americans in the area.
Among Thu's dreams for the association would be to start a school to keep alive the Vietnamese language and traditions.
Many members belong to one of two sister organizations. The Vietnamese Buddhists of Pittsburgh, incorporated last year, now meets on the second Sunday of each month at a temporary temple in Homestead. The Vietnamese Catholic Community of Pittsburgh also gathers to worship on the second Sunday of the month, at the St. Boniface site of Holy Wisdom parish on the North Side, led by the Rev. Dam Nguyen and the Rev. Trieu Le.
The group holds several gatherings each year, including an April 30th "Vietnamese Heritage Day."
On Sunday, Heritage Day will be held in its usual spot, in the University of Pittsburgh's Benedum Auditorium at 3500 O'Hara St. in Oakland. But it should be bigger than usual, because this is such a significant anniversary. The public is invited to the free event.
The local community chooses to have some fun on April 30, since they rarely get together. But it is a sad day for Vietnamese emigres.
Nghi would like people to remember not just Americans who died in the war, but also all of the Vietnamese in the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam who died fighting the North Vietnam Army and the southern Viet Cong guerrillas.
He and others are effusive in their appreciation for how kind Western Pennsylvanians have been and continue to be to them.
Especially in the early days, adjusting to life here wasn't easy. Thu recalls his first weeks in a Highland Park apartment, when he bought milk based on the shape of its container, since he couldn't read any of the writing on it. The day he saw a neighbor pouring from one of the cartons to feed her cat, he feared what he'd been buying and drinking was cat food.
Then there was the time Nghi's wife tried to deice a windshield for the first time -- with boiling water -- and shattered the glass.
"Looking back, we have many stories to laugh about," Nghi says with a smile. "We learn a lot."
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