Spring 2009 - Texas Wesleyan School of Law - Texas Wesleyan ...

She’s Walked in Their Shoes
By Dan Brothers
Her memories of spring 1975 are not
clear. Perhaps that is good.
South Vietnamese military positions
were collapsing rapidly in March
1975 under attack by North
Vietnamese artillery and armor. Hue
fell on March 25, followed by Da
Nang on March 28.
Driving south, 100,000 North
Vietnamese troops had encircled
Saigon by April 27. With the fall
of the city imminent, American
citizens simply went to evacuation
points to leave. Departure for South
Vietnamese refugees was more
problematic. They were on their
own. The price of passports and exit
visas skyrocketed, as did fares for
seagoing vessels.
Five-year-old Huyen Pham escaped
Vietnam with her extended family by
boat from a fishing village. They were
picked up by the U.S. Navy and sent to
Guam, where they were processed.
Pham’s earliest solid recollections are
of entering kindergarten in Florida in
August 1975. Because of her young age,
there never was a language barrier. She
then moved to Arlington, Texas, and
later to a Vietnamese immigrant fishing
community in New Orleans, where she
would experience yet another aspect of
immigration. A large group of Vietnamese
moved into an existing low-income,
mixed neighborhood on New Orleans’
east side, establishing a community with
a Vietnamese church and Vietnamese
stores. This influx had a significant impact
on the area’s population dynamics.
The community would be hit hard many
years later by Hurricane Katrina. But they
would rebuild. After fleeing south in the
aftermath of the fall of Dien Bien Phu in
1954 and escaping Saigon in 1975, Pham’s
mother was not particularly distressed
by Katrina. “It was no big deal,” Pham
remembers her mother saying after being
flooded out in New Orleans.
In 1987, having made high scores on her
PSAT and with help from some excellent
high school teachers and mentors, Pham
applied and was accepted to the six-week
Telluride Association Summer Program at
Cornell. “This experience introduced me
to smart kids with high ambitions,” said
Pham. “When I returned home, I found
a college guide and picked out every
school that sounded famous.
“So I applied to Harvard,” Pham went on,
“without my mother knowing. After I was
accepted, my brothers and sisters had to
persuade her to let me go. She wanted
me to go to school closer to home. To
my mother, Massachusetts might as well
have been Canada.” All of Pham’s siblings
also attended college.
The Halls of Ivy
Cambridge proved to be another world.
Pham remembers her undergraduate
experience as “four of the best years
of my life.” Harvard was a place of
great privilege and wealth, neither of
which she was familiar with. But it was
Pham’s involvement in a public service
organization in Dorchester, a poor area
of Boston, that substantially enriched
her life. “It was helpful to get out of
Cambridge,” Pham said, “with working
families struggling with bigger issues.
Harvard could be very introspective.”
She also worked with refugees and
began to view the refugee experience
more analytically.
Following graduation, Pham received a
one-year Echoing Green Public Service
Fellowship to start a post-secondary
school at the Vietnamese refugee camp
18
in Palawan, Philippines. “The situation
across Southeast Asia prior to 1989
was that refugees were processed to
go to receiving countries – the U.S.,
Canada or Australia – to resettle,” Pham
explained. After 1989, a process called
the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA)
under the auspices of the United Nations
High Commissioner on Refugees was
started. A screening process was then
established to determine whether people
leaving were political or economic
refugees. Those who were not political
refugees were in limbo status. They could
not go back to Vietnam, and no other
country would accept them.
“When I arrived in the Philippines in
1992,” Pham said, “there was a real
feeling of hopelessness. It was a very
hard situation.” Many of the refugees
had been at the camp for three years
living in a transient condition without any
certainty about where they might end up.
The director of the organization Pham
worked for wanted to give the refugees
marketable skills to help them wherever
they resettled. “The school that I started
was called the Poly Technique School,”
Pham went on. “We provided classes in
business management, education and
computer skills, beyond the high school
curriculum.” Pham was the school
administrator and also taught some of
the classes. In 1993, she returned to
Vietnam for a one-month trip, visiting
the families of many of her students
from the Philippines.
After the CPA wound down, a number
of Vietnamese were forcibly repatriated,
but that was short-lived. Unlike in Hong
Kong, where the situation was extremely
bad, the Philippines was much more
humane in its treatment of refugees due
to the influence of the Catholic Church.
“Eventually, some people went back to
Vietnam voluntarily, some settled in the
Philippines, and some were eventually
accepted by third countries,” said Pham.