Southeast Asians make strides in U.S.
By Stephen Magagnini and Phillip Reese
smagagnini@sacbee.comOne broiling Saturday 15 years ago, 345 Vietnamese American kids attended a celebration at Florin High School, where they each were awarded cool backpacks for getting straight A's.
Students from first grade through college shared their secrets for getting 4.0 GPAs, and underscored Southeast Asian immigrants' drive to climb out of poverty.
In 1990, half the Sacramento region's Southeast Asians were poor. Today, 52 percent own homes, according to a Bee analysis of census data. They enjoy a median household income of $50,000 annually, up from $17,350 in 1990 – about $28,500, adjusted for inflation. The regional average is $61,000.
Many fled Vietnam or Laos by boat after the Communist victory in 1975, arriving here with post-traumatic stress disorder and little else. Vietnamese, Hmong, Lao, Iu Mien and Cambodian refugees had lost their land, their freedom, and often their closest relatives.
Most started at the bottom – without English or job skills – but through teamwork and the will to succeed have gone from roach-infested apartments in gang-controlled neighborhoods to suburban homes.
Their children – including those at Florin High that hot August morning – have gone to America's top universities and become doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers.
At her husband's medical office on Fruitridge Road – next door to her daughter Thu Nguyen's dental practice – Lieu Nguyen cried as she recalled cleaning houses for $1 an hour her first few years in California. Her husband, Anh Hunyh Nguyen, a doctor in Vietnam, worked the night shift at a taco joint to feed their two daughters. While their parents worked, the girls studied at the library to save money on electricity.
Anh Hunyh Nguyen, 70, had done two years of hard labor in a communist re-education camp, eating two handfuls of rice a day, before his wife bribed his way out.
"We escaped by boat in May 1977. It was terrible," Lieu Nguyen said. Their boat was boarded by Thai pirates known for their cruelty.
"When I got here, I didn't even have a dime to call my sister, who'd missed our plane in San Francisco," Anh Hunyh Nguyen said.
After relying on welfare and food stamps for three years while he got his U.S. medical certification, Anh Hunyh Nguyen opened his general medicine practice in Sacramento on May 9, 1985.
The couple bought their first home in 1986 for $129,000.
Since then, Anh Hunyh Nguyen has seen 10,000 patients. His daughter Thu Nguyen, 36, opened her dental office in 2000 and has 4,500 patients.
Their oldest daughter, Chi Nguyen, 43, owns Kim Leader Pharmacy. "You can achieve anything you put your mind to here," she said. "It just made us strive, strive and strive."
Lieu Nguyen, who earned her accounting degree, has helped dozens of other refugees get food stamps, medical care, shelter, plates, furniture.
"We owe America, so we're trying to work hard so we can pay back," she said. "You share your time, you share your blessings."
In 1990, 49 percent of the region's Southeast Asians lived below the poverty line. By 2008, their poverty rate had fallen to 19 percent.
That's still higher than the region's 12 percent poverty rate, and the recession has slowed their upward mobility.
More recent refugees from Laos and Thailand are on the first rungs of the ladder. They line up at the Sacramento Asian American Minority office on Franklin Boulevard twice a week for free loaves of bread, bagels and rolls donated by St. Patrick Church.
Nancy Thao, 10, snagged a bag of donuts along with three loaves of bread. "My mom, a seamstress, is in the hospital," she said.
Lia Vang, 57, took bread for bologna sandwiches for her family of eight. "We got here in 1976, and my husband has always worked – we were never on welfare," she said.
"We feed 700 Hmong, Mien and Laotian families a month," said Kathy May Ly, the agency's director.
Hmong and Iu Mien Americans have seen their kids fly, becoming homeowners and professionals, "but we still have some in their 40s and 50s who are struggling," said Ly, who has her MBA. "The Vietnamese have always been better at supporting one another. We Hmong were uneducated; we lived in the jungle." Her father's first job in the United States was potting cactus:"He'd come home with his hands filled with thorns."
Next door, Say Lee, who arrived here in 1982, runs the Lao Market. Four of his nine children have gone into the medical field.
"I tell my kids you have to work hard – you can't depend on me," said Lee, 50.
Chin Ngo of the Kim Quang Vietnamese Buddhist Temple said freedom is a tremendous motivator.
"This is truly a wonderful country where if you are determined and dedicated, you can go to school and be somebody," he said. "In Vietnam, it's not what you know but who you know. If you don't know somebody, you can't get anywhere."
In 1990, just 7 percent of the region's Southeast Asian adults had a bachelor's degree; by 2008, that figure had grown to 22 percent. About 30 percent of all adults in the region have a bachelor's degree.
Xuan "Tamy" Nguyen, 63, has something to do with that. She washed dishes, soldered computer boards and attended cosmetology school to get a job doing nails to raise her six kids. Two were valedictorians at Valley High School, another was salutatorian. Two others were top-10 students.
"We all did homework together at a huge table in our Stockton Boulevard apartment, and if one child had a problem, he'd go to the next brother," said fourth son Thao Xuan Doan, 34. "When we got to the point where no one knew the answer, my mom actually hired a math tutor, a college student, with what little money she had."
His mom, a stern taskmaster, expected nothing less than straight A's.
"I had a running story line in my brain, 'you're going to get straight A's,' and I willed myself to do it. We loved learning, and Mom told us that education would be our key out of poverty."
He loved Harry Potter, "because I was Harry Potter, this poor kid," he said. "When I got into Stanford, it was like getting into Hogwarts."
Doan didn't eat out until he was 17 – "at Subway." He's now a pediatrician in Granite Bay.
His older brother Dinh Doan, 37, attended Columbia Law School and is now a corporate lawyer in Manhattan and a part-time actor. Their sister Diana is a teacher. Their youngest brother is pre-med.
Even their father, a lieutenant colonel who spent 10 years in communist labor camps, got his accounting degree after coming to Sacramento.
"I think everyone's done superbly, and everyone's happy," said Thao Xuan Doan. "We should remind ourselves of some of these stories, and not treat current immigrants with prejudice."
http://www.sacbee.com/2010/10/18/3111515/southeast-asians-make-strides.html
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