Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 30, 1990 TAG: 9007280249
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Doug Pardue
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Dat's adopted father, Hue Huynh, and his oldest brother, Hai, 20, got jobs - Hue making $5 an hour at Cycle Systems, Hai at Roanoke Dye and Finishing, making $4.75 an hour.
Their sponsor, Loc Pham, a Vietnamese refugee who arrived five years ago, found them a small ranch house to rent on Hildebrand Avenue Northeast near Hershberger Road. The house was just a block from a similar house Pham owns.
The rent, $275 a month, was steep, but with both Hue and Hai working, they could make the payment and even save some money.
"Monday I start work," Hue Huynh said.
His smile showed the pride he felt at finally getting a chance to make it on his own after seven months in a Philippine refugee camp and one month at Hope House, a transition house for refugees in Roanoke's Old Southwest.
The move out of Hope House on the morning of June 24, 1989, took just 10 minutes. Dat's family packed their belongings into the duffle bags and suitcases they had arrived with a month earlier. Masking tape with their names printed on it still clung to each piece.
The only additions were some pots and pans, kitchen utensils, a couple of mattresses and some clothing picked out of donation boxes at the refugee center.
Before leaving Hope House, they posed for a group picture with Trinh's family. Trinh refused to pose until she could change into a dress.
Dat's family then loaded their belongings in a pickup truck and followed Pham to their new home.
Trinh smiled and waved goodbye, but nervously chewed her lips as they drove away.
When Dat's family arrived at the house, Pham, clearly enjoying his role as a sponsor, bounced out of his car, smiled like a proud father and rushed to the front door of the tiny one-story frame ranch. His feet left a trail through the violet and white clover flowers growing tall in the yard. The house - blue with white trim - matched the flowers.
"Welcome home," Pham said as he opened the front door.
"How about that, $275 rent," he said, bragging about the great deal he made on the house.
"Yes, I like it," Hue Huynh replied after looking around the three-bedroom house. But his mind was on Monday, his first day at work, his first chance to make money in America.
Six minutes was all it took for the family of six to unload and move in.
\ `I want to work'
\ Back at Hope House, Trinh's mother, Tho Mai, sat on the floor in the solitude of her room. She spread all of her documents in front of her in a semicircle.
Seven months pregnant, she looked lonely, sad and frightened. She said she wasn't. She was just checking to make sure her documents were in order. She didn't miss Dat's family, she said. Hope House was too crowded with them, and it bothered her that she couldn't keep the house picked up and tidy.
"I want to work, and have house," she said. But she knew that wouldn't be anytime soon. She wouldn't be able to work until well after her baby's birth. Until then, she had no way to support herself and her five daughters. She was told she'd have to go on welfare, but she wasn't certain what welfare meant.
She got her first understanding when Kathy Varney, a caseworker with the refugee office, took her to the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority to apply for public housing.
The Central Tenant Selection Office is at Lansdowne, one of the city's oldest and largest public housing projects. The project is predominantly black, and it was the first time Tho Mai and Trinh had seen so many black people.
Trinh stared unblinking and unself-consciously as several teen-age girls, aglow in makeup and trendy clothes, boogied by to the rap beat of a boom box.
Tho Mai's eyes followed the girls, but her head remained still as if she weren't watching.
"This public housing?" she suddenly asked.
Inside the office, a housing worker said she couldn't work the computer and that Mai would have to come back later. Varney, a Vietnamese immigrant herself, accused the worker of discriminating against Vietnamese.
"They make it hard on Vietnamese sometimes," she said.
Varney said some people think welfare and public housing should be saved for people from Roanoke, not Vietnamese refugees. She tried to convince the worker that Tho Mai wasn't taking advantage of welfare.
"She wants to work," Varney said. "But she can't get a job. She has a baby and five girls, no money and really needs a place."
Varney, Mai and Trinh were sent to another housing office. Posters with AIDS warnings hung from the walls. "If your man is dabbling in drugs, he could be dabbling with your life . . . What have you got against a condom?"
"There aren't any openings," a worker told Mai.
But the worker was friendly and efficient. She took Mai's application and told her that because her only income was $435 a month from Aid to Dependent Children, her rent for a four-bedroom apartment would be about $75 a month.
On July 7, two weeks after Dat's family moved into their own house, Mai and her family left Hope House and moved into Indian Village, a small public-housing project close to Vinton.
Mai had been afraid that she would be put in a high-rise apartment with a balcony. "I worry children fall," she said.
At Indian Village, she got a two-story, four-bedroom town house apartment with a modern kitchen, adjoining dining room and a breakfast bar.
Mai couldn't believe it. She'd never had a place with so many bedrooms and didn't seem to know what to do with them.
For months no one slept in them. Mai and all of her children slept on the floor in the living room because they were afraid to sleep upstairs in separate bedrooms.
"We all sleep together in Vietnam," Trinh said.
They had little furniture other than a few mattresses, an old couch and a couple of worn chairs. But they had a TV and a boom box, which Mai used to softly play Vietnamese love songs.
After a few weeks in the project, Mai wouldn't let her daughters go outside to play with other children because one of her girls had been pushed down.
She said she was afraid that the black tenants didn't like Vietnamese, and she was frightened of them.
She also was troubled by petty crime. Someone stole her broom when she left it outside her back door. "Not happen in Vietnam," she said.
On July 31, 1989, Mai's son was born at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
The excitement over her first son turned to panic when a nurse took the child away right after delivery. Mai and Trinh tried to stop the nurse. They later explained with a mixture of embarrassment and laughter that in Vietnam there is a real danger that boy babies might be swapped for girls by nurses or doctors who are paid by people who want boys.
Mai remained in the hospital just a couple of days, and proudly returned to Indian Village with her son, Houng Elmer Mai.
With her son's arrival, Mai quit sleeping in the living room with her daughters. She moved with the baby to the adjoining dining room.
The bedrooms remained unused until winter, when Mai discovered they were the warmest rooms in the house.
\ `A guitar without strings'
\ Trinh got up at 6 a.m. on Sept. 7 so she'd have plenty of time to get ready. She put on blue jeans and a white blouse and tied her hair in a ponytail with a red ribbon. She wanted to look her best, but she wanted most to look American for her first day of school in Roanoke.
She walked out to wait for the bus.
A cool drizzle hung in the air, wetting everything without seeming to fall. Trinh didn't notice. She couldn't stop smiling.
The bus took her to Addison Junior High School where she was to meet several other non-English-speaking students from Northwest and Northeast Roanoke. Another bus would then take them to Patrick Henry High School, where the city offers its only class in English as a second language.
Four Southeast Asian boys and a 17-year-old girl from Laos waited with Trinh in the school counselor's office. Dat never showed up.
The boys wore jeans and high-top tennis shoes with no laces, and slouched, too cool, in their chairs. One wore earphones. His head rocked to the beat of music only he could hear.
The Laotian girl was surprisingly tall. Her long, straight black hair made her look even taller when she stood. She greeted Trinh with a smile almost as big as the one she got in return.
Trinh sat with her hands folded in her lap. On the floor beside her she placed the brand new jet bag her mother had bought for her to carry school books. The price tag - $9.99 - still hung from the strap.
The Laotian girl knew more English than Trinh and loved to talk and giggle. "My name is Phanophon Prasavath. Call me Phone," she said, laughing. Phone is what her American friends call her, and it's easier to say than Phanophon. It fits her too, she said, because she likes to talk on the telephone.
Trinh and Phone became instant friends.
At 8:15, an hour and 10 minutes after she left home, Trinh arrived at Patrick Henry for her first class.
Rock music reverberated across the parking lot from car stereos and boom boxes.
A group of Southeast Asian boys, obviously checking out the new girls, waved as the bus stopped. Most were Vietnamese, and rushed up to talk. Trinh's tension faded. She licked her lips and let out a breath, relieved that she was not alone.
The English as a second language class had 18 students, all Southeast Asian, except for one Mexican.
The girls sat to one side of the room, giggling and trying to speak English. The boys exchanged tapes, many of them Vietnamese rock 'n' roll from California. Scantily clad women singers were on the tape covers.
Roy Martin, the teacher, began class the moment the bell rang.
"What school are we in?" he asked.
"Patrick Henry High School," the students repeated in unison.
"What city?" he said.
"Ro-ah-noke," they replied.
"What state?"
"Va-gin-nee-ah."
"What country are we in?"
"United States of Ah-mer-re-ka."
Trinh, eager to participate and please, was the first to volunteer when Martin asked if someone could point out Virginia on a map of the United States.
She was the first to volunteer to identify the days of the week.
She was the first to volunteer to identify the months of the year. She had a hard time pronouncing April. Rs are difficult. She clapped her hands when she finally said it correctly. The other girls clapped, too.
The boys said nothing, unless directly asked by Martin.
When the class ended, Trinh, Phone and a couple of the other students got in a bus for the ride to William Fleming High School, their home school.
At Fleming, school counselor Hallie Carr took them into the teachers' lounge. Dat sat alone waiting. He had gotten lost that morning, missed his bus and ended up walking to the wrong school.
For the next hour Carr arranged class schedules.
"Until their English is better, they will be placed mainly is classes where they do manual things," she said.
Dat, showing off his English, grinned and wrote F--- in his notebook. He laughed loudly, and then said, "Shut up your mouth, man." His brash behavior had helped him weather years of racial discrimination in Vietnam.
"They always know the slang and cuss words first," Carr said. "He'll be dangerous when he learns English."
She placed Dat in English as a second language, typing, math, physical education and art.
"What is art?" Dat said. When Carr explained, Dat replied. "I don't like." Carr left him in the class anyway. He later flunked it and was transferred to a different course.
Trinh was placed in English as a second language, math, typing, physical education and life management.
Dat admitted he was nervous about going to classes.
"I'm very sad," he said through an interpreter. "I am a guitar without strings."
He doesn't look quite Vietnamese and he doesn't look like an American white. He's small. His records say he's 16, but he says he's 18. He doesn't look old enough to be either. He's barely 5 feet tall.
"Many black people," he said as he walked to class. "Very large - big."
Unlike Dat, Trinh said nothing as she walked to typing, her first class.
"This is a typewriter," Vickie Wright, the teacher said as she sat Trinh at the keyboard of an IBM Selectric.
Trinh watched the other students, followed their lead - and smiled.
\ `I have no money'
\ By the end of January, Dat's father, Hue Huynh, had lost energy and hope.
He made good money at Louisville Scrap Material, as much as $400 a week from piecework. But for a shopkeeper it was hard work, and he was never certain from week to week how much he'd make.
He was so exhausted when he came home at night that he'd quit taking English classes. He quit the classes even though his sponsor, Loc Pham, repeatedly told him that learning English was the most important thing for him to do during his first year.
"If you know English, everything will be OK," Pham said.
Dat said his father was depressed because he no longer had a position of respect, and he had difficulty supporting his family. His oldest son, Hai, now 21, had left the family to live on his own in Old Southwest, and Huynh felt as though his family was crumbling.
"He feels sorry he left everything in Vietnam and came here and has nothing," Dat said.
At times his father "was crying it was so hard," Dat said. "I hope he doesn't blame me."
Over a dinner of rice, vegetables, shrimp, barbecued chicken and spring rolls, Huynh said he didn't blame Dat. He left Vietnam so his children would have more opportunities, and he left for himself. He didn't like the communist government's interference in his jewelry business, didn't like its attempts to control what he bought and sold.
He wanted freedom.
But America wasn't what he expected, he said through an interpreter. "I feel sad because I had a comfortable life. I could provide for my family. Now, in America it's different . . . It's hard to be happy because there are so many things you have to take care of financially.
"I have no money and no English."
He was afraid his family could end up like the homeless old men he sees slumped in doorways on the Roanoke streets he drives home from work.
"Why do you have them in the richest country in the world?" he asked.
His wife, Nguyet, 36, worried about her husband. "He has to slave here," she said though an interpreter.
Two months later, in March, Hue Huynh's fears seemed to come true.
LSM laid him off. He couldn't pay his bills. He had to leave his house and move into public housing.
\ `Snow! Snow!'
\ "Is it going to snow any more?" Tho Mai asked. It was early spring, almost a year after she and her family arrived in Roanoke. She'd just gone through the first real winter of her life, and was glad to hear there'd be no more snow until next winter.
She recalled late fall when a cold fog settled over Indian Village. Her children had heard a lot about snow and thought the white fog was it. They ran outside to play in it, yelling "Snow! Snow!" only to be disappointed.
When it did snow weeks later, Trinh rushed out, barefoot, with some of her younger sisters. They quickly learned why snow falls in the winter.
Mai said she hoped she would be able to get a job soon, but she didn't know what kind. She knew one thing for sure, though. "I want work."
She's finding out that welfare can be a trap. If she gets a job, she said, she won't be able to clear much more than $150 an week, but her rent would go up to about $200 a month and she'd have to pay for a baby sitter or day care.
Mai said she might try to get a night job so she could care for her infant son and little girls in the day. Trinh could watch them at night.
Trinh had been the only wage-earner in the family since their arrival in Roanoke. She spent her first summer in a youth employment program helping to clean schools, and she got a part-time job in the fall working in the kitchen at the Hardee's restaurant on Ninth Street Southeast.
"She's a good, reliable worker. She doesn't stop," Danny Jones, the Hardee's manager, said. Her only problem, he laughed, was trying to understand income tax withholding.
Trinh walked or rode her bike to work until midsummer, when a friend lent her a light blue, 1986 Chevy Nova. Taking the bus was out of the question. "Bus costs too much," she said, and it doesn't run often enough.
She hopes one day to own the Nova so she and her mother can be more independent. Her friend said she could buy the car if she wanted to make small monthly payments, but Trinh's income from Hardee's, $4.25 an hour, is barely above minimum wage. And most of what she makes goes to her mother to support the family. Trinh even used some to buy medicine to send to a sick friend back in Vietnam.
"I love working," she said. She wasn't allowed to work as much as she wanted during the school year because her mother wanted her to study.
Despite the odds against Tho Mai breaking out of welfare, Barbara Smith, the Roanoke refugee center director, thinks she and her family will.
"I've seen a lot of refugees, and Mai is a strong woman who wants to work. She will make it."
\ `We're together'
\ By June, after a year in Roanoke, Hue Huynh, Dat's father, was able to smile again.
LSM had rehired him, and he was making good money. He even managed to come up with $1,000 he needed to repair the 1983 Pontiac he bought last year.
Public housing turned out to be a blessing, too, he said. The four-bedroom apartment at Indian Village is bigger than the house he rented in Northeast. It costs less - $217 a month instead of $275. And the utilities are included.
His family also is able to socialize more. Three other Vietnamese families, including Tho Mai and Dat's mother, live at Indian Village.
Huynh avoids visiting Mai, though, because he is afraid people might gossip. "She doesn't have a man and people might think something is going on," he said.
Dat, too, is happier at Indian Village because he's able to see his mother whenever he chooses. It's like what his grandmother wanted, he said. "We're together."
His social life also is improving. He has an American girlfriend, but they haven't gone on a date. His English isn't good enough. "I don't know what we could talk about."
Dat said he's happy that his father seems more confident and is no longer talking about returning to Vietnam. His father is even taking time for English classes again.
"My life will be better here," Huynh said. "I'd like to get cable TV."
***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on July 31, 1990\ Correction
Because of a photographer's error, Bob Hale was misidentified in the caption in Monday's editions of a photograph accompanying the stories about resettlement of Amerasians in Roanoke.
\
Memo: correction