THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 27, 1995 TAG: 9507270518
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBINSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: COLORADO SPRINGS LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
A green tricycle. Her grandparents' coffee farm. Her poignant goodbye to her beloved aunt; tiny hand pressed against an airport window, tears staining the face of an 8-year-old leaving for good the country of her birth.
They are Quan Nim's enduring memories of Vietnam, which she and her family departed for Virginia in 1983.
She had it good, she remembers, better than most Vietnamese. The aunt cared for her while her parents courted business success. She went to a good school and was happy till the end.
``I just remember that leaving was hard,'' said Nim, a Virginia Beach field hockey player taking part in the Olympic Festival. ``I was crying because I was leaving my aunt that I'd stayed with my whole life. I remember leaning against the window and just putting up my hand against hers. It was so sad.''
But Nim took to American life. Seized it, in fact, and in less than a dozen years, six as a field hockey player, made it pay off in a scholarship to the University of Iowa, which has one of the nation's best field hockey programs.
Never bashful, quick to make friends, Nim absorbed her new language. She needed barely two years in school of ESL, English as a Second Language. Athletic ability helped her assimilate and meet people, though she was introduced to one helpful family through a magic box.
``The Flintstones,'' Nim says, laughing. ``It's from The Flintstones that I learned all my English.''
It's true Nim has had, yes, a yabba-dabba-do time on the field. But if hockey has been the bedrock of her life in Virginia Beach, cracks have developed. As Nim became a swift, aggressive scoring force, as she led Bayside High School to a runner-up finish to mighty Cox in Group AAA last year, she grew apart and broke from her parents.
Tension peaked in Nim's junior year. She missed the season because of a torn knee ligament and, depressed, allowed her schoolwork to decline. That was the genesis of various problems, Nim says. Her parents applied pressure and she bucked back. A split formed, and Nim ended up living with friends. She still does.
``We have different goals and dreams in life,'' says Nim, who has two brothers and a sister but says she only stays in touch with the boys. ``I don't know, everything happens for a reason. I probably won't know now, but 10 years down the road I might realize why this happened.''
By then, Nim hopes to have played in the Olympics, the Sydney Games in 2000. Her knee injury cost Nim a chance to try out for the national Under-18 team, but she impressed the U.S. field hockey staff in early July at its Super Camp at the University of Maryland and earned her spot in the Olympic Festival.
``Her speed,'' says Kim Miller of Cox, a member of the Under-18 team, asked what sets Nim apart. ``The coaches can give you skills but God gives you your speed. You can practice and practice and you'll get a little faster but it's born in your feet.''
At 5-foot-1 and 118 pounds, Nim is one of the four or five smallest players at the Olympic Festival but surely one of the most determined. Nim wears no knee brace and plays with abandon, the better to catch the eye of a coach who can shape her field hockey future.
It worked in high school, and Nim expects more of the same.
``I knew I could get somewhere with hockey,'' she says. ``I always knew I could get money to go to school for hockey, and that's a goal I've actually achieved. Getting money to go to college to play field hockey, I mean, how great is that?''
As for how she compares on a grander scale, ``I think I definitely belong here,'' Nim says, ``but I still have a long way to go till I'm up to the national level. A long way.''
Maybe. But it's nothing to the distance Nim already has closed. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Quan Nim
by CNB