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This is the third and final installment in a series examining local efforts at reconciliation in the extended wake of the Vietnam War.
The two previous articles focused on area veterans who have returned to Vietnam in a spirit of mutual support and forgiveness. This final article addresses the Vietnamese immigrant population in Minnesota, shedding light upon the rewards and challenges facing new Americans.
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Sure, KimChau Ngo was different from the other members of her graduating class at Winona Senior High School.
Ngo was, in all likelihood, the only student in her class who had illegally fled a Communist regime, visited her father in a prison camp, witnessed her mother being captured as a hostage, or lived for a week on a rickety boat traversing the South China Sea.
These simply aren't run-of-the-mill experiences for Winonans.
But, as Ngo would be more willing to stress, when she walked across the stage and clutched her diploma, she was also profoundly similar to her classmates: she was an intelligent and accomplished American, completing a major life achievement.
Ngo, now 30 years old and working for Hennepin Technical College in Minneapolis, is one of thousands of young Vietnamese-Americans presently living, studying and working in Minnesota.
An outspoken advocate for her ethnic community and former president of the Vietnamese Community of Minnesota (VCM), Ngo has spent her life forging an identity between two places, two cultures, and two lifestyles.
For Ngo and the members of Minnesota's Vietnamese community, the process of establishing such a life-in-between is one with both rewards and challenges.
"My experience in Winona was just beautiful," Ngo said. "I was very much included, despite my age, race and color, and I felt that I did my part as a new American to be accepted."
But, in addition to the daily challenges of accommodating a new culture, Ngo's family felt the sting of racial prejudice here in Southeastern Minnesota.
"I had gum thrown in my hair," she said, listing unpleasant memories. "Walking on Broadway, I had people say ‘You boat people, go back to your country.'"
"My father told me to ignore those comments for now, to study and to succeed in my own way," Ngo said. "He told me that I wouldn't be seen as a burden to this country when I have a job and an education and I do my part as a US citizen."
Ngo's opportunity to become a United States citizen, a simple birthright for the lion's share of her peers in Minnesota, was the result of decades of sacrifice and suffering by Ngo's parents.
While the tenets of the American Dream state that each of us can create a life for our children better than our own, few American Dream stories involve leaping from windows to escape hostage situations, living on rations in refugee camps, or interviewing for the right to live a free life.
Ngo's does.
"My father fought for the South in the Vietnam war, and was imprisoned in a re-education camp for four years," Ngo recalled of her early childhood in a land experiencing massive ideological changes under the post-war Communist government.
"My mom and dad told me that they had no way to escape because my father was imprisoned and my mother had to care for my siblings and me," Ngo said.
"I remember visiting my father in the prison camp. At that point I didn't really understand why he was imprisoned or the conflict in general. But in 1979 he escaped the camp and we fled Vietnam on a boat."
Departing secretly from the port of Vung-Tau on the South China Sea, Ngo's family hoped to find shelter at one of many United Nations refugee camps in Indonesia. The Vietnamese government had other plans.
"The government discovered that my father was the owner of the boat and they took my mom and little brother as hostages," Ngo recalled. Now separated from her mother and brother, Ngo traversed the sea for six nights and five days before arriving in Indonesia.
There, she spent a year and a half eating canned food and hoping that her father's interviews with United States and Swiss officials would lead to an offer of a free life. Meanwhile, Ngo's mother had an equally long battle attempting to escape captivity as a hostage.
"My mother jumped out of a window to escape," Ngo said, but she had to leave her son, Ngo's brother, behind. "She spent a year and a half trying to get my brother out."
Finally, a successful interview with an American representative led to a new life for Ngo, her father and sister.
"It was a long, arduous journey," Ngo said. "Life in the camp was hard. We were blessed even to have food."
Having secured an open welcome in the United States, Ngo's father arranged for an invitation for his wife and son also.
Chong Sher Vang, operations manager of Winona County's Project FINE (Focus on Integrating Newcomers through Education), has heard many stories like Ngo's.
His job, as was Ngo's when she was executive director of Project FINE, is to assist newcomers such as the Ngos in the next major step in their journey: adjusting to a completely different country and culture.
"It's total culture shock," Vang said, "especially for people coming from a developing country like Vietnam."
Vang listed the speed of traffic, the size of buildings, the presence of electricity, and many other traits of American society as disorienting factors for recent arrivals from Vietnam.
"Sometimes it results in a fear to leave the house," he said. "People imprison themselves in their houses."
Children have a much easier time with the transitions, Vang said.
"It leads to role reversal," he said, "where the adults become the children and vice versa." Adults, in this humbling scenario, rely on their children to speak on their behalf and navigate community resources for them. Every simple act, from buying groceries to visiting a doctor, must become a cooperative intergenerational struggle against the language barrier.
Vietnamese immigrants corroborate Vang's observation.
"The language barrier made it very difficult to communicate," said 18-year-old Canh Tran, whose family came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1996. "Since I came at a young age, it was easier for me to adapt to the language and culture."
Tran's mother, who speaks very little English, made the language and culture sacrifice because "she knew that if we came here, I'd have a better chance for educational opportunities," he said.
Tran, along with his mother and two sisters, moved to Minnesota from Dallas, Texas, in 2000. Tran's three uncles who fought for South Vietnam had moved to the U.S. previously, allowing his mother a visa to reunite her with her brothers.
"I remember it was a very long flight," Tran said of his much more peaceful trip to the United States. His family's eventual transfer to Minnesota was the result of a job opportunity for his mother.
While the Southeast Asian immigrant population is growing throughout the country, Minnesota proves an attractive location for immigrant families for several familiar reasons, said Vang.
"Especially in Winona, because of the bluffs and the lakes, it's peaceful and quiet," he said.
"It feels safe to go to school here, and because the children are doing well in school, more job opportunities are opening for them." Vang also lists lower housing costs and the absence of violent crime as reasons immigrants choose to settle in smaller Minnesota communities.
Groups like Project FINE, the VCM, and multicultural student groups at local schools help to keep Vietnamese cultural energies alive among the immigrant community.
The VCM, in catering to the 20,000-plus Vietnamese-Americans living in Minnesota, holds regular cultural activities, sometimes marking Vietnamese holidays and other times simply uniting the community members socially.
The VCM's activities support their missions of "preserving and enriching the Vietnamese cultural heritage" and "fostering mutual understanding and cooperation between the Vietnamese community and other communities."
"It's a social-cultural-educational association, not a political one," Ngo, the former president, clarified.
"The goal is to make it so that both Vietnamese-Americans who came at a young age and Americans in general can understand the Vietnamese heritage here," she said.
The efforts of American veterans spreading a spirit of reconciliation in Vietnam work toward the same purpose, Ngo said.
"It's very important that reconciliation happens," she said. "It's good that people go back - they should go back. It's part of the healing process."
But not everyone is ready to heal quite yet.
"Some people don't want to talk about it," Ngo said. "Some Vietnam veterans may have a hard time seeing us here - I don't know if they feel like we are their enemies or their friends."
But Ngo believes that she is living in a country of friends, not enemies.
"The Vietnamese people I know are very appreciative to this country for letting us live here," she said.
Immigrants are often so appreciative of their opportunities in America that they don't want to return to their native countries, even as tourists.
Vang, though not of Vietnamese origin, feels this way about visiting Southeast Asia.
"I have too much to live for here," he said. "That's why I don't want to go back to that part of the world. You have to play by their game when you're there."
In Vietnam, Vang said, even thirty years after the conclusion of the war, "people still have that feeling that you are a supporter of the Americans."
"You have to be cautious about who you talk to and the answers you give to border patrollers," he added, suggesting that it would be much easier for white Americans to travel to Vietnam than Vietnamese-Americans.
Both Ngo and Tran, though recognizing the challenges and dangers a return trip may present them, plan to travel to Vietnam.
Ngo, in fact, will be leading several of her American friends from Winona to Vietnam at the end of this year. The trip will be a supremely educational experience for all involved, not least of all Ngo, who hasn't seen her native land since her evacuation.
Ultimately, the experiences of both Vietnamese travelers to the United States and American travelers to Vietnam prove that both countries offer opportunities of education and reconciliation for those who bridge the gap to seek them.
As Ngo said, "In any war, both sides are winners and losers."
The courageous ones who are working to reconcile and to understand are, perhaps, the only ones able to escape this duality of victory and loss and arrive at a more rewarding conclusion: peace.
"It all has to do with your attitude," said Ngo.
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