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Friday, November 6, 1998
JERRY HICKS
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RELATED O.C. SECTIONS MAIN PAGE NEWS BY COMMUNITY SPORTS PREP SPORTS BUSINESS SO CAL LIVING CALENDAR CALENDAR WEEKEND HOME DESIGN COMMENTARY T.V. TIMES
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 he UCI exhibit includes a book, "Stormy Escape," written by a
woman who fled from her Vietnam home in 1980 with her family while five
months' pregnant. She and her husband and four other children were land
refugees, who endured 15 days of arduous travel across Vietnam, Cambodia
and finally Thailand--by truck, train, bicycle, oxcart and even by
foot--to reach a refugee camp.
Before finally making it to the U.S., they spent seven months being shuffled around four Cambodian and Thai camps. At one in Thailand, the primitive Camp Northwest 9, the woman gave birth to the couple's fifth child. Jenny Ha, 18, is that child. Kim Ha, her mother, was a schoolteacher in Vietnam. In America, she had to start over, returning to college while raising her children, including a sixth who was born here. Kim is now a state government auditor. Besides donating copies of her book, in both English and Vietnamese, Kim has given the university audio cassettes of interviews she has conducted with other refugees. The material is part of the exhibit called "Documenting the Southeast Asian Refugee Experience," which will continue at the main library through April. Maybe viewing this exhibit can help us better understand what we need to hold dear, Kim believes. "Freedom is so precious," she said. "But too often we take it for granted." UC Irvine has put together the largest Southeast Asian refugee archive collection in the county. (You can see its listings on the Internet through www.lib.uci.edu/rrsc/sasian.html.)The pieces in the exhibit come from that collection. The small exhibit doesn't take long to tour. And it whets your appetite to see and read more in the archives, on the library's fifth floor. You cannot study the history of change in Orange County from 1975 through the early 1980s without including the refugees' story. Nearly 1 million Southeast Asians settled in the U.S. during that time. Close to 400,000 settled in California, most of whom came to the Southland. One long glass-enclosed case in the exhibit concentrates on the actual years of turmoil, as refugees were forced from their homelands in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. In one printed interview, a Vietnamese man talks of spending a year repairing a leaky old boat, 33 feet long, and leaving with friends in the dead of night to avoid getting shot by soldiers. The boat was built for a maximum of 31 people. But when it arrived several weeks later in Malaysia, 136 were aboard. Drinking water was passed out by the teaspoon. You had to sleep sitting up. But then, he said, few people could really sleep, they were so terrified of getting caught and shot. They'd seen it happen to many others. Four other exhibit cases are divided by culture: Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and the Hmong Laotians. One Hmong student poignantly writes, "The Hmong are a people without a country. . . . We have moved, accepted and assimilated to wherever we have found ourselves. And through it all, we have been able to retain our identity and culture." Kim Ha's book is preserved in a closed glass display case, but you can find it in the upstairs archives and at a few libraries. I found a copy at the central library in Westminster. It's a powerful and emotional saga of her family's determination to survive. While many left Vietnam in 1975, Ha and her husband, Vinh, stayed on, hoping to make their own peace with their communist dictators. But soon they were forced to live like prisoners, with the government taking over their house in Saigon and many of their possessions. Ha writes that things were so bad that "if the street lights could walk, they would have escaped." She and her family spent months planning an escape, only to be arrested and put in prison for a short time on their first try. A few months later, in March 1980, they tried again. Along their route, they were beaten by soldiers, robbed and faced despair so great that Ha writes she wanted to die "to escape the terrible reality: no money, no home, no future and no destination." And with four small children crying to return home. Once they did reach the camps, life hardly got better. Thai soldiers searched the tents looking for young women to rape. A pregnant Kim was spared. But there was a camaraderie among the refugees. When Jenny was born, others shared their meager rations with Kim. Jenny Ha, of course, remembers only the good times growing up in Huntington Beach and Garden Grove. But she knows the stories of that time from her mother and older siblings. She knows the pain they suffered. Jenny has not, however, read her mother's book, which only came out in English two years ago. "I want to; I'm so very proud of her," she said. "It's on my bookshelf." She's saving it, she said, for a block of time when she can focus on it without the distraction of school and work. For now, she will make it to the exhibit. "I know my family suffered greatly to get here," she said. "Some students might not go there just to see the exhibit, but once they're at the library, they'll take a look. And maybe learn something." Kim believes that all from Orange County can learn from it, and that the exhibit can help in bringing us all closer. "The more people know about the refugee experience, the more tolerant they will be." Jerry Hicks' column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to: jerry.hicks@latimes.com
Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
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