What would parents do in order to ensure their children receive a good education?
For the parents of Phong Chan and his four brothers, it meant leaving a comfortable life and learning everything all over again.
Chan’s family left their home in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1988 when Phong was 10 years old, and they arrived in the United States two years later.
Anh Lu, Chan’s mother, said her family left most of their belongings and lives behind.
“I wanted my children to have a good future,” Lu said. “I wanted my children to go to school.”
Chan, now 22 and an architecture student at the University, went from a life of luxury to being the odd child out in elementary school in Portland, and he is just now starting to feel comfortable in his Asian skin.
In Saigon, his parents owned several bakeries and a restaurant and were of high social status — they had 20 to 30 maids working for them, and Chan had two especially
for himself.
“I was a spoiled little kid,” he said. “Even taking a bath — I just had to sit there.”
Corruption within the government, though, meant their lives weren’t always easy. Chan’s parents also were unsatisfied with the country’s higher education.
After high school, it’s “out to the work field,” Chan said.
Chan’s family left Saigon in 1988 and spent the next two years living in refugee camps in Malaysia and the Philippines, waiting for someone to sponsor their relocation. In Malaysia, they lived on Kuala Lum Bua, a small island with a population of 3,000. Their residence — a section of a longhouse ­ had no running water, electricity, beds or a kitchen.
“It was pretty much like a camping trip,” Chan said.
While the lifestyle was difficult on the family, Chan said he has no regrets.
“If I had to do it all over again, I would still leave,” he said.
In 1990, a Portland-area Vietnamese-American pastor sponsored their move and found jobs at Dunkin Donuts for Chan’s parents. Several months later, his dad found a better job as an assembly line worker, and his mother now works for a biotechnical company.
“The whole process of coming over here has made our whole family completely different,” Chan said. “We pretty much started with nothing.”
Chan began his American education in the fourth grade, in 1990. He said he could not understand anything his classmates or teachers spoke about for the first two months.
“It was terrible,” he said. “You’re the only one who just sits there, and everyone else is looking at you funny. I learned to communicate with gestures a lot.”
Chan said while teachers and some students sympathized with him, a few picked on him throughout elementary school.
“They would cuss at me, and I would have no clue what they were saying,” he said, adding he would later ask teachers what the words meant. “I got a couple of them in trouble.”
Chan said he was the only Asian student in his school throughout his elementary education.
Middle school was not fun for Chan. He said he received many cold stares from fellow students and was pushed around more often. The harassment reached a climax when some students followed Chan home, and his older brothers came out to protect him.
“After that, they pretty much left me alone,” Chan said.
This period of Chan’s life was difficult for him because he had no close friends to confide in, and he did not feel comfortable around anyone except his family — and it only got worse after his father passed away in 1995.
In high school, Chan made his first close friends, some of them white, and his first girlfriend, who was Vietnamese. Asian people criticized him for being “whitewashed” because he spent time with white friends.
After graduating from high school, Chan moved to Corvallis and enrolled at Oregon State University’s engineering school, but after three years, he realized that was not what he wanted. After a struggle to convince his mother he wanted to study architecture, he transferred to the University in the fall of 2002.
According to the registrar’s Web site, there are only four Vietnamese students at the University. The low number may be because others haven’t yet blazed a trail. International Student Association co-Director Gabriela Serrano said family ties are important.
“The majority of international students here have either come here because a sibling was here before them or there is an exchange program, or because they have some relative here,” she said.
Now a member of the University Vietnamese Student Association, Chan feels more comfortable around his white and Asian peers — but he said he has never thought a white girl would find him attractive, adding he sees a lot more white men dating Asian women than vice versa.
“I feel like there is a barrier — I don’t feel comfortable approaching a Caucasian girl,” he said. “Maybe they don’t know much about us or our culture. Maybe they think we are too different from them.”
Chan said he still hears hurtful comments, like “go back to where you came from.”
“Sometimes I feel like they won’t accept our culture,” he said. “We’re like everyone else.”
The negative feelings, though, have eased with time. All four of Chan’s brothers have graduated from college — the first members of his family with four-year college degrees — and he has a short time before the reason for the family’s move to the United States will
be complete.
“Going through all that made me a lot stronger and open-minded,” he said.