By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Staff Writer
I’ve always wondered how Vietnamese women manage to camouflage so much steely determination under such feminine grace and charm.
Take Jill Miller, who arrived on our shores in 1960, the second Vietnamese immigrant in Hawai‘i. She’d hardly walked off the airplane before she was organizing a medicine and clothing drive for fire victims in Saigon.
Without taking a breath, Miller started Operation School House for children of Vietnamese military back home. The Communist takeover of Vietnam put a stop to that so Miller, who married an American, launched the Vietnamese American Association of Hawai‘i, an organization that is still going strong.
Now Miller and her daughter, who is just as polite and determined, have twisted my arm to write about Vietnamese Women’s Day in Hawai‘i, commemorated Sunday at McCoy Pavilion in Ala Moana Park.
That’s how I discovered the truth about Vietnamese women: They’ve taken charge for years. Some of their greatest national heroes — uh, heroines — are women.
In A.D. 40, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, two daughters of a military officer, led a rebellion against their Chinese overlords in the area where Hanoi is now.
I have no doubt that the Trung sisters were petite. That didn’t stop them from mobilizing an army, with many women leaders, that drove the hated Chinese from Vietnamese soil.
Trac was proclaimed queen. She dismantled the bureaucracy and tax system.
It took China’s greatest general, Ma Yuan, to defeat the ferocious Trung sisters and execute them. Legend has it that the sisters chose death by their own hands.
So it’s no wonder that women’s rights came to Vietnam before they became manifest in the United States.
About the time Columbus discovered America, the Vietnamese legal code decreed women equal to men in almost every respect. Women didn’t need parental consent to marry. Daughters inherited equally along with sons.
That what Vietnamese Women’s Day is about, along with several local heroines:
 Yuong Lan, 89, who owned a successful millinery shop and a tea plantation in Vietnam before moving to Switzerland and Hawai‘i. A widow, she lives alone, takes care of herself and owns her own home.
Kieu-Nga Huynh, an architect in Vietnam who fled when the Communists took over in 1975. She joined an architectural firm in Hawai‘i.
Mai Snyder, who came to Hawai‘i as a student to study accounting. After she left the accounting business to have a baby, Snyder met living expenses by running a lunchwagon.
Women’s Day will feature Vietnamese fashion shows at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., along with food booths, music and displays of Vietnamese needlecraft and art.
[back to top] |
