Keeping the culture

Kim Thu Ton wears a Vietnamese-style dress at the Vietnamese Women’s Day celebration at McCoy Pavilion. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

They left their homeland for America calmly, before the "Vietnam Conflict" even began. Or hurriedly, in the throes of war. Or terrified, during its cataclysmic ending. Or in desperation, as the communist government clamped down.

They arrived as adult women, or teens, or tots. And their adjustment to the inevitable clash of cultures depends on what point in that spectrum they inhabit.

Vietnamese women in Hawai‘i represent a kind of microcosm of American immigration, every one with their own stories rooted in their generation’s experiences. As in so many cultures, these women are the keepers of the culture, but some of them had their culture snatched away before they knew it.

The story for Ajah, 25, a student fashion designer, started in 1980 when an aunt spirited her into a boat and away from home and other family. She ended up settling in California with her aunt, not seeing her own parents again until adulthood. Her aunt taught her Vietnamese, but Ajah (who goes by only her first name) basically grew up in a jeans-and-T-shirt world.

"I really wasn’t exposed to Vietnamese culture," she said, clad in a Westernized adaptation of the traditional ao dai (pronounced ow yai) garment. "From what I learned from my aunt, I just combined the two cultures." The ao dai she wore was her own design, a departure from the slim classic lines, with ruffles and flirty slits up both the sheath and the pant legs.

Her teacher is Mai-Scherelle, one of the designers whose work was showcased at Sunday’s fashion show, part of the Vietnamese Women’s Day celebration staged by the American-Vietnamese Association of Hawai‘i.

At 52, Mai-Scherelle belongs to a generation of French-speaking Vietnamese (her father was a French diplomat) who were children during the waning years of French Indochina. She also had training in English and spent time studying in Paris, both experiences smoothing the transition to American life.

Jill Miller, president of the sponsoring association, married an American diplomat who perceived the growing political tensions in Vietnam early on. He relocated to Hawai‘i with his wife and two daughters in 1959, when very few Westerners had the slightest awareness of Vietnam.

Miller, whose English is still heavily accented, saw that her home culture was kept alive within the family, said one daughter, Olga Caldwell.

"That’s why, after all these years, we still can speak Vietnamese," Caldwell said.

Other women found the adjustment much rockier. Hong Stevens was already the mother of two when she met Douglas, her husband of 34 years, in Saigon, where he worked for the Army as a civilian helicopter mechanic. They left at the end of the war under the cover of darkness, aboard an Air Force C-130. One son, who was grown, remained behind; a 14-year-old son traveled with them.

First stop was Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines; then on to Guam, where they tried to eke out a living with a truck farm. A typhoon destroyed those hopes, and they resettled in Hawai‘i in 1990.

Hong worked virtually around the clock in those early years, harvesting coconuts from trees around the Islands and then selling them at farmer’s markets. That supplemented income she later received from a job in food service at Schofield.

"I love it here because of freedom," Stevens said. "But I work hard all the time."

The Stevens family ran a food booth at the women’s day festival, one that spoke volumes about Hong’s acculturation. For sale were not Vietnamese delights, but Hawai‘i favorites: pickled mango and oatmeal cookies.

Next door at the fair, Lien Rusinko enlisted the help of her two sons to run a booth serving phú, the classic Vietnamese beef-noodle soup that has found avid fans among local residents.

Rusinko left Vietnam in 1974 and found her first years here a lonely experience. "Raising kids," she said, "it’s hard for me because I’m away from my family." Two sisters and a brother remain in Saigon.

Separation was hard on her elder son, Tuan Ahn Minders, too, who admitted he gave his mother "a hard time." He found out later that his father had adopted him, he said, and the resentment over secrecy about his biological dad added to the general mother-son stress of adolescence. He missed his grandmother in Vietnam, who had coddled him. "I was the only one she let sleep on the bed," he remembered with a smile.

Another vendor, Loan Pak, fled Vietnam as Saigon fell, arriving in Hawai‘i alone with two small sons (her Korean husband had to come by another route). The language problem represented a hurdle, but not an insurmountable one, she said.

Eventually the Paks had three sons who had to be shepherded through a cultural divide. Pak remembers having to rein them in when they watched their friends whose parents exercised fewer disciplinary constraints.

"They would say, ‘How come their mother is not strict? How come you are?’" Pak said, with a shrug and a smile.

Surely there are Vietnamese women who could barely keep afloat, but theirs were not the stories in evidence at Vietnamese Women’s Day. The women we met had found ways to do more than survive - they had managed to thrive despite the necessary losses that come with immigration.

One is Phuong Thi Bui, 56, who set up her fortune-telling booth at the fair. Besides running her full-time psychic consultancy at the Chinese Cultural Plaza and the International Market Place, Bui works on call as a translator for the courts. She hears their stories, their crises of language and cultural barriers, but she has yet to hear of a hardship that her own family has not endured.

She is one of 10 children. One brother died in action, another drowned while trying to escape Vietnam by boat. Her father taught her palmistry and other fortune-telling arts as a fall-back vocation should her livelihood as herbalist not pan out. Since she came to Hawai‘i in 1990, fortune-telling has been Bui’s bread and butter.

She flips over the reporter’s hand and points out sundry worry lines. Then she displays her own, relatively unlined, palm.

"Very simple, see? I don’t worry," she said. "My struggle is my success, unhappiness leads to happiness."

Bui does not like to talk about the hard times, only the happy ending: "I love it here."

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