By Mahlon Meyer
Northwest Asian Weekly
Sen Vuu and Kim Vuu, husband and wife (Photo provided by Elizabeth Phan)
Memory knows before forgetting endures, sees, hears, feels the sway of the boat, the flaccid scent of 275 bodies packed like cordwood, knows a destination where they ate leaves and tiny crabs for a year until they came to the U.S.
Sen Vuu, 78, does not want to remember. Indeed, as the former refugee from Vietnam now helps a Ukrainian family get settled, he has only one thing in his mind: giving back.
“I remember,” he says, in a lilting voice that is young for his years, young for the long journey he took with his family to escape, that led him through pirate-infested waters, to a dry, parching refugee camp for a year on an Indonesian island, and finally to Bothell with the help of a host family.
“I remember when I first arrived, I had nothing, and there were so many people who helped me, so now I want to give back.”
But as he works with a team of volunteers to settle a Ukrainian family, the flotsam of memories cannot help but come back.
They are cued by little things. He tells no one about them.
It is different than when he discussed memories of the escape during the holidays with his children or during camping trips when the leaves would remind them of the ones they ate in Bahara in Indonesia, when there was nothing else, or the clams his daughters find on beaches here, in the Pacific Northwest, and they remembers digging up crabs 40 years earlier in the camp.
Now, he keeps the memories to himself.
But they still come.
A background
Vuu had been hosting Vietnamese families for decades, teaching them how to survive in the United States before helping them find housing. He and his wife had steady jobs, as custodians in the Seattle Public School District, which was a far cry from his job as a radar technician in the Air Force in Vietnam and then his transfer to headquarters where he was an administrator.
But the jobs allowed him to support over a dozen refugee families after they arrived.
With his own hands, he remodeled his basement to create three additional basements for refugee families.
So when World Relief, in partnership with his church, approached him about helping to settle a Ukrainian family, he was ready.
“I knew what to do,” he said.
40 years apart
Vuu became the driver. The Ukrainian wife was pregnant. And besides that, the whole family was required to attend a slew of appointments and fill out forms, to make sure they had the required vaccines and were considered healthy by the government.
Only the wife spoke English, and haltingly. But it was enough for him and others to understand.
Forty years earlier, Vuu remembered, his broken English had saved the life of his daughter. Hunched down in the lower deck of the boat, leaving Vietnam in 1979, the family sat in fetal positions amidst a throng of other escapees.
All of his six children were struggling to breathe amidst the pressing of bodies, even as their mother tried to shield them with her outstretched arms and legs around them. But it was later found that 7-year-old Linda had asthma.
She was suffocating.
When some Thai pirates stopped the boat, after a day and a half, Vuu yelled out to them in Chinese, a dialect that they would understand (Vuu’s father was Chinese).
Up until that moment, no one dared to move, because the slightest movement would flip the boat, or immerse it.
But now the pirates called Vuu and his family up to the top deck, after the boat had stopped.
One-month-old babies
After driving the pregnant Ukrainian wife to the doctor, Vuu had the chance to take part in a baby shower for the new baby. The baby shower was unique in two ways. It came after the delivery because of COVID-19—rather than before, when the pandemic was still severe. And for the Ukrainians, it was a first.
“They don’t have baby showers in their country,” said Elizabeth Phan, 51, Vuu’s second eldest daughter, who was 9 when they crossed. “Every time the husband and wife talked about the baby shower after that, they had tears in their eyes,” she said.
For Vuu, the $100 he gave in a red envelope was simply because he didn’t know what the family might need. He had already joined with church members in buying a new bed for the two boys. But the one-month-old daughter had a whole life ahead of her.
Forty years earlier, so did his one-month-old son, whom he was carrying on one arm as he stepped into the pirates’ boat to negotiate. The sight of the young baby of the same age was a reminder of that son.
The pirates, seeing that the refugees were starving and dying of thirst, offered to part with supplies—so long as Vuu handed over his son in exchange.
“I was very scared. I immediately jumped back onto our boat,” said Vuu.
But the Thai pirates “loved children,” said Vuu. And they pitied Vuu and his family, and after some deliberation, handed him two five-gallon jugs of water and rice soup.
“They said, ‘This is for your family only,’” said Vuu, now balding and with lines on his forehead where he once had springy black hair.
After they left, Vuu shared the supplies with the other refugees. Each one got a capful of water.
Construction
Usually, Phan, who is on the board of World Relief, helps out refugee families with their resumes and helps them in their job hunts. But this time, the Ukrainian father already knew someone in another church who found him a job in construction. It was a far drop down from his work in Ukraine, where his wife and he had run a computer store, assembling parts, and effecting repairs, “like a mini Best Buy,” said Pham.
For Vuu, it was almost as if he had seen himself, during his first few years here, working construction for 75 cents an hour.
It was after leaving his job in construction that he found work in the Seattle School District, where he stayed for 32 years. His wife, who was an elementary school teacher in Vietnam, joined him there and also worked as a custodian for 28 years.
Asked if, like the Ukrainian family, it was a big let down after being in a different type of career in Vietnam, he said they were only grateful.
“We accepted it,” he said.
Children
Seeing the Ukrainian family now, 40 years later, Vuu said he thought the parents had done a good job getting their kids out.
Watching the two Ukrainian boys running around the baby shower at his church, eating cookies, he felt they would have a good life.
His own son died one year after arriving in the United States, of encephalitis. Two years later, his wife had another son.
“I am confident that he is in heaven with God and that God is taking care of him,” he said. “After I got faith, I understood that everything happens according to God’s plan,” he said.
To gain more information about helping to resettle refugee families, go to: worldrelief.org/western-wa.
To learn more about relief efforts for low-income people in the Lynnwood area, go to: alderwood.cc/compassion-center.
Mahlon can be contacted at info@nwasianweekly.com.