51视频

06/06/2024
By Katharine Webster

On April 15, 1975, Lan and Hai Pho and their baby boy caught the last commercial flight out of Saigon before the South Vietnamese capital fell to North Vietnamese forces. They left behind everything except a suitcase full of diapers.

The Phos were U.S.-educated and had U.S. residency, which allowed them to return here.

Their families and friends weren鈥檛 so lucky.

鈥淚 was so fortunate to get out at that time without any harm to me and my family,鈥� Hai Pho says now.

Their good fortune brought with it a sense of obligation. The Phos brought family members to the U.S., welcomed other Southeast Asian refugees and co-founded the , which scaled up its services when the U.S. government settled about 100 families from Cambodia and Laos in the Greater Lowell and Lawrence area.

The couple, both now retired from 51视频, also made an indelible impact on generations of students.

In recognition of their contributions to the city and university, the Phos were invited to campus recently for , hosted by UML鈥檚 Asian American Center for Excellence and Engagement (AACEE), a student support program.

鈥淭heir work to help Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong and Lao refugees in the 1980s is nothing short of remarkable,鈥� Sue Kim, incoming dean of the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, told nearly 100 people at the event.

鈥淲e are now an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution with a center that provides wraparound support for our growing Asian American student population,鈥� said Kim, who co-wrote the federal grant establishing AACEE. She is also co-founder and co-director of the university鈥檚 Center for Asian American Studies and principal investigator for the Southeast Asian Digital Archive.

鈥淏ut these things don鈥檛 just come out of the blue. Everything that we see today 鈥� at the university and community and state levels 鈥� is the result of our elders, like the Phos, seeing need outside oneself, working hard, taking risks and being brave.鈥�

Image by James Higgins

Early Education in the U.S.

Hai Pho came to the U.S. in 1954 to attend a Christian Brothers high school in Waltham, Massachusetts, and then went to Boston College, where he earned a B.A. in history.

Lan Pho came to the United States in spring 1960 to study business and home economics at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, after winning a Leadership Scholarship from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the South Vietnamese government. 聽

The two met a couple of months later when Hai, thinking she might be a distant cousin, looked her up while attending a summer program for Vietnamese students near Chicago. They weren鈥檛 related, but he was charmed by her and courted her over the next few years.

They were separated by an ocean in 1964, when Lan returned to Vietnam for the two years of service required by her scholarship. She taught at the National School of Commerce, then returned to the U.S. in 1966 with a fellowship from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where she earned an MBA in human resources management.

51视频 in hand, Lan took a job as director of personnel at St. Joseph鈥檚 Hospital in Lowell because Hai, who was working on a Ph.D. in political science at Boston University, had just begun teaching history at 51视频. The Phos married in late 1968.

The following year, Hai was recruited to help two other history professors, Dean Bergeron and Joyce Denning, start the university鈥檚 brand-new Department of Political Science.

After Hai received his Ph.D. in 1972, then-university President Daniel O鈥橪eary offered him a choice between tenure or a promotion from assistant to associate professor; Hai chose tenure. He also requested a two-year leave of absence without pay, wanting to serve his native country.

The Phos returned to Vietnam shortly after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973. Lan was recruited by the National Bank of Vietnam to work with the United Nations Development Program advisor on reorganizing the Vietnamese banking system.

For the next two years, Lan鈥檚 job provided most of the family鈥檚 income while Hai taught U.S. history and international relations at the University of Saigon Law School.

Hai鈥檚 choice of tenure at 51视频 proved life-saving as North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon: It meant that he, Lan and their first-born, a boy, were able to escape.

Image by K. Webster

Helping Refugees

As soon as they returned to Lowell, the Phos began sponsoring and resettling family members and informally helping other Vietnamese refugees in greater Boston. In 1977, they and a dozen Boston-area friends incorporated the Indochinese Refugee Foundation to assist these new immigrants, most of them professionals and businesspeople, and keep their culture alive.

Then, in 1979, the U.S. began admitting more Southeast Asian refugees, including Vietnamese 鈥渂oat people鈥� living in refugee camps, Cambodians fleeing the brutal Khmer Rouge, and Hmong villagers and others from Laos who had assisted U.S. forces. The State Department decided to resettle these refugees in clusters, including about 100 families who were sent to the Lowell-Lawrence area.

The government paid $500 per refugee to a local agency for resettlement, but it wasn鈥檛 nearly enough: Most of the refugees were women and children with little or no formal education, the Phos say.

The Indochinese Refugee Foundation sprang into action, with help from the Phos鈥� friends and other volunteers. Hai lobbied the State Department for more assistance, and eventually the foundation won a grant to assist the refugees with finding affordable housing, enrolling their children in school, accessing medical and mental health care, learning English and training for jobs.

The Phos hired Jacquie Moloney, who would later become UML chancellor, as project director for the foundation, alongside a bilingual teacher. But all of their efforts inspired refugees from Cambodia and Laos settled in other parts of the U.S. to move to Lowell 鈥� an unintended secondary migration that put tremendous pressure on city services.

鈥淚t was very much a crisis situation,鈥� Moloney says. 鈥淭he hospitals were overwhelmed, the schools were overwhelmed 鈥� In many cases, they put multiple families into a small apartment with no dishes or silverware, and they had no interpreters at the time, no health care.鈥�

A New Model of Help

Moloney鈥檚 main job was to build a network of interpreters and outreach workers. The Phos insisted that the foundation hire refugees who spoke some English 鈥� something almost no other refugee assistance organizations did at the time.

The Phos also identified respected elders in the community and insisted that Moloney visit them in their homes, bringing small gifts and accepting a cup of tea to earn their trust, Moloney says.

鈥淭his was a community that had lost so much. The first thing the Phos wanted to accomplish was to give them back their dignity, and that鈥檚 what drove everything we did,鈥� she says.

Hai led the foundation鈥檚 political efforts, helping to persuade then-Gov. Michael Dukakis to establish the Massachusetts Refugee Advisory Council in 1982, on which Hai served as co-chair.

After the first crisis passed, Lan, who was working for the Federal Reserve and teaching some management classes at the university as adjunct faculty, focused on getting the women jobs so they could become self-sufficient. She approached large companies and persuaded them to hire the women and provide them with training, including workplace English classes.

After five years, the Phos helped the refugees transition to three self-help organizations reflecting their distinct cultures and languages, and the foundation ended its resettlement work.

The Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association is still going strong today, and Lowell has the second largest community of Cambodian Americans in the U.S.

鈥淭hey saved that community,鈥� Moloney says.

Image by K. Webster

A Pathway to Education

One major challenge remained: educating the refugee children. At first, the city school system placed all of them in a single building, the Moore Street School.

鈥淭he prevailing teaching approach at that time was to concentrate them in one school so they could learn English faster,鈥� Lan says. 鈥淏ut we thought that exchanging English for their native language and family education would harm the youngsters, and something needed to be done.鈥�

As some of the children moved on to middle and high school, even as more Southeast Asian refugees flocked to Lowell, Lan and the foundation鈥檚 bilingual education teacher, Joan Seeley, began visiting schools and interviewing students, teachers and principals.

They soon realized that the teachers were ill-prepared to help their Southeast Asian students, so the Phos sought help from the university鈥檚 School of Education.

The school hired Lan as full-time staff, and she enrolled in the new Doctor of Education program, where she did research on the refugees.

Lan developed a seminar, Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asian Countries, that the university offered to teachers after school and during the summers. She brought in Southeast Asian parents to help provide cultural context for curriculum development.

In some years, she even got grant funding to send a few Lowell teachers to spend several weeks at a school in one of the Southeast Asian countries from which their students came.

Advocate for Diversity

As the university鈥檚 students became more diverse, Lan, who completed her Ed.D. in 1994, was named founding director of the university鈥檚 Office of Diversity and Pluralism, now the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

Among other initiatives, she developed the New Horizons program, a partnership between Lowell High School and the School of Education, to prepare promising Southeast Asian teenagers for college. The summer program paid the students a stipend so they could afford to attend instead of working.

Many New Horizons graduates went on to attend Middlesex Community College and 51视频, while some won scholarships to attend private schools, including Harvard University and Wellesley and Merrimack colleges.

Some of their descendants are at 51视频 today, where 12% of students are Asian and Asian American. A few, including Registrar Mai Nguyen and Senior Assoc. Director of Financial Aid Thu-Ha Pham, work at the university.

But the Phos themselves are modest about what they accomplished, insisting it was a community effort supported by their friends in the area and at the university.

鈥淲e can never forget the university 鈥� it is our roots,鈥� Hai and Lan told the audience at the event. 鈥淲e deeply appreciate and are truly thankful to the faculty, deans, graduate students and undergraduate students.鈥�