At Last, a Fresh Beginning

Lanh Lam is nothing if not resilient.

He has been in the United States less than two months and has failed the driver’s license test three times. No matter. He’s happy to try again.

He waited nearly a week to get a ride from a relative so he could enroll his youngest children in grade school. Bewildered by the signs and street names he couldn’t understand, he didn’t want to risk heading off by himself.

His 18-year-old son, Tuan, was a bit braver and boarded a city bus by himself to attend English classes at a cultural center four miles away. It took him three hours to make the trip, as he haphazardly got on and off buses.

Unbowed, Lam and his family push forward in a strange land, more curious than afraid.

“I will endure anything as long as there’s freedom,” Lam said. “I didn’t want anything more than freedom.”

Life in America has not been an easy adjustment for Lam and his family, who were in the first wave of Vietnamese refugees to arrive in Southern California after being stranded in the Philippines since 1991. In all, about 2,000 are expected to come to America in the next six months.

Lam, his wife and their five children -- Tuan, 18; Thuy, 16; Huy, 15; Duy, 12, and Huyen, 9 -- landed at Los Angeles International Airport in September along with more than 220 other Vietnamese refugees. Like Lam, many had spent many years trying to get to America.

They were among the last of the so-called boat people who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, only to find themselves stuck in the Philippines without legal status. Afraid to return to their homeland and unwanted by any other country, they settled in camps. They could not own businesses, homes or even hold certain jobs.

Refugee advocates lobbied for the immigrants last year and successfully persuaded U.S. and Philippine officials to hammer out a resettlement plan.

For the Lams, home is now a 1950s-era stucco house with purple carpeting in Westminster. They share the three-bedroom home with another Vietnamese family that arrived in the United States several years ago.

The furnishings are sparse. There are folding tables and chairs, mattresses on the floor for sleeping, and a few figurines they bought in the Philippines before coming to America.

The Lams needed the help of a cousin, who settled in Garden Grove with her husband and two children four years ago, to act as a co-signer on the lease. Their monthly payment is $1,500, and the Lams say they don’t know how they’re going to come up with the money.

“I’ve applied for government assistance,” Lam said. “There are so many people I have to talk to, and I get sent from one person to the next.”

He hopes to get food stamps and health benefits. His spirits were buoyed recently when a friend got such benefits in a week. But Lam is still waiting.

But the Lams have put up with worse, and less.

In Vietnam, Lam ran a small fishing boat in the coastal town of Nha Trang. He said the boat was seized by the communist government in 1977. So he fled to a nearby town, where he worked as an extra hand on a fishing boat. He met his future wife, Lac Le, on the docks there, where she would buy tuna and resell it for a meager profit.

In 1991, the family, now grown to five with three children, squeezed into a rickety boat with 34 others and drifted at sea for six days before landing in the Philippines. The voyage cost them three bars of gold.

Like so many before them, their plan was to push on to the U.S. Lam and his wife knew people who had come to the U.S. and had heard of places to settle in such as Little Saigon.

In the Philippines, the refugees settled in camps outside Manila and Palawan, one of the least developed islands. The Lams lived in refugee camps and eventually moved into barracks. To eke out a living, they sold slippers, rubbing oil, perfume, nail clippers and skin cream from a sidewalk stand, making about $5 a day.

Every hour or so, the police would cruise by and inspect for business licenses. Like others in their situation, the Lams were not permitted such a license. So they would scoop their wares into plastic sheets and run. Some days, they moved as many as a dozen times.

“It was horrible,” said Le, 47. “It was so hard, but we had to put the kids through school.”

Lam said he forced the children to focus on nursing, believing it would provide a pathway to the United States. Huy, 15, said he had heard that nurses made good money and were eagerly sought in the United States. Just the same, he said his childhood dream was to become a sailor.

On their last day in the Philippines, the Lams gathered for a day of shopping for essentials to bring to the United States. They gave belongings to friends and gathered for dinners to say goodbye. They brought one suitcase with them to America.

They had been “waiting in the Philippines for so long that we made friends and were sad to leave them,” Le said. “But as soon as we got on the plane, we were so ecstatic. We couldn’t stop imagining what our new life would be like.”

So far, it hasn’t been easy. The days are filled with one constant: waiting. Lam waits for his cousin to make her weekly visit and take the family grocery shopping in Little Saigon. He waits to take the driver’s test again. He waits for a job and a source of income.

Yet, he has never been happier.

“I have to get my driver’s license first because people tell me that you have to have [a car] to get around California,” Lam said.

Lam and his son Tuan spend nights reading old driving tests, unaware there are study guides in Vietnamese. And Le is anxious to place an ad in one of the area’s many Vietnamese newspapers to find a job as a baby-sitter. But that would cost at least $20, and she would need a ride to the newspaper. For now, neither the cash nor the ride is available.

Lam says he fears his children won’t adjust to their new lives, but they already seem far ahead of their father. They play basketball in the backyard, watch television with friends and have already discovered hamburgers at McDonald’s.

On a recent day, Huyen, 9, sported a tight, ruffled crop top that showed her stomach. She wants to change her name to Mary, a character she remembers from a book.

Duy and Huy want to change their names to John and Paul, after Pope John Paul II.

Despite the adjustments, Lam says he feels safe and stable, and smells freedom.

“No one can take away my house or my car for no reason. No one can arrest me for no reason. I get to work hard, buy what I want and no one can take it from me,” Lam said. “I have to start my life all over again, but at least my children won’t have to go through what I did. They will have opportunities.”