Published: June 24, 2009 09:56 pm         

After immigrating in 1975, the Vu family has lived an American dream

TERRE HAUTE — More than 40 people crammed into a beautifully landscaped northside home last weekend, as Joseph and Mary Therese Vu’s 50 years of marriage were celebrated.

But as the last of the kids, grandchildren and great-grandchildren packed up Monday evening for cross-country treks home, Joseph Vu vividly remembered the day such a happy gathering was beyond imagination.

Sister Edwardine McNulty, formerly on the General Counsel of the Sisters of Providence, remembers as well.

“That family only had what they could carry,” she said, recalling the spring of 1975, as U.S. troops left Vietnam and communist forces overwhelmed the south. “Even the little children had little bags to carry.”

Once upon a time

Vu, who marked his 70th birthday in February, said both he and his wife originally were from northern Vietnam. But when the country was split in half by the Geneva Conventions in 1954, their families moved south to a city then known as Saigon, away from the rising communist regime. On Nov. 1, 1959 Joseph and Mary Therese married.

A schoolteacher, Vu later joined the army as tensions between North and South Vietnam mounted, eventually working for U.S. military advisers before the full-blown U.S. invasion. After learning to work on jet engines, Vu served U.S. military contractors and instructed troops within the Vietnamese Air Force, working on F-5 fighter jets.

But in April 1975, the last U.S. troops were leaving and what was then South Vietnam was about to disappear. Vu remembers the family had only two hours to grab whatever they could and board one of the last planes off the peninsula.

Asked if he’d had any plans for what he would do when he got to America, Vu said, “No, not at all.”

Nonetheless, he, his pregnant wife, their six children, his mother, Mary, and his brother-in-law, Dominic, all boarded the plane with what he called “mixed feelings,” happy to escape the communist troops, but worried about their future.

Island hopping

Vu said he spoke some English at the time, but not much. The family’s first stop was Guam, where they stayed for a week before being transported to Hawaii and, from there, to Camp Pendleton in California. They would remain there three months.

Sister McNulty recalled hearing about the family through the Sisters of Providence’s network of nuns, one of whom was at Camp Pendleton at the time. Almost all of the other refugee families had been sponsored and moved out of the camp by then, but the sheer size of the Vu family prevented many potential sponsors from assisting.

“They wouldn’t be split up,” McNulty said, noting that offers were made to break up the group and spread them across different areas. But Vu would not have his family separated, so the nuns stepped up.

“So we made the choice to sponsor them,” she said, recalling driving one of several cars across the country to help with the transport.

On the Sisters of Providence’s land in West Terre Haute at the time was an abandoned schoolhouse equipped with a kitchen. The nuns provided beds, rice, chicken and some vegetables, and offered to help teach the Vu children English.

McNulty recalled Joseph Vu “as a very intelligent man,” and said he went to work immediately.

Vu said it was on his second day in America that he launched into a work schedule: two days a week at the sisters’ water plant and five days as a groundskeeper. He asked permission to work additional hours after those shifts and was given a job in the printing press facility at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College.

And so he worked for two years.

The family continued to expand. Vu and Mary Therese had “adopted” Dominic and, before long, the seven children they had brought to America grew to 11. A 12th died in early childhood.

After a brief search for printing work in Texas, Vu realized his family was too large to rent a home, so back to Vigo County he came. With a loan from the Sisters of Providence, he was able to purchase a small house in West Terre Haute.

Then, “under the providence of God,” Vu said, he secured a job as a laboratory aide at the Eli Lilly plant in Vermillion County. “It’s a good company with good benefits,” he said.

Vu, who had continued his education in English, took more courses and advanced to a technician spot at Lilly. Eventually he moved into the technical lab for research and development and retired after 22 years with the company.

Along the way the house in West Terre Haute had become too small as well, so Vu found a much larger, repossessed home on Terre Haute’s north side that he felt he could afford. But after learning how the property had come to be his, he said he was consumed with concern that he, too, might suffer such a fate; he volunteered for every hour of overtime Eli Lilly would offer, applying it all toward the mortgage.

“I paid if off in five years,” he said of the home he purchased in 1983.

A full house

While their parents’ actual anniversary isn’t until November, the Vu grown children chose Father’s Day weekend as one of the few times the entire crew could assemble.

More than 40 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren descended on the home over the weekend. They hailed from San Diego, Denver, Phoenix, Lincoln, Neb., Indianapolis and Atlanta, Ind.

“We talked about getting hotel rooms,” Vu said, “but the kids said, ‘No, we want to be here with you.’”

All of the Vu children graduated from college — five from Purdue, one from Indiana University, four from Indiana State University and one from a business college in Nebraska.

One grandson, unable to attend the celebration, is a police officer and National Guardsman in Lincoln, Neb. “So he has two jobs right now,” Vu said, proudly, just minutes after recounting his own prodigious work schedule upon immigrating to America.

Son-in-law Wade Hames of Phoenix was among the few last visitors still at the house Monday evening. He said he was glad he’d come.

“Every time we all get together, it’s exciting, to say the least,” he said. Referring to the Vus’ two new great-grandsons, Hames added, “a lot of new babies.”

Joseph Vu, a lifelong Catholic, said he is as thankful for what he has been given as he is at what is being given back.

As he spoke in his family living room of 26 years, four of his children — three pharmacists and a schoolteacher — spackled the kitchen ceiling in the dwindling hours of their visit.

Vu said his sentiments are best condensed into “gratitude and thankfulness to the community.”

While his feelings are many, he said, those words best sum them up because all of his children have become “useful members of society.”

But now those children feel the house in which more people than a baseball team once lived is too big for their parents, and Vu said this past weekend might be the last time the whole family gathers there for a reunion.

Where he and his wife might go is still up in the air, he said.

“I have no idea. Everyone wants us to be with them,” he said, laughing and rattling off big cities like San Diego, Phoenix and Denver.

But then, 34 years ago he had no idea where in America he and Mary Therese might end up after arrival. And to date, the odds seem to be in his favor that, wherever they go, everything will work out just fine.



Brian Boyce can be reached at 812-231-4253 or brian.boyce@tribstar.com