Preserving Pieces of the Refugee Experience

IRVINE — Khang Lai sees his entire life on the shelves and in the file cabinets of this small room on the third floor of UC Irvine’s main library.

The 23-year-old student picks up a book and thumbs through, nodding at the descriptions of Southeast Asian refugee camps, where he and his family lived after fleeing the Communist takeover in Vietnam two decades ago.

Below that beckon volumes of books, theses and papers on everything from “Vietnamese Novels in French” to “Lao Adolescents in Honolulu” to “The Traditional Vietnamese Family in Transition.” Posters from Tet festivals in Orange County and nearby cities adorn the cinder-block walls.

Taking stock of the room, the Southeast Asian Archive, Lai says, “it sort of depicts me.”

That is the intent of this unusual collection that began 10 years ago in a couple of file cabinet drawers in a basement office.

It has now blossomed into a treasured resource that includes more than 2,000 items and offers the best hope nationwide both for students researching local Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian culture and for community members trying to preserve the history of Southeast Asian refugees, with Orange County home to the largest such community in the country.

Although other universities have collections related to Southeast Asia, they focus on the Vietnam War and the history of those countries.

But scholars and archivists say UC Irvine’s collection is the most extensive devoted solely to the refugee experience.

“Besides Irvine and our collection, no other library in the country has anything like it,” said Wei-Chi Poon, director of UC Berkeley’s Asian American Library, which often refers students to Irvine’s more comprehensive collection of refugee and emigre materials.

To call the collection eclectic seems an understatement.

Need “Traditional Recipes of Laos”? It’s here. A 1965 issue of the Vietnamese literary magazine Bach Khoa? In a box in the far corner. The latest issue of Suorsday, a Cambodian-language magazine from Long Beach? Check the display rack. Transcript of an interview with a refugee in a Malaysian camp? In the cabinet against the far wall. A copy of the defunct Hmong Times? Which year?

On a recent day, Brown University graduate student Karin Aguilar-San Juan sifted through clippings and other materials as part of her doctoral research on the business and economic development of Southeast Asian emigre communities.

“Every time I come here there is far too much to absorb,” said Aguilar-San Juan, who has visited the archive a few times.

Yong Chen, a UCI history professor who studies immigration, said the archive has become known for its invaluable first-hand accounts of life in refugee camps and the experiences of emigres in Orange County and other communities across the country.

“Sometimes primary resource materials are burned at libraries because of space or because nobody cares,” Chen said. “For decades, students of European immigration as well as Asian communities have always tried to do everything possible to protect and collect and preserve these kinds of primary resources because if you don’t do it now, with the passage of time, it will be too late.”

Indeed, it was community leaders in Little Saigon, fretting that the memory of their experiences would be lost to time, who initiated the archive and persuaded university officials to house it.

Duong Cao Pham, a high school teacher and lecturer at UCI, is credited with conceiving the idea, which he said occurred to him after learning that an East Coast university was collecting materials related to the war.

With Orange County home to the largest refugee population, Pham thought there should be a similar archive here, documenting the emigres’ experiences in fleeing Vietnam and settling in America.

“We thought it would be a pity if such an experience would be completely lost,” said Vu-Dinh Minh, a Westminster doctor and one of the archive’s founders. “We felt if we could collect it, it would help the Vietnamese remember their background and also contribute to America some perception about our values. The archive is important for the community to feel they are part of U.S. life.”

University administrators said they could only offer a small space in the basement. If the idea took off, they said, more room would be found.

It did.

More than 100 books were collected from Little Saigon publishers and bookstores. Others in the community donated newspaper clippings describing their plight, correspondence and personal papers. And shortly after it was founded, the archive’s mission expanded to include all Southeast Asian refugee groups, not just the Vietnamese.

The archive eventually moved out of the basement to its current quarters in a larger room on the library’s third floor.

Pham attributes much of this growth to archive librarian Anne Frank, whose zealous pursuit of materials by way of advertisements in local newspapers and visits to homes and social gatherings--even garage sales--has won her constant plaudits from community leaders.

The archive survives on about $2,000 a year that UCI provides in addition to Frank’s salary; monetary donations and grants are few and meager. The vast majority of the collection came from the closets, trunks and bookcases of people in the community.

Frank, who has been with the archive from its inception, rarely turns anything away. A fading art exhibit poster or tattered flier announcing a social gathering may not seem like much now, “but if you keep it, in 10 or 20 years it becomes important,” Frank said.

She does a brisk inter-library loan business with institutions across the country. Since she put up a site on the World Wide Web three years ago, the e-mail hasn’t stopped.

Most of the queries and visits come from students, but a fair number of people from the community--and an occasional veteran--do amble in for a look at history, Frank said.

The most requested items are the dissertations, newspaper clippings and personal remembrances in the form of poems and prose of life in Vietnam, refugee camps and new homes.

Garden Grove writer Kim Ha donated tapes of interviews with refugees that she made while researching a 1992 book depicting her escape from Vietnam and those of others. She also gave the inch-thick manuscript, written in Vietnamese in longhand on loose-leaf paper.

“In that manuscript there are a lot of tears because when I wrote at night I had to relive it all again,” said Ha, whose English-language version of the book, “Stormy Escape,” was published this month. “I cried a lot and you can see where the tears flowed on the pages.”

For the community, the archive often seems a mirror, a place where they see themselves and ponder both past and future.

“I feel at home there,” said Yen Do, editor of Nguoi Viet, a Westminster-based daily that is the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the country.

But he and others would like to see the archive expand and increase its hours--it is open from 1 to 4 p.m., five days a week.

Some in the community praise the university for maintaining the archive but in the same breath lament that it doesn’t offer a Vietnamese language course or a program studying Vietnamese or Southeast Asian immigration.

The university does include one course, the Vietnamese American Experience, but the lack of a full-fledged program, or major in Asian American studies, has long been a sore point with students and the community.

Ketu Katrak, who was named director of Asian American studies last fall, sympathized with the complaints and said she agreed there was a need for a Vietnamese-language class.

But her priority, she said, is winning approval from the university to offer a bachelor’s degree in the more broad-based Asian American discipline. It is currently offered only as a minor, but under a proposal she submitted in December it could be a major as soon as next year.

Demand for classes connected with the refugee experience is evident. Duong Cao Pham, who has taught the Vietnamese American Experience class at UCI since 1989, says there is a waiting list of 70 to 100 students.

And when that class’s deadline for term papers approaches, the archives fill with students scrambling for books, papers and other materials.

Lai, now a student assistant at the archive, last year wrote a paper on Buddhism using only materials from the archive.

“I never thought UCI could amass this type of collection,” he said.

The Southeast Asian Archive Web site is at: https://pitcairn.lib.uci.edu/sea/seahome.html

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Newcomer Niche

The UC Irvine library houses a 10-year-old collection of documents and other materials chronicling the experiences of Southeast Asian immigrants who left their homeland because of war in the mid-1970s. About that collection:

Southeast Asian Archive

Purpose: Preserve the history of Southeast Asian refugees and their experience

Location: 3rd floor, UCI main library

Hours: 1-4 p.m., Monday through Friday (off-hours by appointment only)

What you’ll find there: More than 2,000 items on local Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian culture, including doctoral dissertations, books, videos, audiotapes, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers

For more information or appointment: (714) 824-4968 or e-mail questions to [email protected]

Source: UC Irvine