Southeast Asia Refugees’ History Finds a Home

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

The 23-year-old student picks a book off a shelf and thumbs through, nodding knowingly at the descriptions of Southeast Asian refugee camps, where he and his family lived after fleeing the Communist takeover of South 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 was begun 10 years ago in a couple of file cabinet drawers in a basement office.

It has blossomed into a treasured resource that has more than 2,000 items and offers the best hope in the United States both for students researching local Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian culture and for community members trying to preserve the history of Southeast Asian refugees.

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

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.

Yong Chen, a UC Irvine history professor who studies immigration, said the archive has become known for its firsthand 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.”

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 UC Irvine, is credited with the idea, which he said occurred to him after learning that an East Coast university was collecting materials related to the Vietnam War.

With Orange County home to the largest Southeast Asian refugee population in the nation, 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 offer only 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. Members of the community donated newspaper clippings, correspondence and personal papers. And shortly after the archive was founded, its 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 through advertisements in local newspapers and visits to homes, social gatherings and garage sales has won her many plaudits from community leaders.

The archive survives on about $2,000 a year, plus Frank’s salary, provided by the university; monetary donations and grants are few and meager. The vast majority of the collection comes 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,” she said.

Garden Grove writer Kim Ha donated tapes of refugee interviews that she made while researching a 1992 book on her escape from Vietnam. She also gave the inch-thick manuscript, written in Vietnamese in longhand on loose-leaf notebook 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.”