Seeing Red

Coming to America

The square, two-story building on University Avenue that once housed the Capital Market is now rented to Trang’s Beauty Salon and a storefront office of the Islamic Minnesota Da’wah Institute. Pham sold the property in January. After the loss of his business and the expense of the lawsuit, he needed the money to fund his retirement.

From 1989 until a few months ago, Pham and his wife, Mai Vu, lived upstairs in quarters they remodeled themselves. They moved in December to a mortgaged house in West St. Paul. “We’re getting old,” Pham explains. “My wife gave birth to 10 kids. Now she’s not very healthy. We need a quiet place to retire.” He adds, “There are some bad memories here.”

Most of the furnishings are gone, but a few chairs remain among some bric-a-brac in a rear family room. Pham, wearing a suit and tie, takes one chair. An underdressed reporter takes another. Lawyer Rosha takes a third, having come both to explain the legal aspects of the case and to help with some interpreting as Pham tells his story; his English is good, but still notably a second language.

He was born in 1936 in the northern part of Vietnam. In 1953, he quit school and joined the army, as he puts it, “to fight Communists with the help of the French.” The following year, the battle of Dien Bien Phu put an end to French rule and resulted in the country’s formal partition into North and South. Pham joined the South Vietnamese army and served for 23 years, mostly as a communications specialist. He was a master sergeant when Saigon fell in 1975.

He also was a Catholic activist and chairman of a lay council that worked with several churches in a region near Saigon. Primarily because of his work with the church, he was imprisoned by the Communist regime in 1977. After his release two years later, Pham loaded a wooden boat with his wife, his 10 children, other family members and friends—a total of 101 people, he says—and fled to a refugee camp in Indonesia.

After almost a year in the camp, Pham and his immediate family arrived in the United States in August 1980. Having no other relatives in the country, they were sponsored by U.S. Catholic Charities and settled in Rochester, Minnesota. His daughter Lan Pham, number eight of the 10 kids, recalls that “we were among the first Asian folks in Rochester. Not many people looked like us.”

Tuan Pham attended a local technical college, studying building maintenance (boiler operations, heating systems, and so on) while working full-time as a clean-up man in an auto-painting shop. He later became the physical plant director at a Catholic school.