Thuy Huyen is running for Ms. America on the platform of world poverty, something she knows firsthand
It sat there smugly, seeming to exist for the sole purpose of taunting the little girl every time she meandered past it.
Thuy Huyen (pronounced “Twee Who-win”) despised that inane bowl of decorative fruit.
Back then, food was always on her mind – there was never enough of it.
There wasn’t enough at the refugee camp in Indonesia, where her little belly swelled up like a basketball from malnutrition, protruding out from her wiry frame. And now that her family had finally been granted entry into the United States, there still wasn’t enough to eat.
There were times when her mother, Lien, would go to the McDonald’s near their home in the little fishing town of Port Arthur, Texas, and bring back a single hamburger that she would cut crosswise two or three times, so she could split it among her children.
Huyen remembers one day when she was about 7 years old, she watched as a girl her age tossed an apple core into the gutter. Huyen thought about that apple core for a while. There was a bite or two left on it. Would she go fetch it from where it lay in the gutter and eat it? It was covered in dirt, but she was so hungry. She admitted to picking it up, but was reluctant to say what she did next.
When her family arrived in Texas, they were flat broke. A charitable woman hosted the refugees in her home. Huyen remembers, now three decades later, the anguish that was caused by this woman’s choice of table topper – that awful bowl of plastic fruit.
It seemed fitting that, when Huyen filled out her application for Ms. Oregon earlier this year, she chose world poverty as her platform.
“I figured: If I’m going to pick a platform, I’m going to pick something that I am very familiar with,” she said.
The Ms. (not Miss) America pageant is for women 26 and older. They can be married, single or divorced and with or without children. There is no swimsuit or talent competition; instead, the emphasis is on contestants’ spreading their platform messages in the months leading up to the selection of Ms. America. This will happen at a live-streamed pageant in Brea, Calif., in September.
This was the first time Huyen, 42, had ever entered a pageant. A selection committee crowned her after a thorough vetting process earlier this year, and now she’s the reigning Ms. Oregon.
She smiled with poise as she recounted her life’s astounding and often horrific tale during an interview over a picnic table in North Portland’s Peninsula Park.
Despite the somewhat depressing topics of conversation, Huyen seemed cheerful, even laughing gleefully, at times, as she detailed her family’s struggles.
Later she would reveal she could barely hold back tears throughout the interview. She said it was the first time she’d shared the details of her escape from Vietnam in 35 years.
Saigon’s fall
Huyen was born on Buddha’s birthday at the most lavish hospital in Saigon.
It was 1974, one year before communist forces captured the South Vietnamese capital city, marking the end of the Vietnam War.
Huyen’s grandmother was a wealthy woman who owned a fabric store and retailed jewelry. She used her riches to build several Buddhist temples for the people of Saigon.
Huyen’s father, Chanh, was a well-known man of pedigree who dabbled in politics and taught high school English.
Her parents owned two houses in the city. Huyen remembers splitting her time between urban Saigon, where she was looked after by an absent-minded housekeeper, and the countryside, where she would play with the pigs on her grandfather’s farm.
“My grandfather used to tell me stories about the communists,” she said. “He said even to go out for a piece of bread, if you are out at the wrong time or place, they can shoot you through the head.”
Many Vietnamese fled the country when North Vietnam’s communist regime proved victorious, but in 1975, Huyen was just 1 year old, and her little brother, Vinh, was a newborn; it would have been too difficult. Her parents decided to wait and, as a result, lost most their life’s savings and treasures to communist raids.
Huyen remembers the fear that gripped her family after her grandmother’s home was invaded. Soldiers threatened to kill everyone who was there, and they took everything that had been collected over the years.
Her father’s extended family was killed off entirely by communist soldiers. Huyen doesn’t remember ever meeting any of them.
“I was against the communists,” Chanh explained from his home in Aurora, Ill. “They followed me, and they wanted to imprison me. That was the reason why we had to escape.”
The escape
It took one full year of planning and preparation before Huyen’s family could flee Vietnam in 1979. If they were caught trying to leave, they could have faced execution.
While the communist regime was trying to keep the Vietnamese in, it was forcing the Chinese out. Like many other Vietnamese escaping the country at the time, they decided their best bet was to pretend to be Chinese.
False identification was purchased for Huyen, her sister and brother, her parents, and 12 aunts, uncles and cousins who would accompany them. They all had to learn their Chinese names and to speak some Mandarin phrases.
Huyen was only 5, but her mother taught her a few words, just in case she was asked any questions. She cut both her daughters’ hair very short, like little Chinese girls.
They secured their place on a wooden fishing boat with a payment in gold for each passenger. Luckily her grandmother had enough to pay their passage – and to buy them life preservers.
Her father said the boat could hold about 80 people. Most everyone who boarded was Vietnamese pretending to be Chinese, to avoid detection.
Communist soldiers kept forcing more and more people on board until there were 300 people stacked on top of each other, said his wife, Lien. Most boats used for these escapes were built for fishing along the shoreline, and not built for the open sea. Those who made this voyage came to be known as the Vietnamese Boat People.
For four days and four nights, they traveled across the sea toward Indonesia. Huyen recalls that many passengers became seasick and vomited on the boat. Her younger brother suffered ongoing seizures, and just a toddler, he kept soiling himself with no change of clothes.
Chanh said the overloaded boat lost its equilibrium when it hit a storm. In the middle of the sea, it began to sink.
Huyen and her family were the only refugees wearing life preservers.
At her mother’s insistence, everyone in the family jumped overboard. A nearby boat manned by Thais hoisted them up with a large fishing net.
Hundreds of Vietnamese who refused to jump drowned when the sinking boat slipped beneath the waves.
It’s estimated that somewhere between 200,000 and a half-million refugees fleeing by sea after the fall of Saigon died making the trip.
Approximately 1 million Vietnamese Boat People made it to refugee camps, where disease and starvation took thousands more.
Tens of thousands of Chinese also died at sea.
Huyen’s family thought they were safe once onboard the Thai fishing boat. They were fed a rice porridge called Congee. Huyen remembers one fisherman cut up apples for them to eat.
Throughout the 1980s, Thai fishermen-turned-pirates robbed thousands and raped and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese who were fleeing the communist regime by sea.
In 1982, the New York Times reported 200 women and girls taken from Vietnamese boats were recovered from Thai houses of prostitution.
The Thai fishing boat carrying Huyen and her family landed on a small, nondescript island somewhere in Indonesia.
That’s where four of the fishermen pulled out guns, holding the barrels to the heads of her father, her uncles and her older male cousin, she said.
“My parents were very smart,” Huyen said. “They knew we were going on a boat, so they hid a lot of jewelry in their bodies – which is a very common thing when you escape.”
The men looked to Huyen’s mother for direction, and she told them they would have to relinquish it all in exchange for their lives.
The family was transferred to a third boat, and after two more days and nights at sea, they landed at Kuku, a refugee camp in Indonesia where they would live for more than a year. It was sparsely populated when they arrived, but there were thousands by the time they were transferred to Galang refugee camp in 1980.
“Life in Galang is just like life in Kuku,” Huyen said.
There was no clean water. Huyen and her older sister would fetch ocean water, contaminated with human waste from refugees who used the shoreline as their toilet. Their mother would boil it to kill the bacteria.
They had only the clothes on their backs, and there was very little food. Huyen and her sister befriended a set of twins who taught them that with two bean sprouts, they could grow more, and that’s how they survived until near the end when international aid organizations began to distribute food such as crackers.
It was in Kuku that Huyen’s stomach had ballooned, and she’d find out later it was also filled with worms.
But Huyen maintained that she was a fortunate child, because so many children around her were dying from starvation and malaria.
“We would always see parents crying all the time, and they were carrying their kids up to the hill to bury them,” Huyen said. “I have those memories in my head, and even to this day, when I look outside to the sea, or at the coast, I have tears every time because I think about my escape, and all the people that died.”
Her little brother’s seizures continued, and her sister’s asthma was a constant concern to her parents, but miraculously, they all survived to see the day their names were called to board a plane to the U.S.
Huyen’s aunt had a father-in-law who had moved to the U.S. in 1975, and he was sponsoring the entire family.
Starting over
Huyen’s family started their new, American life in Port Arthur, Texas.
Chanh worked three jobs and eventually saved enough to move his family into a $10,000 house.
They hadn’t been there long when a burglar broke in and held a knife to Lien’s neck. For the second time in as many years, she brokered a deal for her safety – he could have the family’s savings, hidden below the television set in the living room. He made off with about $400.
They soon moved to Chicago, where they continued to live in poverty, moving from place to place for the next few years, usually following a bump in rent.
And now there were more mouths to feed. Her parents had taken in several nieces and nephews and adopted a 9-year-old girl whose mother was still in Vietnam, and her mother had given birth to their fourth child, another boy.
Adjusting to the U.S. was not easy for Huyen. She was too nervous to speak English, and she carried around notes her father had written for her to communicate with her teachers and classmates. There weren’t any other Vietnamese children in any of her classes.
Some of the kids mocked her, and told her to learn English or go back to China.
“They hurt your feelings a lot,” she remembered, “but back then I was like, Oh whatever, I’ve been through so much, I can’t even think about that.”
But other kids took pity on her.
Huyen remembers the day her classmates presented her with a piggy bank they had filled with money. They wanted her to use it to buy a winter coat. Everything she wore was second hand, and her only jacket was too thin to keep out the penetrating chill of Chicago’s unforgiving winters.
She got a lot of help from her teachers, too, who would buy her lunch and pay her way on field trips.
But her parents labored constantly to get their family back on its feet.
Although they both had college degrees from Vietnam, it meant nothing in the U.S. They both enrolled in Northeastern Illinois University and earned degrees in computer science.
They also saved enough money to open and operate several businesses – two clothing stores, a gift shop and a perfume store. Huyen and her sister would print price tags, dress mannequins and fill out orders. Her little brother would man the cash register.
At the same time, her parents also began to sell insurance for MetLife, with her father becoming a regional manager and her mother a top seller.
By the mid-1990s, when Huyen was about 20, her parents bought a house in the suburbs of Chicago. They’d finally made it. In Huyen, her parents instilled the importance of helping their fellow Vietnamese, many of whom were struggling.
Her father was awarded the Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom in 1994 for his service to Vietnamese Americans, and in 1995, he was awarded the Eternal Flame of Freedom Brass Medallion by Sen. Bob Dole – two medals he wears proudly to this day.
Ms. Oregon
Huyen came to Portland in 1999, when her father was invited to speak at a large Vietnamese festival.
By this time, she had graduated from college, earning a degree in psychology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was working as a director at a children’s activity center in Chicago.
Huyen immediately fell in love with Oregon.
“Everyone is so nice and caring in Oregon,” she said. “If I lose a pair of earrings on the street, I have at least one person looking for the pair without asking. No one turns their back on anyone. Everyone just wants to help one another.”
It wasn’t long before she returned to Portland for another vacation, and in search of a husband. If she found a husband in Portland, she could make the move.
Being the beautiful and alluring 25-year-old woman that she’d become, this didn’t take long.
“I was in a coffee shop, and I saw this guy. He was in a suit and really handsome, and I was like: Oh my Gosh! How do I get his attention?” She sat across from him, the two exchanged smiles, and four months later they were married.
About a year later, on a whim, she entered a model search at the Portland Convention Center. There were hundreds of girls competing. She felt out of place – she was the oldest, the shortest and, she said, the chubbiest. So when she was handpicked by Princess Diana’s longtime hairdresser, Richard Dalton, as a winner, she could hardly believe it.
“My self-esteem went way up,” she said. “I beat all those girls! From then on, it was always in my mind – if I can beat all those girls, I could probably win again if I had another chance.” But she was busy, working in child care and as a teacher, and she didn’t pursue it.
Her marriage lasted about five years before Huyen decided to end it. She wanted children, and he wasn’t ready. Her clock was ticking, and they had differences, she said. She never told her husband the story of her escape.
She eventually took a job in accounting at Portland State University, where she’s been working for the past 14 years.
A devout Buddhist, she goes to temple every Sunday. She also goes to Christian Bible study every Wednesday on her lunch break. She’s a private person, who avidly reads books and magazines in her apartment downtown. She also loves nature, recently scaling Mt. St. Helens, and now she’s training outdoors for Iron Man. Aside from parties where she said she’s a social butterfly, she prefers to keep to herself.
In November 2015, she was thinking about that model search all those years ago when her younger cousin – Nancy To, Miss Illinois 2012 – told her about how much fun it was to be a pageant winner.
“It was always in the back of my head, but I was like, no, you’re old now, you’re in your 40s,” Huyen said. But then she discovered the Ms. America pageant and thought, why not?
Four months later, in February, she got a call from the pageant’s CEO, former Ms. America Susan Jeske.
“I thought her story was amazing,” Jeske said. “And she does a ton of volunteering, was on the dean’s list in college, there are so many awards she’s received – she’s just so talented and so diverse.”
And it’s true. Huyen showed Street Roots some of her awards and certificates. The little girl who was afraid to speak English in second grade went on to excel in high school and college and continues to earn recognition for both her contributions to the Vietnamese community and her volunteer work.
About 10 years ago, she became a U.S. citizen and has taken an interest in local politics, most recently donating her weekends to A Better Oregon, the group behind the November ballot measure seeking to raise the minimum tax on corporations making more than $25 million per year in order to fund K-12 education, health care and senior services.
In her new role as Ms. Oregon, she’s already given speeches at dozens of events where she’s encouraged her audiences to do their part in the fight against world hunger and poverty.
“We are spoiled,” she said. “We buy an expensive purse, not me, but in general, like a Louis Vuitton purse – they could save somebody’s life with that money! Or even a little, just a dollar could help a kid in a Third World country.”
She said she wants to use her title as Ms. Oregon to make a difference, and she said while her platform is world poverty, she won’t have to travel far.
“We have a lot of homeless people on the streets, and I would love to help Oregon first,” she said. “One step at a time and one person at a time would mean a lot to me. Everyone counts.”
emily@streetroots.org
At Thuy Huyen’s request, Street Roots has not included the full names of her family members due to her fear for their safety. For many people who flee oppressive regimes or conflict zones and later find refuge in the U.S., the fear can stay with them throughout their lifetime. For the Planet Portland series, Street Roots respects these requests for anonymity.
