They found prosperity and a new family here
SAXONBURG — Tu Chau can be at home anywhere, but on Thursday afternoon he was especially happy because he felt he was really home, again, in Butler County.
Chau is a family man to the core. He's braved war and starvation to protect his wife and child. And the people assembled in the Oretle Care Building of Concordia on Thursday afternoon are his family too, he said.
There's no place he'd rather be than here, in the midst of an annual tradition to visit the people who first welcomed him to America.
Today Chau, 68, is a happily retired grandfather with an American family that stretches from Butler County, his adopted hometown, to California, where he and his wife, Hien Tran, son Vu Chau, and daughters, Tu-Phuong and Kim, live.
But it wasn't always so. Forty years ago Chau was a Vietnamese refugee fleeing communism and the collapse of his country. In the process, he not only found a new life in America, he found a new extended family, a new country, and a new hometown.
“Yes it is hard. But I think I managed to take care of my family, and I feel really blessed,” Chau said. “I feel really proud to tell people my story.”
The story of how Chau became an American, and why he considers Butler County his hometown, goes back decades. To hear its beginning is to take a trip to the city of Hue in central Vietnam, where Chau was born a farm boy in 1949 and he grew into a Boy Scout, and eventually a petty officer in the South Vietnamese Navy.
[naviga:h3]The Viet Cong appear[/naviga:h3]
By 1968, the year the communist North Vietnamese invaded South Vietnam, Chau was 19 and a Boy Scout leader on a bike trip to visit a Cub Scout family. He would never make it to his destination because he was kidnapped by an AK-47-toting child soldier of the Viet Cong.
Chau, who was already in the South Vietnamese Navy, kept his military allegiance secret but he was undone by his Boy Scout uniform. Chau was taken to a Viet Cong field hospital and forced to assist communist forces in caring for soldiers wounded in battle.
He was held at the camp for about a month, he said, and managed to escape into a rice field.
So would begin Chau's career in the South Vietnamese military — a career that would end in 1975, with defeat and a harrowing, last-minute escape from his native country.
<h3>Escape from Vietnam</h3>Chau never intended to leave his country, he said. As a petty officer in the South Vietnamese Navy, Chau and his wife, Hien Tran, and their 11-month-old son, Vu, had been living along the southeastern coast of Vietnam and about 180 miles northeast of Saigon, near an inlet of the South China Sea called Cam Ranh Bay. The bay was the site of an American-built naval base and had been chosen as a safe haven for refugees from the South Vietnamese city, Da Nang, after it fell to communist forces earlier in 1975.But by April 3 the North Vietnamese military had captured the base, forcing Chau's family and thousands of others to flee to the capital city of Saigon.However, just weeks later the North Vietnamese Army was poised to capture Saigon and secure communist control over the country. Thousands of American civilians and “at-risk” Vietnamese were being evacuated by the American military, but the airlifts didn't take Chau and his young family to safety.“We stayed in (Saigon), and we thought maybe someday we would go back to Cam Rahn and life with our families again,” Chau said.But on the night of April 28, as North Vietnamese forces shelled Saigon, Chau learned that what remained of the South Vietnamese Navy was conducting its own evacuation. About 80 ships were pulling out of Saigon and sailing away to the Philippines that night.His family — Chau, his wife and son, and brother-in-law Chiet Tran — arrived at the Saigon waterfront to find thousands of people with a similar idea. In the pandemonium of refugees desperate to board the military vessels, Chau and Hien realized it wasn't going to be as simple as walking or climbing aboard to safety.With no walkways to board the ships, Chau would have to throw the then-11-month-old Vu on board and pray a friend on the deck caught the baby.As Chau and Hien wrestled with the dangerous prospect, The young couple watched other parents try and fail to throw their children to safety.“A lot of them — a lot of them missed,” Chau said. “You could see people go down. My wife said 'OK, if he (Vu) goes down, I will go down with him.'”Vu didn't go down that night, but aboard the ship — under the command of a friend of Chau's uncle — there were other concerns. During the eight day journey from Saigon to the American military base at Subic Bay, in the Philippines, Chau's ship would come under attack by the South Vietnamese Air Force, and the family would be pushed to desperation by a shortage of food and water as the ship struggled to support thousands of refugees.When the convoy finally reached Subic Bay, Chau said, they faced another test. The Philippine government, now cultivating a relationship with Vietnam's new communist regime, demanded they formally surrender all trappings of the former South Vietnamese military. That meant formally lowering their battle flags and repainting the ships.Chau said the bitter ceremony brought home the realization that they had lost the fight to save their country.“It's a really sad moment, if you can imagine it,” Chau said. “You lost the war and now you lost — totally lost, I mean, you lost your country, you lost your flag ... so we went inside Subic Bay.”<h3>Coming to America</h3>The Philippines was the start of the family's life outside of Vietnam, but it was Guam, where they stayed for about a month in a refugee camp where their journey to the United States really began.Chau remembers Guam for its punishing sun, the food lines in the camps, and the frightening reality that there were Viet Cong agents among them, gathering information and attempting to convince the refugees to return to Vietnam. On some days, he said, the temptation to buy into the agents' promises of a welcome return to the country was strong.“I almost wanted to go back. My wife left her whole family back there; I left my whole family back there. It makes sense,” Chau said.Ultimately, the family left Guam not for Vietnam, but for Fort Indiantown Gap in Lebanon County, Pa., where they were screened and processed by U.S. military personnel over two months. Eventually they received word that they had been sponsored by St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Butler County.Chau and his wife, amazed at every turn by American highways and airplane travel, would arrive in Butler County with nothing but a welcome bag and $10.Setting foot in Butler County was a wake-up call for Chau and Hien. In the chaos of their journey, it had been easy to forget the obvious challenges facing them — such as the fact that they didn't speak English. Settling down in Butler County, Chau remembered his family had a long road ahead. But as luck would have it, the first face they saw was a friendly one.Le Weber, a Vietnamese-American who had broken a strong taboo in Chau's country by marrying an American man, met them on the runway with a comforting gift: fish sauce and ramen noodles — comfort food from home that Chau, his wife and brother-in-law had dearly missed.It was just the first of many moments of joy the family would share with residents in their year living in the Cabot home of Roger and Coreinne Vogel. Members of St. Luke's say they were struck by how fiercely protective Hien was of the couple's son, and how welcoming the community was to Chau and his family. Not that they are surprised.“He's the kind of person — to know him is to love him,” said Catherine Montag, who lived across the street from the Vogels and regularly took Chau and his wife shopping.“He is the essence of a great man. He wants to pay everybody back,” she said.Others recall how the family refused their offers of payment for doing odd jobs, and how fiercely proud Chau was of having their friendship and aid during those early days.“Can you think of anyone that thanks you after 30 years?” asked Bernice Hook, who got Chau his first job in America.Chau keeps in contact with his Butler County friends via phone calls, church members said, and uses his annual visits to gather the group together for a celebration commemorating the love they showed his family. Chau said the family has never forgotten what the people at St. Luke's did for them.Those lessons and aid helped propel them to the life they made for themselves on the west coast.“From the beginning, whoever helped us, whoever gave us anything, we remember for the rest of our life,” Chau said. “That's the reason we're here almost every year now.”<h3>From mushrooms to IT</h3>About a year later Chau, who with the help of Hook had gotten a job at the Butler County Mushroom Farm, had saved up $2,000 and was set on moving to California, to escape the region's winter weather and to find better work and a better life for his family.But he carries with him lessons learned, and stories remembered, from his time picking mushrooms.In fact, Chau said, he believes his success is due to his time in the mushroom mine. Chau's hands-off management style, which he attributes to his time working there, helped build a $2 billion annual manufacturing business at Xlinx, a software and hardware company that caters to military, medical and aerospace clients.Chau was the company's director of operations for 11 years, after working his way up through the hardware divisions of a series of high tech firms.He retired from Xlinx about seven years ago, amid stress-related health concerns, but said the system he created came from lessons he learned picking mushrooms: create a system that gives employees incentives to work as a team, don't micromanage, and be a people person.“It's funny, but it's critical for me; for my career,” Chau said. “I use the same techniques, the same way to manage people. I grew up on the bottom, so I know how people feel when the manager is on them.”For all that success, Chau said, California has never quite felt like home. He enjoys the weather and his professional success, but something important is missing.“Our neighbors, we hardly talk to each other. It's really stressful,” Chau said. “I like California because of the weather and because of the job, but I do not like the people.”<h3>Homecoming</h3>In 1993 Chau and his family took a chance and went back to Vietnam to see their families, who had been “crippled” by their flight from the country. The communist regime took note of everyone who fled, he said, and reprisals followed.The reunion was an emotional one peppered with scenes from an espionage movie. Chau and his family were required to bribe their way past customs agents to get into the country.Once there, a family reunion was interrupted by a police chief who also required a payoff.“It took me an hour to be able to talk again,” Chau said of what it was like seeing his extended family after nearly two decades.That journey was an exceptional one, but Chau makes another pilgrimage every year to Butler County, where he vacations with the St. Luke's members and friends who helped him in that turbulent first year in America. This year, for the first time, Chau and friends took a bus to Washington, D.C., where he toured national monuments and visited the Vietnam War Memorial — an experience he said reminded him of the price paid by thousands of American soldiers fighting for his countryIt's a bittersweet feeling for Chau, who can't help but mourn and celebrate at the same time. He mourns for the soldiers killed and the loss of his country, and rejoices in the love and friendship he found at the end of a perilous journey that started 40 years ago and half a world away.“There's no reason for me to be homesick, because this is my home,” Chau said. “Butler County is my hometown. That's why I'm so happy to come back.”
