Tiềng Việt

Tuyet Giang

Summary of my life from my university days till now
In May 1979 I left Vietnam by boat with my family. After five days on the ocean we arrived at Hong Kong where we lived in a refugee camp for a period of time. There were eight children in my family. Sister Trinh and brother Khanh ended up in Norway because they left Vietnam in 1976 by boat and almost died in the ocean because of lack of food and got lost because of storms.  They were saved by Norway ship and were taken to Norway to live. In autumn 1980, the whole family, except for sister Trinh and brother Khanh, left Hong Kong Refugee Camp and immigrated to the United States in the state of California in the San Francisco area.

By this time of April 1980 I had married a man I met in the refuge camp who came from the area of my hometown of Qui Nhon. We had two sons, Vu and Donald. In October 1989 there was severe earthquake in the San Francisco area. My husband was killed when while he was driving on the double-decker freeway that collapsed from the earthquake, crushing his car. I now was left with two little boys to care for by myself and it was a very tough time for a while with my responsiblities as a single mother.

While I was married I started studying computer science beginning autumn 1980 at Contra Costa College in the eastern part of the Bay Area (San Francisco area). Then I transferred to University of California at Berkeley. Due to family hardship, I ended up attending college at California State University in Sacramento, California where I got a degree in electrical engineering in May 1986.

I have lived in the Sacramento, California area since 1990. Sacramento is the capitol of the state of California and is 110 km northeast of San Francisco. It has one of the largest concentrations of Vietnamese people in the United States.

Upon graduation I got a Federal government job with the Department of Defense at McClellan Air Force Base, which is located in Sacramento, California. While there I did engineering work on automatic test equipment, communications systems, and radar systems. The base closed in 2000 and it had a huge impact on many people as 17,000 used to work there. I eventually got another Department of Defense job and now work for DeCA West, which is the organization responsible for operating all the commissaries (food supermarkets) on the military bases throughout the western U.S., Guam, and countries such as Japan and Korea. My job now is doing computer and computer networking support. It requires me to travel often throughout the United States including Hawaii and Alaska, and also to Guam, Japan and Korea.

The oldest son, Chau An Vu is 28 yrs old now and graduated in 2004 from the University of California at Davis, California. He works for a company in the San Francisco area. The picture is taken at university graduation of my son Vu. The youngest son, Chau An Dung (Donald) is 24 yrs old and graduated in December 2008 from California State University at Sacramento, California.

As for the rest of my family, my father died in 1988 in United States because of lung cancer and my mother died in 1996 here in the United States. I lost my youngest sister in a 1988 car accident and then my oldest brother in 2003 car accident in Sacramento, California where I live. The one brother who originally went to Norway now lives in the San Jose area and is an electronics engineer for NVIDIA Company. My younger sister still lives in Oslo, Norway and does well in business. The rest of us live in the Sacramento, California area. Many thanks to this country to give us many chances, helping us to get better life and a better education. Although all my brothers, my sisters and I came to this country with nothing, we all graduated with 4 years degree in Electronic Engineer (two brothers and I), Computer Science (1 brother), Nurse (1 sister) and got a very good job to support ourselves and our family.

VNHELP
And when I am not spending time at work and with my family, I spend some of my time doing volunteer work with two charity organizations that do charity work in Vietnam. The one organization, VNHELP, is headquartered in the San Jose, California area. A good college friend from my university here in the United States is the director of that organization. VNHELP does charity projects throughout Vietnam to help children, builds schools, provide educational scholarships, and provide free medical equipment. In the summer of 2005 I traveled with the VNHELP group to give out wheel chairs and miscellaneous medical materials. We also met with various government officials to determine what other charity assistance we could provide in the future.

Project Vietnam
The other charity organization I have been involved with is Project Vietnam. This is a group of doctors from the United States and Canada that provides free medical care, patient operations and training at various locations throughout Vietnam. I assist the team with English-Vietnamese lanaguage interpreting and various other duties on the trips to Vietnam. This organization is headquartered out of the Santa Ana area of Los Angeles, California, which has the largest concentration of Vietnamese in the United States. The doctors give their time free and pay for all their own expenses for these trips.