Professor Honored for Her Work With Refugees

FULLERTON —  Son Kim Vo follows what she calls the “Triple-A Principles” in counseling refugees and immigrants on how to enter mainstream America.

Awareness of differences in cultures. Adjusting to those differences. Acculturation.

“You can’t have one without the other and still live a successful life here,” Vo said. “I’ve based my work on promoting these points.”

For her efforts and involvement in the Vietnamese refugee community since 1981, Vo, a professor and director of the Intercultural Development Center at Cal State Fullerton, was honored Saturday at a fund-raising dinner held by St. Anselm’s Cross Cultural Community Center in Garden Grove.

The honor is one Vo accepts with quiet pride, but “in the name of everyone else who has helped make the Vietnamese community what it is today,” she said. “My story is like many others’.”

Not quite. Vo came to the United States before the end of the Vietnamese War, earning her doctoral degree in education at USC. In early 1975, as the beginning of the fall of Vietnam was making headlines, Vo returned home instead of staying in America. She knew the Communists were winning the war, she said, but figured she could contribute as an educator in her homeland, no matter what the political regime.

But she and her husband, Vien Van Le, were forced into a two-year stint in re-education camps, she because she was a professor and he for having fought in the South Vietnamese Army. In 1981, after nine unsuccessful tries, the couple escaped Vietnam by boat, heading to a refugee camp in Malaysia.

Four days after Vo arrived in Orange County, St. Anselm’s recruited her, because of her English skills, to work as a case worker. Thus began her work as a bridge between Vietnamese and American cultures.

“She’s hard-working, sensitive and committed to the community,” said Mai Cong, president of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a Santa Ana-based social services organization where Vo was executive director for two years after leaving St. Anselm’s.

In 1984, Vo was hired by the state Department of Social Services to serve as a special consultant to the Vietnamese community. She resigned in 1992 to head the Intercultural Development Center, where she acts as a liaison between the university’s faculty staff and its growing Vietnamese student population.

“She spent a lot of time talking to parents and to students and guiding them,” said Mary Kay Crouch, an associate professor of English who went to Vietnam with Vo in 1991 to set up education workshops at universities in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. “Some students have told me they come to Cal State Fullerton because their parents knew Dr. Son was here and that she would advise them.”

Advising new refugees and immigrants means being bluntly honest, Vo said.

“People need to let go of their past and realize that they now live in a different culture and that they should embrace that culture if they want to succeed,” Vo said.

That is her first line of advice. Her “Triple-A Principles” follow soon.

“By being aware of cultural differences, we can take the best of both worlds and live accordingly,” she said. “And when I say ‘adjust,’ I mean to accept the differences and adjust to them. Acculturation speaks for itself.”

“We create our own opportunities if we follow these rules,” she said. “Our life is made up of opportunities; we have to take advantage of them to be successful.”