By Kyp Shillam, Crowley Star
Though her memories of Vietnam are dim, for Yen Nguyen (pronounced Wen), the move from Saigon in 1975 is forever stamped on her memory.
Vietnamese bilingual teacher Yen Nguyen helps one of her students with a vocabulary assignment. (CROWLEY STAR/KYP SHILLAM)
“I came to the U.S. when I was 10, during the fall of South Vietnam,” she says of the tumultuous period in world history. “My father wanted us to have freedom and a better life. He worked in the American Embassy, but I’m not sure what he did. I do remember that we were poor and we saw a lot of chaos in those final weeks.”
Chaos is an understatement. Nguyen’s family of 12 was among the first of those to be emergency evacuated from the crumbling nation. Split into three groups, Nguyen went with her very pregnant mother on a boat – literally set adrift in the China sea. Drifting for nearly three days, Nguyen said her mother went into labor once the USS Millerrescued them.
“She was having my brother (whom she named Miller after the ship) and I went to get some food and milk from the soldiers on the ship. That’s when I ran into my sister and found the rest of my family. I wasn’t sure we would find them,” she said. “They were lucky. They were flown by helicopter to the ship.”
Speaking no English, the refugee family was taken to Fort Smith, Ark. There, they began their life in America.
“We lived there for four years and went to school. We learned English fast,” she said. “I had very helpful, loving teachers who helped me so much. I will always remember that.”
It is that experience that gives Nguyen her foundation for her job as a bilingual teacher in Crowley ISD’s groundbreaking Vietnamese program.
Started five years ago with only seven students, the Vietnamese bilingual program at Jackie Carden Elementary now boasts five teachers guiding 60 students. Nguyen says it is the only Vietnamese bilingual program in Texas.
“It is very unique,” she said. “It is very different from the Spanish program as we start the students with 75 percent Vietnamese in Pre-K, and 25 percent English. In Kinder, we communicate 50/50 but do most of our work in English.” By first grade, the students are doing 100 percent of their work in English, though some of the talk in the classroom is Vietnamese.
“It’s accelerated because we don’t have enough Vietnamese teachers to take the program into the upper grades, and the parents of our students want their children to learn to speak and write in English as quickly as possible,” she said, noting the children are often their teachers and interpreters. “The pace is fast, but the parents are all for it.”
Read the full article by Kyp Shillam from Crowley Star.
