For Wilshire Baptist Church
You just never know who you’re going to run into. After dinner with my mother on Friday, we dropped into her neighborhood Braum’s for ice cream. We were sitting in a booth when her eyes locked on someone across the room. A moment later, a man stepped up and then his wife followed and confirmed what she had thought: It was Khanh and Hop.
We first met the couple in about 1975. They had fled Vietnam with four children during the fall of Saigon and found their way to the United States and to Richardson where they were sponsored by First Baptist Church where we were members. The family arrived with “nothing but the clothes on their backs” as the saying goes, and it took a full church effort to get them situated for life in a new country. I don’t know all the details but they were provided a small but comfortable home near a good school. A couple with four young children needed lots of groceries and they were taken to the grocery store. A member with a manufacturing business gave Khanh a job in his warehouse, but he worked other jobs too. I’ll never forget going to the local pizza joint with my high school friends and seeing the couple bussing tables. While we were laughing and having fun, they were elbow deep in dirty dishes. It was heartbreaking to see, but it was inspirational too.
As is often the case, some church members had more direct connection with the family than others. My father was chairman of the missions committee — somehow I didn’t know that at the time — and our family gave them a green Chevy Impala that probably had little trade-in value but huge bench seats just right for a family of six. We had them over for dinner on Christmas Eve, and Khanh was the enthusiastic spokesman for the family as we introduced them to our traditions and he told us about theirs.
I helped the family too, although I had a personal agenda. I needed an Eagle Scout project, and I came up with a plan to tutor the three school-age children. I have a clear mental picture of them sitting in a perfect row on our living room sofa while we went through lesson plans I prepared that encompassed reading, writing and identifying our U.S. coins and currency. I don’t recall how many weeks this went on, but I got my Eagle rank and I didn’t see the children again until tragedy struck. While I was away at college, the little boy was hit and killed by a car one afternoon while crossing the street to go play with a friend. I came home for the funeral and watched as Khanh stood to speak to the congregation, his broken English punctuated with deep sobs. Considering all the family had been through, we couldn’t help but cry with him.
And now here was the couple, eating ice cream with us on a Friday night in Richardson. I hadn’t seen them since the funeral some 40 years earlier. I would never have recognized them if they and my mother hadn’t made the connection. He was balding and smaller than I recalled, but he was the same gregarious man that burst into our house for Christmas Eve dinner. I actually recognized her more, and she was as quiet as I recalled, letting him do all the talking.
And what did he talk about? “I love Mr. Hampton,” he said when he heard of my father’s recent death, and he recalled the gift of the car and many trips to the grocery store. And then he provided some news on his children.
After we parted ways, my mother shared more of their story that I was freshly interested in knowing. They came to Richardson by way of Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, which I’ve learned processed 50,800 Vietnam War refugees from 1975 to 1976. That included Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong people. We recalled that Khanh had a prominent job in Vietnam but had to start at the bottom here. We don’t recall how our church came to sponsor them but it probably was through a religious/church-related agency.
So, our church helped one family. So what? Well . . . they own the house they live in on the same street where they first settled. Khanh is still working at the bank he has worked at for 30-plus years. The couple has been married 64 years, enduring changes and heartaches that often split couples and divide families. Their three surviving children went to college and are professionals – including a pharmacist and a school principal – with families of their own. They had turned their personal hardships and tragedies into victories and were the embodiment of what we blithely call “the American Dream.”
Just when the troubles of the world seem insurmountable, the visit reminded me that small-scale efforts can still help chip away at large-scale problems. Maybe we can’t save an entire country from destruction, but we can help an individual or a family find safety and a new life. And we might not be able to do much on our own, but as members of churches and civic groups we can pool our resources and help neighbors make fresh starts. And who knows: Strangers might become neighbors and friends that you reconnect with at an ice cream shop on a Friday night. You just never know.