Chau Leatherman credits her migration story to three lucky breaks. The first was the journey south to Saigon just after the Communists took over the North.
Next came a scholarship to Portland State University, where she met her husband. And then there was her husband’s job, which unexpectedly provided them with the car that allowed her family to escape Saigon. These strokes of luck combine to shape a tale of survival and new beginnings, each leading to her successful life.
Chau was born in Mong Cai, in what was then North Vietnam, in 1944. Her father worked in the Vietnamese government as a Province Chief in North Vietnam. She was one of six siblings. Life was calm until one day when Chau was ten years old, the family’s life suddenly changed. During a routine boat inspection on a river, her father was killed by gunfire from Communist forces across the water.
Seeking a fresh start after the abrupt loss, the family packed up their lives and moved south to Saigon.
At first, the family found shelter in a school with other refugees. Days later, they moved to a modest house. The money from her father’s pension quickly ran out. Chau’s mother, who had never been to school or worked outside the home, had to find a way to support the family.
“She tried to sell rice, but she failed miserably. She didn’t know how,” says Chau. “She later had a sundries shop and the older siblings helped support the family.”
Watching her mother’s tireless efforts to keep them afloat, Chau turned her focus to academic excellence, determined to break free from the hardship and uncertainty her family had experienced.
“When I was young I was an indifferent student,” says Chau. “But when I saw how my mother was struggling, I vowed to do something. The only way I saw to get out of a life of hardship was to become a studious person.”
In high school, Chau was inspired by a teacher whose passion and dedication ignited her own dreams. Chau went on to attend a teachers’ college at the University of Saigon. She graduated as a teacher of English, assigned to a high school in a far away city to inspire a new generation of students, much as her own teacher had inspired her.
After school each day, she would return home to find her landlady had created a shelter out of wooden beds and sandbags, ushering her tenants to go in.
“She would tell us to go in there,” Chau remembers. “Some of us would go and others would not because we couldn’t breathe.”
The roar of rockets and mortars raining down upon the city became a grim normalcy.
After a year of teaching, Chau was accepted for a U.S. aid scholarship program at Portland State University in the fall of 1968.
It was a time of great upheaval and change in the United States, with the Vietnam War dominating headlines and stirring fierce debates. To Chau’s surprise, the war seemed distant in her new college life. “Questions about the war never came up,” she recalls. “We talked about boys and things like that.”
But even if the conflict was not part of daily conversation at school, she could not ignore it. “All but my youngest brother were in the military,” she says. “The war was there. We knew what it was. We knew that it was affecting people.”
One brother was stationed in Saigon, tasked with disabling bombs. The others were scattered across various military posts in the country, fortunately none in the heat of battle.
At PSU, she met the man she would marry, Tim Leatherman. Tim and a friend in Portland went to play ping pong in the basement of a PSU dormitory. While they were playing, a group of students came down on a study break; among them was Chau.
“She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.” Tim recalls.
After working up the courage to talk to her, Tim got her name and phone number. It was the summer of 1969. Chau and Tim had fallen in love but she had an obligation to return to Vietnam as a condition of her scholarship, so, in 1972, she departed for Saigon, leaving Tim behind. Several months later, he made the journey to join her and the two were married shortly after his arrival. They started to build a life together in Vietnam when the city fell in the tumult of war.
Chau was working as an assistant to an intelligence officer for the U.S. embassy in early 1975, so she followed news reports of the North invading the South. It was clear that the country was going to fall, but the question was when.
Rumors began to spread that anyone associated with the Americans would be killed after the Communist takeover, so fleeing seemed the only option. Airplane flights were the primary escape route, sparking chaotic scenes of desperate crowds trying to get on flights.
“In Danang people were hanging off the wheel wells and there was almost a riot to get onboard the flights,” says Tim.
Chau had already acquired U.S. citizenship through her marriage to Tim, so the priority became the evacuation of her family to ensure their safety. “I was working in the embassy, so I was able to see when we needed to leave,” says Chau.
At the time, Tim was working at an adoption agency connected with the U.S. As tensions continued to rise, the adoption agency began to transport the children out of Vietnam for their safety. One evening, an American car with diplomatic license plates entered the adoption agency compound and the driver gave the keys to Tim.
“When you have a big black American car with diplomatic license plates, you have quite a bit of freedom,” says Tim, remembering that night.
Tim and Chau packed her family into the car, the males concealed in the trunk, and navigated through the airport gates without incident. Then he went back to help the adoption agency with the remaining children.
The next morning, April 21, 1975, Chau’s family flew out of Saigon, mere days before the country fell to the Communists on April 30th.
Touching down in Portland marked the beginning of a new journey for Chau and her family. They were among the first of what became a significant influx of Vietnamese immigrants in the Portland area. Today, according to the World Population Review, about 12,000 people from Vietnam live in Portland.
Chau aided her family in the integration process, and later worked with other nonprofits to help resettle other refugees. She became a case worker with the Children’s Services Division of the State of Oregon, working until 1987 with the children of Vietnamese immigrants and the general population. During this period she and Tim welcomed their son, Lee, into the world.
The Leathermans have returned to Vietnam on multiple occasions, with each visit revealing major changes in the cities. Initially, some of the bustling cities they had once known were now eerily quiet. Never imagining the country in such a way, the visits provided the closure they searched for on what their life in Vietnam would have looked like.
“It was exactly the right decision for us to leave Vietnam,” says Chau. Sitting beside her, Tim nods in agreement.