When Thuy Chu Tran thinks about her childhood, she remembers it with a distinct sense of isolation. Tran’s family moved from Sài Gòn, Vietnam in 1975, when she was only 9 years old, eventually landing in Westminster, California. There, she both literally and figuratively wrestled with finding her voice. She struggled to learn English in a community with very few Asian immigrants and faced a bully throughout middle school.
“I realized that I was being picked on, and I was striving to find my voice and fight back,” Tran said. “‘You go back to where you come from, Ching Chong, and eat your fried rice.’ And what am I supposed to say back? [Should I say,] ‘You go back to where you’re from, and eat your fried chicken’?”
However, as lost as she felt in the classroom full of Charlie Brown-esque garbled language, Tran found stability in her skills in math, using it as an escape from her childhood bully.
“When I was in elementary school, I got to walk over to the high school to do math.… Not being able to speak English, math was my language,” Tran said.
Tran recalls very little about her childhood before immigrating to the United States. She was born in Tây Ninh in 1966 and later moved to Sài Gòn with her parents and three younger siblings. Though she has some memories of crawling into bunkers during bomb raids, what she describes is a generally peaceful childhood. As the dangers of the war mounted in 1975, Tran’s uncle, an American contractor, found a way for her immediate family to escape to the United States.
Tran’s family ended up squeezed in her aunt’s guest room in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas on April 30, the very day Sài Gòn fell. They later moved to California, where her father found a morning job in accounting and her mother worked at an assembly line for an airplane company at night. At the time, the Asian-American community in California was still very small, and Tran remembers the isolation she felt in her childhood.
“It was America,” she said. “There was not very much diversity. There was no Asian grocery store. Little Saigon was not developed [yet].”
To Tran, being bullied revealed what was expected of her by white America. White Americans assumed certain things about first generation Asian-Americans—namely, that Tran would keep her head down and allow the bullying to happen.
Tran’s refusal to back down from using her voice continued throughout her life. After high school, she attended the University of California, Los Angeles with a major in biology. However, when she took a Vietnamese history class, Tran realized the fragility of democracy—that without someone standing up for it, democracy can and would fall to political bullies.
“I learned about the war and why I was there and what was given up,” Tran said. “Not until now, as I fight for democracy in our state and in our country, do I realize that democracy can fall. Vietnam lost a democracy, even though it was a prop-up democracy.”
In 1990, Tran went to graduate school at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, where she opened an optometry business in 1995. She also worked with the Lions Club, providing optometry services across many countries, but she wanted to do more with her voice to preserve democracy.
At a Christmas party in 2007, she spoke with another Lions Club member who came out of retirement to give her a connection into the military, where she provided humanitarian aid to countries in need. As she raised her right hand, face-to-face with Colonel Lloyd in the Air National Guard Base, Tran found that she wasn’t just using her voice—she was paving the way for others with it.
“When you join the military, they give you an email,” Tran said. “And if you are John Smith, it’s probably ‘JohnSmith290’ or ‘JaneDoe320,’ but… I was the first ‘Thuy Tran.’”
Boat People SOS, a nonprofit in the District of Columbia trying to get more Vietnamese people in office, reached out to Tran in 2011. At first, they asked her for financial support for their mission, but this became her introduction into a whole new world of protecting democracy through politics. The Executive Director of Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) then encouraged Tran to run for the Oregon House of Representatives.
Though she lost the race at the time, she learned a lot through her experience. Tran decided to use her voice at the community level, and by 2012, Tran was appointed to the Park Rose School District Board, winning by 12 percent against a white man.
“I ran, and I said, ‘I’m from the community. I’m going to be your voice,’ to the AAPI community, to the Park Rose community, to all the parents at the school my kids went to,” Tran said.
In 2022, when the opportunity to run for state representative came again, she won. On January 3, 2023, Tran once again raised her right hand and vowed to defend the Constitution, and to this day, she continues to do so.
“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the table,” Tran said. “People are out there making decisions that affect the lives of your family [and] your community. If you get the privilege to be at the table, you get to fight for their rights.… Other countries lose [their] democracy, just like Vietnam. Many countries fall into fascism, and if you observe what is happening in the [United States] right now, the [United States] is falling into fascism faster than other countries in the past. You have to fight for what you have.”