Between two worlds (continued)

AS THE HEAD of one of the state’s largest social service organizations for Southeast Asians, Joseph Le has seen the economic hardship faced by arriving refugees. He’s the executive director of the Socio-Economic Development Center for Southeast Asians, which offers programs and such services as assistance to crime victims and ESL/citizenship classes. The organization’s offices are in a squat brick building on Elmwood Avenue in Providence, full of certificates, citations, and awards from prominent figures like Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline and former governor Lincoln Almond.

Because educated people were targeted by the communist governments, Le says, it was often farmers and laborers who managed to escape to a new life here. Even those who were formally educated in their home country usually arrived speaking little or no English (according to the Census, between 50 and 60 percent of Southeast Asians in Rhode Island "speak English less than ‘very well’ "), and as a result were forced into jobs that paid little and required long hours. ThongKhoun Pathana’s stepfather, for example, a machine operator in a Massachusetts factory, had been a mathematics professor at the National University of Laos.

More than one-third of Southeast Asians in Rhode Island work in manufacturing jobs. Though these posts are a stable source of employment for many people, the Cambodian Society’s Molly Soum, who herself worked briefly at a Providence jewelry factory, says Southeast Asians are often easy targets for layoffs: "We don’t speak the language," she says. "We don’t have the skills, we don’t have the degree . . . they look at you like you don’t have anything else to do than work for $5 an hour and let them walk all over you."

Employment is also difficult for those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the late ’80s and early ’90s, psychiatrists estimated that up to three-quarters of Southeast Asian refugees suffered from PTSD, depression, or both. As Le says, "Our people witnessed death, hunger, suffering . . . It sets them back sometimes to remember the war, what happened on the Southeast Asian peninsula."

The Hmong United Association’s Vangpao Yang used to work at a Southeast Asian support center at St. Joseph’s Hospital, running groups and linking people with therapists and psychiatrists. He saw the effect of the trauma on people’s ability to live and work. "People have a hard time finding jobs," he says, "because they can’t adjust . . . people who don’t have support — brothers, sisters, family killed — they can’t get to work." Yang himself has a moment of panic each time a firecracker goes off near his Washington Park home; he can’t help but worry, for a second, that it is a bomb. Each time a helicopter flies overhead, the sound brings him back to the sticky hot jungle, afraid for his life, listening to the pounding of the military helicopters carrying the dead back to their villages. Yang says the memories were especially hard for his father. " ‘No matter what, you have to get a job,’" his father always said, but Yang knew, too, that "the nightmare is still there."

The good news, says Le, is that more and more Southeast Asian youth are completing high school, continuing on to college, and securing good jobs. "It’s very gratifying to see," he says, how the "sacrifice of the first generation" is paying off. Indeed, 69 percent of all Asian Rhode Islanders 25 or older have a high school diploma, up from 60 percent in 1990. More and more families, agrees Molly Soum of the Cambodian Society, are able to "buy their own homes, move out from the South Side . . . they move up, sending their kids to private school, getting a stable job, sending their kids to college."

Maliss Men’s family represents one such story. Describing her father’s struggle to make a living after arriving in the US, she says, "It really broke his wing. He was very successful in Cambodia. [Then he] came here and was stripped of everything . . . [It was] disappointing finding out the American dream isn’t what they thought it was." Men’s mother, meanwhile, has worked in a Texas Instruments assembly line in Attleboro, Massachusetts, for more than 30 years. Men herself worked there for two long summers during college, and says, "It brought me to tears seeing her."

After she graduated from Bridgham Middle School on Providence’s West End, though, her family was able to move to the suburbs, to Lincoln. Her parents made this choice, Men explains, because, "Education was always a priority. [The] whole purpose of coming to America [was to] make a better life." After graduating from high school, Men went on to the University of Rhode Island, participating in the University’s Talent Development program, which explicitly seeks to "recruit, support, and retain students of color and disadvantaged students," thereby creating a forum for the students to explore these issues. Now she teaches at a Montessori school in North Kingstown while working part-time toward her master’s degree in ESL and cross-cultural studies at Brown.