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<\/a>She clothed three young daughters and a son in peasant garb, sewed gold bullion and U.S. dollars into their clothing, and piled the youngsters into the family car to head for Vietnam\u2019s coast.<\/p>\n
Stopped repeatedly at communist roadblocks, she lied and said that they were heading back to their former home in the Mekong Delta. One Vietcong soldier even hitched a brief ride. Nevertheless, Mrs. Lam was determined to reach Thailand and freedom.**<\/p>\n
In the days afterward, her distraught daughter Vivi Tran \u201976, a Seton Hall student at the time, approached Father Lawrence Frizzell in the University\u2019s McLaughlin library. A junior in the business school, Vivi sought assistance from \u201cFather Larry,\u201d who had arrived the year before from England to teach in a new program in Jewish-Christian Studies. Vivi desperately wanted to bring her mother and siblings \u2014 who had ultimately reached Thailand \u2014 to the U.S.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember him saying, \u2018We\u2019ll figure something out to help your family,\u2019\u201d Vivi says.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a month,\u201d Steven says, \u201cI went every day to the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, trying to get the paperwork started so that my family could gain refugee status \u2014 but with no results.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, a series of remarkable events occurred.<\/p>\n A cable arrived at the embassy from then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Steven says.<\/p>\n The diplomats let him read the message for himself: \u201cPlease let the Tran family come to the USA.\u201d<\/p>\n To his astonishment, he learned that this intervention was the result of actions undertaken by two powerful Seton Hall personalities: Monsignor Thomas Fahy, then president; and John Tsu, professor and founder of the Department of Asian Studies, who was then and later an adviser on Asian-American affairs to several U.S. presidents.<\/p>\n Just days later, the family was reunited at John F. Kennedy International Airport, recalls Philie Tran, then 14, Vivi and Steve\u2019s sister. \u201cWe were lucky,\u201d Philie marvels. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have to stay in a refugee camp.\u201d Nor were they among the 500,000 estimated \u201cboat people\u201d who died, or the 165,000 who perished in communist re-education camps.<\/p>\n The arriving Trans were stunned to receive permanent resident cards. What\u2019s more, Vivi found out that her tuition and board costs would be waived.<\/p>\n The story can be divided into three chapters:<\/p>\n Philie Tran remembers that, after the fall of Saigon in 1975, after passing through the Vietcong checkpoints, her mother hired a fishing boat for what proved to be a harrowing journey.<\/p>\n \u201cOur boat was small,\u201d Philie says, \u201conly big enough for 12 people.\u201d<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Mrs. Lam allowed a number of young single men in addition to the crew to escape with them, crowding the boat perilously. Mrs. Lam also generously shared her family\u2019s food. What should have been a day\u2019s trip turned into five.<\/p>\n \u201cWe ran out of food and then the fishermen had to throw out nets to catch fish.\u201d After that, everyone subsisted on fried fish and ginseng. \u201cIt seemed like forever.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually, the Trans would reach Bangkok in a hired car. Philie remembers vividly what happened after they were stopped along the way: \u201cSomehow that policeman knew we had money. I remember my Mom knelt down in the road and begged him to give back our money. I\u2019ll never forget that. But he didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>At about the same time, Vivi\u2019s brother, Steven Tran, Ph.D. \u201974, who had graduated from Seton Hall with a degree in chemistry, took a leave of absence from his job at the pharmaceutical firm Hoffmann-LaRoche, and boarded a plane for Bangkok. There, he met his mother, sisters and brother \u2014 who in the interim had been nearly lost in a storm at sea and then were robbed. Destitute, they had been taken in by a Thai family.<\/p>\n<\/a>The Tran family\u2019s amazing tale, intertwined as it is with the collapse of American hopes after decades of warfare in Vietnam, is also a story of the extended Seton Hall family. Specifically, the lengths to which members of the University community would go to in order to come to the aid of a student who found herself in dire circumstances. The story had been lost from public memory until Vivi, now a successful real estate agent in the Los Altos, California area, was invited to an alumni event in San Francisco last fall and first shared her memories of Seton Hall with its organizers.<\/p>\nThe Escape<\/h4>\n
\nOn the second day at sea, a howling storm blew up that almost swamped them. Meantime, both food and freshwater grew short with so many people aboard.<\/p>\n