A Profile of Tom Quan An extraordinary life of service
April 5, 2006 ********************************************************* Tom Quan was 17 years old when Saigon fell on April 28, 1975. Some of you reading this may remember watching the events in Vietnam as they unfolded on television the frantic evacuations by helicopter off of the roof of the American embassy in Saigon as thousands desperate to escape the advancing North Vietnamese Army clamored for the flights to safety, the vision of legions of refugees standing on the decks of American aircraft carriers bobbing off the coast of Vietnam as wave after wave of helicopters arrived with yet more human cargo to add to the turmoil, the specter of those same helicopters, once landed, being pushed overboard into the churning seas to make room for the growing masses of misery standing shoulder to shoulder on deck, with nowhere to go, and nothing but the shirts on their back. Tom Quan wasn't watching the events unfold on television on April 28, 1975. He was there. More specifically, he was hunkered down with his aunt in a ditch adjacent to the runways of the American airbase in Saigon, along with hundreds of others hoping to escape as the mortars flew overhead and the military personnel at the airbase attempted to continue to hold the installation until the phalanx of helicopters coming in from off shore could pluck as many as possible from the embassy downtown and those who were gathering in greater and greater numbers at the airport on the rumor that help was at hand. Tom Quan and his aunt emerged from that ditch, and were among those who clambered on board helicopters landing briefly at the airport attempting to relieve the chaos there. Tom and his aunt were lifted up and away from Saigon, their small bags of hastily gathered belongings left behind on the tarmac for fear even one additional ounce of baggage would overwhelm an aircraft already overloaded with human ballast. Tom left more than just his small suitcase behind on the ground in Saigon, however. He also left behind his parents, his brothers, and everything he had ever known in life. Tom Quan is a victim and a survivor of war, and this is his story. ********************************************* Today, Tom Quan is Vice President of Marketing at Applied Wave Research (AWR). We spoke in early March and over the course of our phone call Tom recounted the events of his remarkable and accomplished life. It was an honor to hear him out, and an admittedly emotional exercise to type up the notes from that conversation. This is what Tom told me on March 1, 2006: ********************************************* I was born in Saigon I guess it's Ho Chi Minh City now in the late 1950s. I grew up there. It was the biggest city in Vietnam and I spent the entire war in the city. My whole family lived in Saigon. Two of my four brothers spent the war fighting against the North. It was an interesting time to grow up, as you can imagine, even though living in the city meant that I was somewhat immune from what was going on in the countryside. Two or three times in my 16 years living there, the war came pretty close to being on our doorstep. During the 1968 Tet Offensive a number of North Vietnamese troops actually got into Saigon. But in general, the war was in the countryside. Of course, it was difficult. We always heard about things that were happening out there, but I never left the city growing up and I knew very little about the country of Vietnam outside of Saigon. I went all through school in Saigon and was in the 12th grade when the war came to an end. That was April 1975. In Vietnam at that time, you had to pass an equivalency test to graduate and I was about to do that when the last few days of the war came. My aunt worked for the U.S. Government in Vietnam. There was a program underway at that point to try and evacuate all of the U.S. Government employees out of Saigon before the North Vietnamese troops came into the city to take over the country. On the afternoon of April 29th, my aunt suddenly came to our house. She said we had to get out and if anybody stayed behind it would be very bad. I was just becoming of draft age at that time, so my family said to my aunt, "Take this guy!" My oldest brother was still out in the countryside fighting, and my younger brother was too young to go, so I was chosen to try to escape with my aunt. That was the starting point of kind of an interesting story. ********************************************* I packed a small bag and went with my aunt to the airport, but it took us three hours longer than we had thought to get there in the chaos. The airport was being bombarded with artillery from the other side, and the runways were all destroyed essentially gone. So my aunt and I had to stay in the trenches around the airport all through the night. There was a lot of artillery flying around, and because it was nighttime, you could see the streaking of the anti-aircraft fire. Big artillery rounds landed near us at times, but we stayed down in the trenches hoping to survive. In the morning, we heard a different kind of noise and it was very loud. Afterwards, we found out it was 200 helicopters coming in from the U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet the aircraft carrier group positioned off the coast of Vietnam in the South China Sea. Half of the helicopters went to pick people off of the roof the U.S. Embassy. The other half came to the airport to start picking up the people who were there. We came out of the trenches with lots of other people who were also hiding there, and eventually it came to be our turn to get on to one of the helicopters as it landed and then took off from the airbase. As the helicopters landed, before the evacuees got on a lot of U.S. marines would come out of the helicopters. They were trying to secure the airport for further evacuations. Before we got onto our helicopter, we were told to drop everything. No one was allowed to take luggage on board. All we were allowed to take was a coat and one pair of clothes in a small bag. My aunt and I left Saigon essentially with nothing. As we flew away, we could see all of the luggage spread out all over the ground below us because everybody had to leave everything behind. Then we headed out to the South China Sea. We landed an hour later on the American aircraft carrier, the Okinawa. Standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier, it was an incredible sight. It was my first time out of the county. I felt so small on the huge aircraft carrier out in the middle of the ocean. There were hundreds of support craft on the water around us. I said to myself, this is a very different world. We stayed on the aircraft carrier for half a day. By then more helicopters were coming, and they had to get us off the Okinawa to make room for other people to land. So we were then transported, again by helicopter, to the U.S. Midway aircraft carrier. Then the military caught a commercial freighter that was just coming across the ocean and used that as a transport boat for us. It was really scary because the freighter was not equipped to load and unload people I almost fell into the ocean a couple of times. It had a very narrow path to get up there and again the sight there was incredible. There were 6,000 people in the hold of the ship, and we were stuck on the lower deck for two and a half days. It was the worst two and a half days of my life. Back on the aircraft carrier, it had been heaven. We had been eating what the officers were eating, but that wasn't the case on the freighter. We all had to sit on the hard steel deck below, three stories down. It was completely dark and nobody could lie down. There was no food although once in a while the crew would drop a 100-gallon bucket of badly cooked rice down to us. We were stuck there in the hold of the ship until we reached Subic Bay in the Philippines. Eventually, we were all unloaded there and then they had to process the paperwork for all of us. After that was done, we were transferred by motorized canoes each canoe could only hold a few people at a time the 20 miles across the straits to Clark Airforce Base. We spent just a few hours at Clark, and then we were put on a C-130 transport again designed for carrying cargo not people and sat on the floor holding onto the straps for the entire flight. Finally, we ended up on the island of Guam. The U.S. also had a base there, so our papers were processed again there, along with a lot of other people. There were quite a few famous Vietnamese there in Guam being processed with us the Vice President of Vietnam and other such people were all in the same barracks with us. I slept in a bunk next to the Vice President's bunk. He also only had a very small bag with him. That was it for him, just like for the rest of us. Everyone processed through Guam in that time was given immediate, permanent residence in the U.S. because of our status as refugees. We stayed for a day or two on Guam, and then flew in a TWA 747 to El Toro Airbase in San Diego. The Marine Corps had a base there and a big airstrip. We landed there around midnight, and then were bused to Camp Pendleton. I can still remember very well that my aunt and I were assigned to Camp No. 8, which was a group of huge, makeshift tents. There is a movie called "The Green Dragon," with Patrick Swayze. It's about the first wave of refugees that landed in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. The whole movie is exactly the life that we had in that particular camp in San Diego in 1975. Sometimes I show the movie to my sons, to show them what their dad lived through. Every day, everyone went out and had breakfast in the big tents at the camp. The U.S. marines cooked lunch and dinner for us they were very nice. We had a mix of food there, but not all of it was good. Every time they served us chop suey, nobody would get in line. No one wanted to eat that stuff. But when there was chicken, the line for food was really huge. We stayed in the tents at Camp Pendleton for a month. I had a distant relative in San Francisco, who came to San Diego and sponsored us out of the camp. ********************************************* So my life in the U.S. started with a bunch of other Vietnamese students that had all come to study here before the war was over, and then were stuck and couldn't go back. We were housed together in a rental house in San Francisco, and then after six months I moved to San Jose. I enrolled again in the 12th grade. I decided to repeat that year because I wanted to study English. I could read and write in English at that time, but my speaking and ability to listen were pretty bad. I ended up doing 12th grade at Santa Clara High School, where I mostly focused on the language. In the rest of the subjects, I was way above the 12th grade level because of my schooling in Vietnam. During that time, I worked moving lawns and doing yard work to support myself. When I left Vietnam, my mother had given me a piece of gold it was less than an ounce. I converted it into money and got U.S. $185 for it, which was a pretty big amount for me because I had nothing else. At the end of the 12th grade, I applied to a couple of colleges. I went to San Jose State for two years, and then transferred to U.C. Berkeley. The Valley was booming at the time with a lot of electronics companies. There was even manufacturing still going on around here in those days, so it was natural to get a degree in Electrical Engineering at Berkeley. One of the reasons I was accepted to Berkeley, besides my academic achievement at San Jose State, was because I wrote a pretty compelling application essay. It was about my life up to that point. I still have that hand-written essay kept in a safe deposit box at the bank. So, I earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Berkeley, and then I got a job at Intel. I also got job offers from Hewlett Packard, and some other companies, but I decided to work for Intel. While at Intel, I designed a bunch of peripheral chips they were still doing the 286 and 386 architecture at that time. Five years later, I left Intel and essentially started my career in electronic design automation (EDA). I was an applications engineer (AE) at a start-up called CAE Systems. Since that time, I have had a continuous career in EDA. After CAE Systems, I joined Cadence for six years. Then I left Cadence for a couple of different start-ups, and then went back to Cadence. Now, I'm at Applied Wave Research. I have had a pretty good run of things through these years. When I went from my chip design job into EDA, I knew eventually I wanted to become a marketeer. But I wanted to make sure that I sharpened my skillset in advance of that change, so I went to Santa Clara University at night to earn an MBA. I started in 1985 with night classes, but eventually I just decided to finish full time which I did in 1989. Santa Clara had a very unique program. There were lots of people in my classes to learn from and great opportunities for networking. ********************************************* The year after I left Berkeley and started at Intel, I met a number of friends at IBM who were also Vietnamese. We decided to start a non-profit foundation to help refugees from Asia who were in Silicon Valley looking for work. We called it the Vietnamese Voluntary Foundation, or VIVO, and after 25 years it's still very active today. At the time, there was great demand for electronics technicians and we all had experience in that area. So the first thing we did with our foundation was to open classes to teach people how to debug printed circuit boards. We also taught them how to use solder and how to debug measurements and other things related to electronics. Over the first few years, we helped several thousand people to learn these skills. Later, we found that the government had money to help us with these programs, so we applied for and wrote grant proposals to help fund the work. Last year in 2005, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of our organization. VIVO has now grown to have an actual paid staff of 35 people. The funding over the years has also grown to approximately $1.8 million dollars annually. Over this 25-year period, we are proud to say that we have served at least 50,000 people in gaining skills and finding productive work in the area. Above and beyond the staff, VIVO is principally an all-volunteer organization, and I am on the Board of Directors. Off and on, I also serve as Chairman of the Board. Lately, funding has been difficult it's been a lot tougher to get government money for our organization so we have started an interpretation service to help raise money for the foundation. We are also teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, and have added those to the programs that are funded through our grant money. The Vietnamese Voluntary Foundation has been my dream, and now that VIVO functions well, we will hopefully be able to give money to other organizations to enable them to do similar work in other communities. Of course, now it is not war refugees arriving from Vietnam who need our help, but thousands of newly arrived immigrants from all over Asia. Without the kinds of services that our foundation provides, these immigrants would end up on Welfare, which is a great burden to society. People tell us that they receive our services and that it changes their lives. The work on the Foundation has been very important to me. It's part of the balance in my life that I've been able to work between industry and the non-profit. I work very hard in both places, but it's the contrast between the two efforts that provides the real balance for me. Recently, I told my wife that I am quite sure that I know how I want to spend my time after I retire. I want to spend a great deal more time on the Foundation helping immigrants find a complete life here in the U.S. ********************************************* My wife and I met in San Francisco at the student house where I lived in the months after I left Camp Pendleton in late 1975. The funny thing is that it turns out she had also been living at Camp Pendleton, when I was there. But there were over 10,000 people in the camp at that time, so it is not a surprise that we didnt meet. My sponsor the person who brought me to San Francisco was a friend of my wife's sponsor. We were only 18 at the time we met, so we share a lifetime of stories about that time and the years since then. We frequently talk about our life in those days and compare it to our lives today. It's been 31 years since all of that occurred, and sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday. ********************************************* I did not see any of my family, who stayed behind in Vietnam when I left in 1975, until 1991, when my parents was able to immigrate here to the United States through the "Orderly Departure Program." The paperwork took 10 years, on average, for anyone to leave Vietnam through that program, and 1991 was the soonest I was able to bring them here. My father passed away peacefully a few years later. My oldest brother had been an officer in the South Vietnamese Airforce. When he came home from the war, back to Saigon, he was sent by the new government to a re-education camp for three years. After he was released from that camp, he and my youngest brother went to Thailand as Boat People. They escaped on boats from one of the Coastal Provinces in Vietnam, and then were eventually sponsored to come here to the U.S. It took them 10 years to get here, as well. I also have an older brother, who had gone abroad to study in Belgium in 1971. He got stuck there when the war ended, but the U.S. had a program to reunite families, so he joined me in 1976. My second oldest brother was a Vietnamese Marine and he was killed by a roadside bomb in the countryside just three months before the war ended. It was very sad, because after surviving so many battles during the war, he walked into a land mine and was killed. If he could have just survived a few months more, the war would have ended.
********************************************* My sons know that their dad has been though a lot. They are pretty good about it, and dont take as much for granted because they have learned a great deal from the story of my life. They know there can be many bad things happening in the world, but if you keep your head up and continue to look forward you can survive and succeed. My sons also know that the way I survived at San Jose State and at Berkeley was to do menial jobs during the summer. They have the perspective that you can bring value to your life by using your hands and brain to accomplish things. My youngest son is 16 now almost the same age I was when I left Vietnam but I try not to influence his decisions about things. He is very good in math and science; those subjects are pretty easy for him in school. He's very interested in medicine, particularly because he had asthma while he was growing up. He has had enough interactions with doctors to know that you can leave people happy when you serve them that way, and I think he will probably pursue that kind of career. ********************************************* Sometimes people ask me what would have happened had I not been home on that day back in 1975 when my aunt came to the house frantically asking my parents who they wanted her to take out of the country with her. People ask me where I would be today. In 2000, I returned to Vietnam for the first time since I left at the end of the war. I met some of my old high school friends there and I now know that if I hadn't left that day if I had been in the army, or off with my friends my life would have been completely different. One of my old childhood friends teaches high school in Vietnam now. One is driving a taxi. Most of the rest of them are doing small things running small shops, selling beer, and things like that. I haven't met a single one yet who has had the opportunity to do something significant with his life. That first time I went back, I visited with my friends. In the several trips back to Vietnam since then, I just couldn't bring myself to visit them again. It was too depressing. I often think it is so difficult to understand these things in life. Why we are all born the same way, play in the same street and go to the same school, but our lives turn out so differently? It is too difficult for me at times to think about why it has been so different for me than for my friends from childhood. I try to answer the question a question that doesn't actually have an answer by being even more involved in my organization that is helping Asian immigrants here. I know we are helping to give people better skills and that is so important. VIVO is helping people here to fit into their new county. It is the same thing I had to go through when I came here, but hopefully it's easier today because of organizations like VIVO that understand the struggle, and can assist people in overcoming the obstacles. I have been very lucky. ********************************************* Editor's Note: Tom and Misa Quan have contributed a great deal of energy and resources for over 25 years to VIVO The Vietnamese Voluntary Foundation. You can learn more about this highly regarded organization by visiting the website at www.scu.edu/diversity/vvf.html |