Beating the Odds in Garden Grove Race

Lan Nguyen knows all about long odds.

His family, all 10 of them, escaped Communist Vietnam to settle in Orange County. He arrived in 1980 with his mother and six brothers, after a perilous boat trip to Malaysia and a year in a refugee camp.

His oldest brother and father, who were held captive in a Communist reeducation camp, escaped years later and joined them.

On Monday, Nguyen, 38, beat the odds again, pulling an eleventh-hour upset against a two-term incumbent in a Garden Grove school board race. He became one of the first two Vietnamese Americans to win such elections in the country. The other is Madison Nguyen, 27, no relation, who won a seat on the Franklin-McKinley elementary district board in Santa Clara County, which also has a sizable Vietnamese community.

“I knew it was going to be difficult,” said Lan Nguyen, who won by 76 votes after trailing in preliminary counts to trustee Terry Cantrell. “But I couldn’t wait, the community couldn’t wait.”

The urgency to bring a Vietnamese American voice to the school board was apparent in the numbers, Nguyen said. Orange County’s Vietnamese American community -- more than 134,000 -- is the largest in the country and concentrated in Garden Grove and Westminster. The Garden Grove Unified School District, which serves both cities, has the largest Vietnamese American student population in the nation -- about 11,000 children or 28% of the district. Both cities have Vietnamese American officials on their city councils but, Nguyen said, the absence on the school board was glaring.

“Education requires everyone to get involved,” he said. “The teachers, the students, the parents.”

Cultural and language barriers have prevented Vietnamese parents from participating in the district, said Nguyen, who’s married to computer programmer Helen Tran, 36. The couple have a 2-year-old son, Andrew.

“It was never about academic performance; we have very good schools,” he said. “But [Vietnamese] parents feel very intimidated because they don’t know whom they can go to. Now they can come to me.”

Nguyen is among a young crop of Vietnamese Americans who have come of political age.

In the Nov. 5 election, Westminster elected its second Vietnamese American council member, Andy Quach, 30. Tony Lam, who become the first Vietnamese American elected official in the country in 1992, is retiring from the Westminster City Council at the end of the year.

Garden Grove’s mayor pro tempore, Van Thai Tran, 37, a friend of Nguyen’s, was elected in 2000.

Community observers say these candidates represent a political maturation in the Vietnamese American community. The first generation’s primary concern was making a living in their new country. Their U.S.-educated children are beginning to assert themselves politically.

“There is no doubt that there is a trend,” said Tran, who campaigned for Lan Nguyen and Madison Nguyen. “The number of new voters in the community has increased dramatically in the last four years.”

That increase is credited in large part to the candidates themselves. In many ways, they built a constituency. Lan Nguyen’s campaign, for example, helped register 6,800 new voters in the county, he said. His volunteers helped 9,500 voters in the district with absentee ballots.

Nguyen, an attorney and longtime community activist, also was aided by his family story, which is well-known among local Vietnamese Americans and evokes memories of their own difficult journeys to the United States.

Shortly after the first members of Nguyen’s family escaped Vietnam, his father and oldest brother were freed from the reeducation camp where they had spent seven years, he said. But it would be another 10 years before the family was made whole.

His brother escaped by boat to Japan and reunited with the family in 1982. His father stayed behind in the event his eldest failed and ended up in jail.

Eventually, Nguyen’s father bribed his way out of the country to Germany, where he sought asylum at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. In 1992, the family was finally reunited.

Despite the rough beginnings, all eight sons went to college, Nguyen said proudly.

And when it comes to beating the odds?

“I’ve always rooted for the underdog,” he said.