VietNamNet Bridge - At the University of California in Irvine, an extensive collection preserves the stories of Indochinese immigrants to the US. Researchers worry that budget cuts will hinder documentation of the community’s integration into American life.
In an unremarkable room in a corner of a university library in Orange County, California, the little-known stories of Southeast Asian immigrants are kept alive.
The room holds rare items from decades ago - audio recordings recounting journeys from Vietnam by boat, letters written from camps to families left behind and orientation brochures they picked up upon arriving in California.
Researchers and academics from across the country, even from as far as Japan and Germany, have come to dig through UC Irvine's Southeast Asian Archive -- the only collection in the world that continues to document the transitions of immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to life in the United States.
But with the university facing severe budget cutbacks, some academics fear that the investment and legwork that kept the archive vibrant will suffer.
When she retired, the university did not replace Anne Frank, the full-time librarian who spent decades collecting materials from the Indochinese diaspora communities. These days, the collection is the part time responsibility of another research librarian.
Nearly 1 million Southeast Asian refugees settled in the U.S. from 1975 to the early 1980s. Many found their way to Southern California. Today, Orange County is home to the largest population of Vietnamese-Americans. Most of the archive's materials document the establishment and growth of this Vietnamese community.
Archive enthusiasts are worried that with reduced staff and funding, the archive will no longer reflect the still-changing Vietnamese-American experience.
"It is a very valuable collection, but it involves more than archiving and being there in the library," said Linda Vo, head of UC Irvine's Asian American Studies Department. "It involves encouraging people to preserve the history of their community and family, as well as an important part of American history."
Had it not been for the archive, Vo said, the beginning chapters of the Southeast Asian experience in Southern California might have been lost forever. As Vietnamese were beginning to settle around the bean and strawberry fields of Westminster in the late 1980s and open businesses, a former professor in Vietnam urged officials at UC Irvine to help document the growing enclave.
The university agreed, and responsibility fell to Frank, then a young library staff member. She didn't know much about the county's new residents, so she reached out to immigrant groups, asking those she met to write down the details of their arduous journeys to a new homeland.
Frank collected letters written by families in Southeast Asian camps to relatives in Orange County. She picked up Vietnamese-language publications. She asked for donations of books and correspondence from Vietnam, as well as unpublished theses related to Southeast Asian immigrants from universities across the country. She clipped newspaper articles documenting milestones in the life of ‘Little Saigon.’
She went to Vietnamese New Year Tet festivals and various community events, picking up brochures, programs and fliers. "It was the stuff people usually throw away," Frank said. "If you keep it long enough, it becomes interesting. These things fade from people's memories."
At first, Frank stuffed the items into a small cabinet in her office. As the collection grew, the university library set aside some money and eventually it found a home in the small room on the third floor of the main library.
Quan Tran, a Yale graduate student, said the archive is a treasure for her research on the relationship between Vietnam and its overseas diaspora. "It is one of the very few places that document the different shifts in the [Vietnamese community], especially the cultural, political and social changes" inside and outside Orange County's Little Saigon, Tran said.
Frank retired in 2007, and the archive's advisory board lobbied the university to conduct a national search for her replacement. But library officials declined to do so, and the university later instituted a hiring freeze.
Library officials say that despite budget difficulties, the university is committed to increasing the collection, which is currently a responsibility of Christina Woo, one of the university's senior librarians. Library officials say they have restructured a team of librarians to help maintain the archives, including student employees.
Frank's concern is that collecting materials for an archive that documents a constantly changing community can be difficult and takes time.
"If you are trying to document a community, you have to have someone who has knowledge, who is willing to go to community events, to meet people," she said. "If they don't replace me, that may die. What we have will be preserved, but I'm not sure if the collection will grow."
VietNamNet /Los Angeles Times
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