Budget cuts raise concerns for future of Southeast Asian archive

Had it not been for the archive, Vo said, the beginning chapters of the Southeast Asian refugee experience in Southern California might have been lost forever. As Vietnamese refugees were beginning to settle around the bean and strawberry fields of Westminster in the late 1980s and open businesses, a former professor in Vietnam approached officials at UC Irvine about documenting the growing enclave.

The responsibility came to Frank, a university librarian who archived Orange County history. Frank didn't know much about the county's new residents, so she reached out to refugee groups, asking those she met to write their stories of escaping a homeland that had fallen to communist forces.

She collected letters written by families in Southeast Asia's refugee 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 She asked for donations of books and correspondence from Vietnam, as well as unpublished theses related to Southeast Asian refugees from universities across the country. She clipped newspaper articles documenting milestones in Little Saigon: Tony Lam's win in 1992 as the first Vietnamese American elected official; the 53-day protest against a merchant who displayed communist symbols in his store in 1999; President Bill Clinton's historic visit to Vietnam in 2000.

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.

The archive's rare finds include items donated by Project Ngoc, a student-led organization that sent volunteers to Southeast Asia in the 1980s to help refugees as they waited for resettlement. When the organization disbanded, it donated letters, official documents, photos and paintings created by Vietnamese refugees.

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.