Hidden Treasures: Searching for Shared Values While Seeking to Preserve Unique Cultures

Not unlike balancing spinning plates atop long poles, searching out the values that undergird and thus inform a people while at the same time attempting to isolate, identify and to retain intact characteristics specific to that people is a balancing act like few others.

The Vietnam Conflict

It was the Vietnam turmoil (late 1960s – 1970s) that introduced me intimately, and at times painfully, to a cluster of Southeast Asian countries and their cultures. My work in the International School by day, and at the American University in Bangkok by evening brought me face to face with many of the peoples of this region. My little Thai house on a busy klong (canal) hosted a Thai university student (offering insights into the youth culture), later Asian travel agents (for vast amounts of valuable logistical and historical information), a Thai cook (and her exquisite Thai cuisine), and an Amma (for child care, and language and domestic instruction). By immersing myself in the community life of Bangkok, into my life came professionals, laborers, adults and children – the spectrum.

From Bangkok it was with travel ease that I could visit Laos, take a jeep high into the mountain villages of the Hmong, trek the jungles of Cambodia and marvel at their storied Angkor Wat and other Khmer magnificiences. Burma (now Mayanmar) was closed to us at that time, but in time entrance was granted into Vietnam itself. Hong King, Taiwan, and Mainland China were also integral to this extraordinary education.

The Fall of Saigon

April of 1975 – the infamous date of the fall of Saigon (later the city would be renamed Ho Chi Minh City), marked a time of chaos and change. Lives of many thousands of Asians changed radically from that time forward. My life too.

Because of my work in the region, it was a natural that I would volunteer to work with the incoming refugees from those countries. It was through this work that I could see the need for cultural bridges between what those peoples had known and what they were coming to know because of their new lives in the U.S. It was because of the many coincidences during this time that I came to know and then to collaborate with persons of great resource and talent

Tent Cities of Displaced People

Military camps and facilities across the U.S. converted over night into communities accommodating waves of incoming Southeast Asians… not coming from Vietnam only, but from Laos and Cambodia, and even from the remote mountainous regions came people representing numerous tribes and different ethnicities.