For new arrivals on our shores — teetering between hope and fear, VietLead offers a crucial lifeline | Philly Gives

Chu Bach, as his friends call him, might have tried to delay the moment, but it always came.

The moment he would have to walk out of his home in South Philadelphia, the moment he would turn to his wife and do what he always did, year after year, on the day he had to report to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for his annual check-in.

“I kiss my wife and tell her, if something happens, take care of yourself and our son,” the 64-year-old said.

These days, Chu Bach is teetering between hope and fear for his future, which is why he only agreed to be interviewed if his last name was not used, instead referring to him the way most of his friends do, as Chu “Uncle” Bach.

His hope comes from efforts made on his behalf by VietLead, a nonprofit organization that helps the area’s Vietnamese community with food, medical assistance, youth empowerment, civic engagement, and what it calls community defense — working with people like Chu Bach specifically on their cases and also on policy advocacy to end detention and deportation of formerly incarcerated Southeast Asian community members in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

And the fear?

“Right now, a lot of our community is scared, knowing that immigration hostility will increase, with a stance that is very pro-deportation,” said Lan Dinh, cofounder and co-executive director.

During an interview in VietLead’s cramped offices in a South Philadelphia Asian shopping center, Chu Bach began to cry. It’s all too much — too much trauma, too much pain, too much fear.

What if he never came back? What if immigration grabbed him and deported him? What if he never saw his wife and son again?

In Philadelphia, Vietnamese number between 20,000 and 25,000 and are the city’s third-largest Asian group, according to Dinh citing census data. VietLead serves them in zip codes in South, Southwest, and Northeast Philadelphia, as well as in Camden, where the 5,000 to 8,000 Vietnamese who live there constitute that city’s largest Asian group.

Of the 29,000 Vietnamese who live in the Philadelphia area, 63% have limited English proficiency and 28% live in poverty.

The bulk of Vietnamese in Philadelphia and in the nation came in two waves — the first from the 1970s to the 1990s, with refugees and soldiers arriving in the aftermath of the war, and the second from the 1990s to 2010, including Amerasians and families reuniting.

The coming year is an important one for VietLead. It marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the United States’ involvement in wars in Southeast Asia.

As part of the Southeast Asian Freedom Network, a national group, VietLead will press the U.S. to take responsibility for the impacts of the wars in Southeast Asia, including Agent Orange, a toxic pesticide that continues to poison the land in Vietnam. “People continue to have birth defects,” Dinh said. “Also, for the U.S. to clear undetonated bombs — bombs that go off every single day that kill people in the countryside.”

In addition, the group seeks to end deportations of Southeast Asians, while, in the meantime, allowing Southeast Asians with deportation orders to work and providing them with public assistance.

Dinh said that Chu Bach’s situation is fairly typical, although he has been luckier than many.

In 1975, Chu Bach’s father was a captain in the South Vietnamese army. One day, after North Vietnam took over, officials came to his house and told his father to report to the police station.

“He never came back,” said Chu Bach, who was 15 at the time and thinks his father died in a reeducation camp. “We never saw him again. We wondered what happened to him.”

Five years after his father disappeared, his mother, sisters, and grandmother decided to pay for him to escape Vietnam. They chose him because they thought he was strong enough to survive the perilous overseas journey on a crowded smuggler’s boat.

Chu Bach did, then spent three years in refugee camps in Indonesia and Singapore before being sponsored by a church in Boston in 1983. He learned welding and began to work. But, he said, he got in with the wrong crowd, got addicted to cocaine, and participated in an armed robbery in Philadelphia to get money for drugs.

Arrested during a car stop, he had no idea how the legal system worked, didn’t have a private lawyer, was convicted, and wound up serving seven and a half years at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, now closed.

In prison, “I turned my life around,” he said. After his release in 1994, he began going to church, and has been employed steadily since then, first in odd jobs and then working the last 16 years as a hibachi chef in Japanese restaurants. He owns a home, pays taxes, and sent his son to college.

“Right now, a lot of our community is scared, knowing that immigration hostility will increase.”

“More than 30 years,” Chu Bach said, “I’ve tried to improve my life every single day. I proved to everyone.”

Although his conviction made him a deportation candidate, a 2008 memo of understanding between the Vietnamese and American governments said that Vietnamese who arrived in the U.S. before 1995 wouldn’t be deported if convicted. But that began to change during former President Donald Trump’s first presidency.

That’s when Chu Bach learned about VietLead.

“They help keep families together in America,” he said.

VietLead found him a lawyer and helped him apply for and obtain a 2023 pardon from Gov. Josh Shapiro — a three-year process. Through the lawyer, Chu Bach also has a new immigration sponsor — his adult son. Chu Bach and his wife never told their son about Chu Bach’s shaky status. They didn’t want him to be afraid each time his father left the house.

“I would just pray to God, ‘Please, please, please, give me a chance to walk in there and walk out to be with my family,’” Chu Bach said.

The pardon and sponsor are paving the way to a green card for Chu Bach, but it’s still tenuous, especially given the political situation.

“I’m in limbo again,” he said.

“A lot of folks with deportation orders were born in refugee camps or lived through the wars in Vietnam. They came here and settled with very few resources,” said Ken Mai, VietLead’s community defense senior coordinator.

Lacking resources, “they make a mistake and land in prison without citizenship. Nationwide, there are 16,000 Southeast Asians with orders of removal,” he said.

“In Philadelphia, a lot of Southeast Asian youth form gangs to protect themselves and their communities from violence,” he said.

Reaching out to the youth is part of VietLead’s mission as well. During the school year, through PhillyRoots and For Youth By Youth, VietLead works with Philadelphia and South Jersey’s Southeast Asian, Black, and brown youth with low-income and refugee/immigrant backgrounds on community leadership and advocacy. Programs continue in the summer.

VietLead also runs two community gardens, including one at Horace Furness High School in South Philadelphia. The crops skew Southeast Asian and include water spinach, bitter melon, and winter melon.

“We want to reconnect our community to land as a form of healing,” Dinh said. “A lot of our people are former farmers. Through our garden sites, we connect our senior community members and our younger folks, so our seniors can feel dignified and confirmed and so our young people who did not grow up that way can be connected to that part of our cultural identity.”

Jane M. Von Bergen spent more than 25 years as a reporter and editor at The Inquirer. janevonbtheater@gmail.com

This article is part of a series about Philly Gives — a community fund to support nonprofits through end-of-year giving. To learn more about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.