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August 29, 2001

From East to West, Then Up and to the Right
After 23 Years, Viet Dinh Has Really Arrived

By Ylan Q. Mui

Washington (Washington Post) -- Politics had not treated Viet Dinh's family well. His father was a city council member before the war in the family's hometown of Vung Tau, Vietnam. When Saigon fell in 1975, he was thrown into prison. After escaping from prison three years later, he had to hide out until 1983, failing in 25 attempts to leave the country. Finally, he made it to the Philippines and eventually to the United States -- where Dinh and other family members had been scraping by.

Politics had wrenched the family apart and led to years of struggle and poverty.

So it was a shock when, just one month after entering college in 1986, Dinh changed his major from pre-med to . . . governmental policy and economics.

After learning this news, it took his parents weeks before they calmed down enough to write him back. "Didn't you see what happened to me?" Dinh says his father warned him.

But now, look what's happened to Dinh. At 33, he is the highest-ranking Vietnamese American official in the Bush administration, working as assistant attorney general overseeing the Office of Legal Policy. He recently returned from hobnobbing with the president on Air Force One and flew to Los Angeles with Attorney General John Ashcroft to study ways to reform the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

All this wasn't in the original plan. Becoming a doctor (or maybe a priest) was the "safe" and "expected" thing for Dinh. After his family's long ordeal, he owed it to his parents and six older siblings to do well. He owed it to his new country to become a successful citizen.

"The debt can be repaid not only in the traditional areas of science, technology and business, but in contribution to public service," he says.

For Dinh, it hasn't always been personal assistants and offices with black leather sofas, of course. It was more like 12 days in a boat with about 75 other people, fleeing to Malaysia from Vietnam. His family's flight had to be coordinated with his father's escape from prison, or it could have meant death or jail for those remaining. But the prospects in Malaysia didn't seem much brighter. They were greeted by gunfire from patrol boats as they pulled into harbor on June 12, 1978.

The refugees had nowhere else to go. Their boat wasn't going to make it to the Singapore harbor, the next possible stop. So the refugees waited until late at night, then docked in Malaysia, making a run for it while everyone else slept. Dinh's mother was the last one off the boat. The 9-year-old boy watched as she chopped the boat to pieces with an ax as tall as herself so the authorities couldn't force them to leave in the morning.

"That image of my mother destroying our last link to Vietnam really stands in my mind to this day as to the incredible courage she possesses, but also the incredible lengths to which my parents, like so many other people, have gone to in order to find that promise of freedom and opportunity," Dinh said during his Senate confirmation hearing in May.

After a few months in Malaysia, they settled in Portland, Ore. For two years, they picked strawberries, scrounging to send money to Dinh's father and one of his sisters, who were hiding out in Vietnam. Dinh also went to school, learning English by reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books.

In 1980 the family moved to Fullerton, Calif. Dinh's mother -- who had been a teacher in Vietnam -- became a seamstress, and Dinh flipped burgers at McDonald's, served pies at Pizza Hut and swept floors. "You name it, I've done it," he says. Forget soccer practice, Boy Scouts, Little League. The family had to work to save money to bring Daddy back: "We all recognized what the priority was."

Finally, one afternoon in 1983, they got a letter from their father. He was coming to America.

Having their father home eased the family's workload, leaving the kids time for extracurriculars. Dinh, by now in high school, took up tennis and joined the debate team. One of his debate coaches pushed him to apply to Harvard. Financial aid and a scholarship package won him four years of undergraduate work and another three years at Harvard Law. (He's still paying off the loans.)

The Ivy League education put Dinh on the path of movers and shakers. He became a research assistant at a Kennedy School of Government think tank, and worked in Boston's budget office. He helped found an umbrella organization for Vietnamese students in Massachusetts.

Harvard was a place of privilege, and Dinh didn't even have enough money to fly home for the holidays. But he loved the intensely intellectual atmosphere. He realized his love for law after fighting with a friend about whether the Founding Fathers believed man is essentially good or evil. They started the debate after class one afternoon, and it lasted until 9 the next morning.

In law school, he homed in on his passion for the Constitution and its structure -- the separation of powers. He developed a conservative philosophy in which government should hold limited powers to maximize the "zone of liberty" for each person.

But Dinh wasn't in an ivory tower studying Black's Law Dictionary. He used his skills to persuade the Hong Kong government to let his sister come to America. She had stayed in Vietnam with their father when the family fled -- she helped pay for the boat that carried them. Even after her father escaped, she was stuck in Vietnam. In 1989 she finally made her way to Hong Kong, and Dinh started working to get her refugee status. The whole family was reunited in 1992 -- 17 years after Dinh's father was jailed.

Dinh was 25, fresh out of law school and clerking for Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals. A year later, he went to work for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Then he got a call to join the special counsel for the Whitewater investigation. In 1996 a former professor told him about a job teaching law at Georgetown University, and Dinh went back to the classroom. He was tenured last year -- the first and only Vietnamese American law professor there -- before being nominated for assistant attorney general in the Bush administration.

The post was his chance not only to think about law but also to help shape it.

The audience was on its feet and applauding before Dinh even opened his mouth at the banquet for the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies late last month. The Vietnamese community had been following him since he was profiled in April 2000 in the book "25 Vietnamese Americans in 25 Years." Speaking engagements and interview requests had piled up.

At the banquet, he spoke "from the heart," without notes. "What makes America great is that it takes the people of the world, puts them against a majestic backdrop and gives them freedom," he said.

He has a light Vietnamese accent, his T's sounding like thick D's. He talked about INS reform, racial profiling, drugs and keeping guns away from gangs. He talked about his parents -- retired now in Orange County after running a grocery store in Salem, Ore. -- and how they have been held up three times by Vietnamese gangs. Then, the kicker: He told the audience that he is working hard for the day when he can say, "Me, you don't have to worry about that anymore."

That one word -- me, Vietnamese for "mother" -- resonated. It was one of the few Vietnamese words in his speech. It showed that he may be high on the Hill, but the problems facing the Vietnamese immigrant community hit close to home for him, too. The audience leapt to its feet for another standing ovation.

John Quoc Duong, 28, executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, also took the stage that night to talk about Dinh, the regular guy. How the first time they met, early this year, was over a dinner of bun bo hue, a noodle dish with pig's feet and beef, in Eden Center in Falls Church, the heart of the Vietnamese community in the Washington area. How they eat pho, a beef stew, together on the weekends. How Dinh, despite his government status, remembers his roots.

The audience swarmed Dinh after the speech, taking pictures, offering him other speaking engagements, boasting about their single daughters.

Of the people profiled in "25 Vietnamese Americans in 25 Years," Dinh is the most asked about, says Thuy Thi Nguyen, 26, an education lawyer in Oakland, Calif., who helped put the book together. "It's just the 'wow' factor," she says.

There are only a handful of prominent Vietnamese players in government. Tony Lam became the first Vietnamese American to hold elected office in the United States when he won a seat on the Westminster City Council in California in 1992. Dang Pham is executive director of San Francisco's Immigrants Rights Commission and City Census 2000 liaison, while Bich Ngoc Nguyen was the acting director for the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Education Affairs under former president Bush. Barrett Thang was the first Vietnamese Superior Court judge.

The current Bush administration, reaching out to the Vietnamese community, has appointed Duong, along with Mina Nguyen, a special assistant to U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and Dinh.

Life in Vietnam has shaped Dinh's views of government. He advocates trade with Vietnam and internal economic reform as a way of undermining the communist government. He criticizes affirmative action as a remedial effort that warps the Constitution's color-blindness. He aligns himself with the Republican Party.

"I think he's very representative of the older generation," Nguyen says.

A report released in March surveying the politics of Asian Americans shows that Vietnamese immigrants are the only group that identifies more often with Republicans than Democrats, which Nguyen attributes to the war being fresh in their minds.

Dinh philosophizes a lot about "freedom" and "opportunity": Government is a system of "wise restraints that set us free."

The INS needs to scrutinize applications to ensure that deserving refugees get "the magic potion of freedom." If he has one message for immigrants, it's to avoid becoming jaded. Don't take everyday life for granted: "Things can be, and have been, a lot worse."
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