Hieu Stuart bounces into her blue Mini Cooper on a rainy Friday morning and cruises the two minutes from her apartment to her English class at Hollins University, a small women's college in Roanoke. Her assignment today is to continue to work on a persuasive essay. It's a tough assignment for Stuart, a native of Vietnam for whom English is a challenge even after more than a decade in this country. But she's probably the student here most confident in her subject: the relationship between positive thinking and success. "In my experience," she writes of sports, "the optimistic personalities really make a difference in performing and help to win the games."
"Where do positive attitudes come from?" Stuart goes on to ask. She's not sure, but irrepressible optimism is what's propelling her at age 32 to get a psychology degree after a life of trying to see the upside of some definitely downside situations.
Hieu Stuart in the Hollins University library.
(Pilar Vergara)
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Almost 12 years ago, Stuart and her impoverished family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam. She struggled to learn English as she worked low-level jobs. Her family had so few resources that Stuart pilfered furniture from roadside trash. "I was stuck," she says. "I did not want to dream because the reality was so sad." And just two years ago, she held her husband, John Stuart, in her arms while he died of a rare form of cancer.
Following a year of soul-searching and mourning, Stuart enrolled at Hollins in September, entering as a junior with the help of credits from Northern Virginia Community College and some financial aid. She's majoring in psychology, and playing on the soccer and tennis teams.
After she graduates, she wants to get her doctorate in psychology and go on to counsel fellow Vietnamese immigrants. They aren't typically comfortable with talk therapy, she says: "My people struggle with a lot of problems and never let it out."
Older students like Stuart are different from their teenage classmates. They know what they want and are focused on getting it, says Stuart's English professor, Marcy Trianosky. "They come to class having really thought about things," Trianosky says. "It really puts the [other] undergraduates to shame sometimes." Stuart is a shining example, she adds, "an incredibly hard worker and incredibly positive."
Hollins has a special undergraduate program, known as the Horizon Program, for what the school terms "nontraditional-age women." Many of the program's 80 students are in their thirties, women who took detours -- family, work -- on the way toward higher education.
Men can study as graduate students at Hollins, and some do, but you wouldn't mistake this for a coed school when you see the cafeteria full of clusters of young women, some still in their pajamas at lunchtime. Stuart blends right in, despite being a good 12 or 13 years older than the rest; she's a petite 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds. On this rainy afternoon, she hungrily grazes through the buffet line, plopping a heap of fried chicken fingers onto a large plate of salad greens, then strolling past students in chatty groups to sit by a window overlooking a playing field. She says her age is a nonissue because "no one ever guesses I'm over 21 years old . . . They can't believe it when I tell them my age."
During her first semester here, she's taken classes on cognitive psychology, sexuality and creative dance, as well as Trianosky's English course, "Writing for College: Inquiry and Genre." And she seems to have befriended -- or at least met -- the entire school after only a few months on this campus of about 1,000 students, waving cheerily to passersby after class. "Everyone knows me," she says, clearly pleased.
Celia McCormick, Hollins's dean of admissions, says Stuart "is probably one of the most enthusiastic, excited, ready-to-jump-in Horizon students I've ever seen . . . I would use the word 'energy' to describe her, even when she's sitting still."
Stuart's American friends started calling her "Action" a few years ago -- something that Stuart says blew her mind, since that's precisely what Hieu (pronounced Hugh) means in Vietnamese. "I was, like, 'Oh my God, this is so scary,'" she giggles. She often punctuates her sentences with "Wow!" and "Whoa!"
Beneath the buoyant exterior, however, there's a quiet, thoughtful side to Stuart, a reflection of her Buddhist upbringing. As a child in Vietnam, she was so involved with the temple that people in her village assumed she'd become a nun, she says. She still prays every night and meditates every morning. And she still struggles with English. She tells all her professors, "My purpose in this class is not to get A's, it's to improve my English," and seeks their help.
She says that when she recently asked a friend to point out her pronunciation errors, "I realized, I've been doing all this wrong! I say 'Engliss' instead of English. Wow! I said to him, 'Where the heck have you been?' "
But this is a woman who's had larger concerns in life than proper pronunciation. In Vietnam, Stuart was a top student in high school and wanted to be a lawyer. But the communists had seized her father's land and business -- he was a mechanic -- and her family decided to pack up and leave the country. Stuart joined her parents and four of her 11 brothers and sisters in their 1993 move to Honolulu, where an older brother was already living. As the oldest sibling in the new household, she felt the traditional Vietnamese responsibility to serve as family caretaker. Her first check from a job at a duty-free store paid for a microwave oven and for her younger sister Hang to enroll in a gymnastics program. Hang, now a 25-year-old gymnastics instructor near San Francisco, was an elite acrobat in Vietnam. "She sacrificed her education to take care of us," Hang says of her sister.
