Painful Journey Ends in U-Va. Diploma

CHARLOTTESVILLE, May 22 -- In April 1975, as the communists were closing in on Saigon, Hoanh Huu Phan, a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army, gave up a chance to escape in a U.S. helicopter because he didn't want to leave his family behind. He was arrested a few days later and, in part because his college degree made him suspect, spent the next eight years in a reeducation camp. His son was later denied entry into college.

So it was with no small degree of satisfaction that his daughter, Lan Anh Thi Phan, 22, sat on University of Virginia's Lawn on Sunday, laughing with her friends and gazing into the blue sky as a beach ball sailed over 5,890 graduates in black mortarboards.

As a breeze rippled the trees around the university's white-columned edifices, about 30,000 people witnessed its 176th graduating class receive degrees. Among those watching was a Marine Corps sergeant stationed in Fallujah, Iraq, who saw his daughter's graduation via the Internet. The family of John Steve Catilo, a biology major and graduate of Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School who drowned last summer while coaching a crew team on the Potomac River, was at the university to accept his degree.

Vivian W. Pinn, director of the office of research on women's health at the National Institutes of Health and a 1967 graduate of U-Va.'s medical school, urged graduates to be open, adaptable and unafraid to buck tradition. At U-Va., she said, "I was the only woman or person of color in my medical school class, and among few across the university."

Phan, who received a bachelor of science degree in nursing and has been hired as a nurse at Washington Hospital Center's oncology department, has done a lot of adapting. In 1995, when she was 12, her family arrived in the United States as refugees, leaving two older siblings who were not allowed out of Vietnam. She struggled through a Washington winter and learning a new language, lugging a five-pound English-Vietnamese dictionary to school each day.

Learning English soon gave her a new role in her family. "You pick up the language a lot faster than your parents, so you . . . become the parents' voice in a way," she said.

As a student at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, she sought help from the D.C. group Asian American LEAD (Leadership, Empowerment and Development for Youth and Families). She later become a youth leader and board member for the group and will volunteer there when she returns to the District this month.

"She has a lot of heart for her community," said Sandy Dang, the organization's executive director and a longtime friend of the family who joined Phan's mother, 15-year-old brother, Minh, and friends at the ceremony. Noting that Phan plans to help Minh, a sophomore at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, get into college, she added, "She has done so much for this brother, she has become like a mom at such a young age."

Even after getting into college, Phan's life wasn't easy. After her first year of school, she had to take a semester off when she learned she had a stress-related heart condition. Shortly after she returned to school, her father died in a car accident on Rock Creek Parkway.

Last week, Phan talked about how her father had come from a family of writers and teachers, and she recalled how important education was to him, even as his own education had caused him so much trouble.

"Education was always the key," she said, adding that even as her father was denied opportunities, he made her childhood "amazing."

"He read stories to us every night," she said. "Folk tales, Vietnamese history, newspapers. I'll always take that with me wherever I go."