The Possible Dream

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Shaping the Man

The story of Anh 'Joseph' Quang Cao, the newly elected Republican congressman for Louisiana's second district, is the definition of the American dream.

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Living with his sister in Falls Church, he taught religion and literature to middle-school students at St. Agnes School in Arlington for a year while he prepared for law school. He volunteered with the charity Boat People SOS, an advocacy group for Vietnamese refugees.

"He just knew he wanted to do something to help needy people," his sister remembers.

After a year, Cao went back to Loyola to study law. He joined Mary Queen of Vietnam church, the anchor of the Vietnamese community in east New Orleans. He saw Hieu "Kate" Hoang, a pharmacy student he once taught in catechism class. She was enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, about 90 minutes away.

"He would drive up on weekends, and we would go to church and to lunch," she says.

The couple married in 2001, but she declined to take his last name. "Cao" translates as "tall" or "high," and "we are not tall," Hoang says, smiling.

The couple bought a house in Venetian Isles, a waterfront development nearly 20 miles from downtown New Orleans. Cao began practicing law, soon running his own small firm. Hoang worked as a pharmacist at a Walgreens. Their daughter Sophia was born in 2003; a second daughter, Betsy, arrived the next year.

He did not pursue politics at all. If he was climbing a professional or social ladder, nobody in New Orleans or the national Vietnamese American civic groups knew about it.

Then the wind began to blow.

A Pivotal Storm

Time in New Orleans is pretty much divided into pre- and post-Katrina.

Pre-Katrina, life was largely symbolized as the good-time Big Easy, a rollicking city of jazz, funk, drive-through daiquiri bars and French Quarter cabarets ("Not Just the Same Old Thong and Dance," reads one billboard on Interstate 10). In politics, it seemed there was no end to cheerful corruption and fun-loving graft.

Post-Katrina, the city's population dropped from about 460,000 to as low as 190,000 (about 320,000 people are in the city today). The chancellor of the University of New Orleans says that enrollment went from 18,000 before the 2005 hurricane to 11,500, and that the university is losing more than $20 million per year. The airport has dropped from having 9,250 badged employees to 4,968.

But the city's 15,000 or so Vietnamese residents, stuck out in the wasteland of east New Orleans, came back en masse, some 95 percent of them. They repaired their ranch-style homes and replaced their statues of the Virgin Mary in their front yards. They went back to their shops, amid the smell of sulfur from nearby plants and the thick fog that rolls in from the backwaters.