Oral history interview with Van Tran, 2019

This oral history interview with Van Tran was conducted by Shea Seery and Sankar Raman in 2019. The interview was recorded for The Immigrant Story, an organization that documents and archives the stories of immigrants and refugees in the United States.

In this interview, Tran discusses her family background and early life in Saigon, Vietnam, including her education, particularly learning languages, and her love of music. She shares her experiences during the Vietnam War. She talks about her father's work with the U.S. military and his imprisonment in a North Vietnamese camp. She shares her memories of the fall of Saigon in 1975, and describes her family's attempts to escape to the United States. She then describes the process of emigrating to the U.S. in 1985, including a stopover in the Philippines, where she taught English and met her future husband. She talks about her marriage in 1987, about raising a family in Stockton, California, and about opening Phở Lê, a Vietnamese restaurant in Camas, Washington, in 1991. She talks about the restaurant's success, about opening other locations in Portland and Vancouver, and about her and her husband's reasons for closing the Camas location. She also looks at photographs and talks about them.