A God of surprises provides a dwelling place

When he boarded the plane in Guam for the United States nearly 40 years ago, Bac-Hai Viet Tran, then 22, knew intuitively he was headed from death and chaos in his native Vietnam to freedom and opportunity in California. But as the plane descended for its final approach, he looked out the window.

“In California, I knew they had beaches and other things,” he said. “I looked out the window and saw trees everywhere. I said to myself, ‘This is not California.’ Then someone said, ‘Welcome to Fort Chaffee (Arkansas).’ I said to myself, ‘God forbid!’”

The God of surprises pulled a whopper on Bac-Hai that day. For the last four decades, the surprises have piled up, brick upon brick, in a pattern that when viewed from 35,000 feet, has convinced a doubter – a man who once disliked priests and then became one himself – that there is a divine plan after all.

“We found out later that Fort Chaffee was the best refugee camp because it was an old military base that had barracks,” Father Bac-Hai said. “You could live in a house, not a tent. God is good.”

Father Bac-Hai always had a bit of renegade in him. He didn’t like priests as a kid because whenever his family had any special food left over, they saved it to give to their priests.

“We were children at home and we couldn’t eat it,” he said.

When Bac-Hai was 12, his father, a hard-working contractor, sent him to a Christian Brothers boarding school a few hundred miles away. In the buttoned-down Vietnamese culture, the lone instruction Bac-Hai’s father gave to his son before leaving home could not be mistaken as words of affirmation.

“My daddy said, ‘Behave, and whatever you do, listen to them. If they send you home, we’ll kill you. If you make my family name embarrassed, we’ll kill you.”

Bac-Hai responded by working hard, learning English and French, and his dedication would serve later as a get-out-of-jail-free card when the communists from the north began pushing inexorably south to take a stranglehold of Vietnam.

Bac-Hai’s two aunts worked for Catholic Charities, and they had heard through channels that there were only a few of days for families to flee Vietnam. Bac-Hai’s family held a meeting. He was one of eight children – the eldest son.

“My grandfather said, ‘You young people, you can just go. If it works out, you can come back here for vacation. If not, you have a future,’” Father Bac-Hai said.

Bac-Hai was the only child from his family who left Vietnam, traveling in a group of 14 relatives. His boarding school education paid off, giving him the translation skills that made him a valuable commodity among the refugees.

After two months in Fort Chaffee, a young Baptist couple from Oklahoma – Sharon and James Gard – agreed to serve as a host family for Bac-Hai, who had received a scholarship to study dentistry at the University of Oklahoma. There was no public transportation, so Bac-Hai rode his bike four miles every day to class.

On the first Sunday, the Gards asked Bac-Hai where he wanted to go to church. Bac-Hai had seen plenty of churches on his ride to campus, but he knew exactly where the Catholic church was. “I didn’t know what the name of the church was, but there was this big Bingo sign outside,” he said.

The Gards also helped Bac-Hai figure out his future.

“Are you sure you want to be a dentist?” James Gard asked him. “Did you know that dentists have the highest suicide rate of any profession? Can you picture yourself looking at people’s mouths every day – 32 teeth? Is that what you want to do?”

A few months later, Bac-Hai got a call to come to New Orleans, perhaps to study pharmacy at Xavier University. Before he enrolled, he worked for Catholic Charities, ferrying pregnant Vietnamese women to doctor’s appointments at Charity Hospital three days a week and translating for them.

“They gave me an old Plymouth,” Father Bac-Hai recalled. “It was like a submarine. There were no seat belts. Just picture this: a Plymouth with one skinny boy, two pregnant women in the front and six squeezed into the back. And I know nothing about the car. Just drive it until it breaks down. Nobody tells me to change the oil.”

One day on the Crescent City Connection, the law of physics and black oil took over, and Bac-Hai’s rumbling maternity ward came to a
screeching halt.

“You can laugh, but I was crying at the time,” he said. “The policeman came up and asked me what happened. And then he looked inside the car. I said, ‘Not mine! Not mine!’ He laughed and told me to get back in the car. He pushed the car to the side, and suddenly, the car started again. It was a miracle. I don’t know how it started.”

Near the end of the summer of 1976, friends and coworkers began to ask Bac-Hai if he thought he had a vocation to the priesthood.

“What?” Bac-Hai replied incredulously.

Somehow, Bac-Hai, without ever telling his family back home in Vietnam, decided to try the seminary and entered St. Joseph Seminary College.

“I can tell you, God sometimes does a miracle in crazy ways,” Father Bac-Hai said. “You cannot explain it. My family would never believe it. I had too many girlfriends through the years. They never thought I could do it. They know I didn’t like priests in my childhood.”

Two years before his 1984 ordination, Sharon Gard, who had taken in Bac-Hai as her little brother, died in a one-car accident. She was five months pregnant. Bac-Hai, a Catholic seminarian, went to Oklahoma for the funeral and read a passage from Scripture at the Baptist service.

“They always told me they were so were proud of me because I opened their eyes to another culture and other countries,” Father Bac-Hai said. “I just remember telling Jim, ‘I have no doubt that Sharon is in God’s kingdom because she welcomed me when I was a stranger in her house. God will say the same thing to Sharon – welcome to my house.’”

As pastor of St. Agnes Parish in Jefferson, Father Bac-Hai reflects on the many miracles of his own life. There are thousands of similar stories of Vietnamese refugees, protected by an unseen but omnipresent God.

“I recognize that God’s grace is upon you every moment in life, and sometimes you don’t see it,” Father Bac-Hai said. “You just have to try your best and leave the rest to God. Years ago, when I was young, I wanted to control everything. I wanted to plan everything. When I went into the priesthood, I learned that you cannot control things. Try your best and leave the rest to God.”

That’s why he is particularly excited that on July 2, two Vietnamese missions on the West Bank – St. Joseph in Algiers and Assumption of Mary in Avondale – will become full-fledged parishes of their own. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians (2:19): “You are no longer strangers and sojourners.”

“I think you get to the point where after 39 years, everybody wants to be independent,” Father Bac-Hai said. “In the first 10 years, you could call yourself refugees. But today, after 39 years, you are no longer refugees. You are Americans – Vietnamese Americans.”

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]