7,500 Miles to Redemption
Building Schools, Building Hope
Ti.nh Mahoney’s journey back to Vietnam began the day he left. It was 1975, and North Vietnamese tanks had smashed through the palace gates, helicopters had carried the last Americans out of Saigon, and tens of thousands of war refugees were fleeing, loading makeshift boats bound for anywhere. They left behind three million dead. Ti.nh was 12, and his last frantic view was rain outside the small window as the military transport took off. It would be two decades before he could say a proper goodbye.
His mother had married an American Foreign Officer who later worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and after the war the family ended up in Pakistan. “Vietnam was on a downspin,” Ti.nh says, “with no economy and no food.” It was also a country under lockdown. He couldn’t visit or get any news about his grandmother, who had served as his surrogate mother, until U.S.–Vietnamese relations were reestablished 19 years later. By then the fragile, elderly woman — near death — didn’t remember who he was.
USAID required his father to visit the States every two years, and that was how Ti.nh found himself on a cross-country road trip that took him past Waller Hall before taking him to the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t forget the green valley between the ocean and the Cascade Mountains, and a few years later he was sitting on the Quad learning about Not unto ourselves alone are we born with the Class of 1986.
Finding Home
At Willamette, Ti.nh was torn between two cultures — Asian and American. “Back in the early ’80s all most people knew about Asians was that when you go to Chinese restaurants you eat beef and broccoli. Everything around me was different than what I grew up with. I forgot my language and I ate non-Asian food. I felt lost.”
Isolated and academically floundering, Ti.nh searched for roots and found them — in the six strings of his guitar. The guitar performance major had come in knowing a few chords, and his aptitude for classical music hadn’t yet taken off; he had become a subject of concern.
“I was approached about recommending that Ti.nh find another major,” says guitar Professor John Doan, “but as I walked away from the discussion, I passed an open door and heard Ti.nh playing something I hadn’t heard before. I heard an impassioned young man pouring himself into his music with a fluidity and expressiveness that was moving — and we weren’t getting any of that.”
Doan helped Ti.nh formulate his improvisations into a composition, one nested in memories. When Ti.nh played he saw the fishing village where he had grown up, sampans bobbing on rivers and the swing of oxen hauling wood. He remembered wind like water across rice fields, and crawling behind the sandbags in his grandmother’s home when the bombs sounded. He thought of her flowers, and the small garden plot she had given him to work.
Ti.nh wrote his memories into My Vietnamese Suite and gave his first concert at the music department’s Convocation, just before Thanksgiving. “Ti.nh said he was going to play a song called ‘Homeless,’ and in his naivety he became transparent,” Doan says. “He explained how he had tried to be American like everyone else, had tried to eat hamburgers and speak English. And now everyone was going home for Thanksgiving and he couldn’t go home. That level of disclosure is unusual for students. I looked around the room at the students and professors, and almost everyone was crying.” Ti.nh’s status in the music department was reevaluated, and the chronic headaches that had plagued him melted away as he found his own path.
Prior to Ti.nh’s junior recital, Doan called arts critic Ron Cowan at the Salem Statesman Journal and pressed him to do an interview. Doan still remembers the silence at the other end. Cowan wasn’t in the habit of interviewing undergraduate students for junior recitals, which are generally attended by a dozen friends at most, but Doan said, “Trust me on this one.” Cowan must have been impressed, because he wrote a half-page article and included a photo. Five hundred people attended the concert in Smith Auditorium, including busloads of Asian and Native American students. “When I looked out and saw row after row of brown faces, I felt a connection, a sense of comfort that I had not felt for a long time,” Ti.nh says. “I played from my heart.”
Building Hope
“The dividing line between rich and poor is education, but for children in many poor villages there are no schools.”
“After I graduated I became a poor musician,” Ti.nh laughs. He also became a philanthropist, establishing the Village School Foundation, which builds schools for children in rural Vietnam. After the U.S. embargo was lifted against the communist country in 1994, Ti.nh made his first return visit and met dozens of undersized, undernourished children sleeping on the sidewalks of Saigon. And in the countryside near his old home, he met a teacher struggling to keep her school alive. Remembering his own interrupted childhood, Ti.nh began to harbor a dream of building schools. “The dividing line between rich and poor is education, but for children in many poor villages there are no schools.”
Men in the prison’s Asian Pacific Family Club had seen an article about Ti.nh’s music and, hoping to make contact with the world beyond their cellblocks, asked if he would come and speak with them. They weren’t having a lot of luck with visitors. As one inmate says, “It’s like, ‘Hello, this is inmate so and so from the Oregon State Penitentiary’ — click.”
But Ti.nh knew how it felt to be swimming upstream against your identity and past. His first visit was in 2002. “I remember every few feet, solid steel doors would slam shut behind me,” he says. “You could hear the echo bounce off the cold concrete.” Guards led him to the chapel, where he remembers seeing 50 men in prison blue — and one guard.
When he went back, and kept going back, the men told him he was the first visitor who had ever returned. “I never asked what they did,” Ti.nh says. “People make mistakes.” As the unlikely friendship developed, Ti.nh shared his dream with the inmates, and they adopted it as their own, no matter how preposterous. After all, how much money can someone raise in a maximum-security prison, where convict custodians make $20 a month and cooks make $40?
A lot, it turns out. The men went cell to cell and organized a fund-raiser, complete with belly dancers who had improbably gotten through the front office. Many men, Asian and non-Asian, gave their entire month’s salary — and with reason. Dwaine Little, a lifer who works in the prison hobby shop, says, “I got locked up when I was 14. I’ve done 39 years.” This is the first program, he says, that helped him transcend the prison walls.
The men’s offering of $1,360 helped Ti.nh’s foundation build its first school (shown above) for $8,000, and Ti.nh returned with photos of the school and its children. As the men pored over thank you pictures drawn in childish scrawl, some remembered their own children, long lost, and others thought of the children they would never have. Inmate Sam Sophanthavong says, “Prison has a way to desensitize any man, and I guess, for the first time in the longest time, they felt their goose bumps rising. You can’t make what you did with your life right, but to see this helps. If there’s one thing I’m proud of, it would be this school.”
Capturing a Story
“It’s like you walk around for 30 years without a limb, and then you reattach it and you’re whole.”
In 2003 Ti.nh shared the story of the prison project with a friend, Emmy Award–winning filmmaker Emiko Omori, who became so intrigued she decided to create a documentary. She and Ti.nh went inside the penitentiary to interview the inmate donors, shooting 7,500 Miles to Redemption with a small digital camera.
And then they went across the ocean, visiting a foundation school outside Phan Thiet, Ti.nh’s hometown. “It’s very rural and poor and peaceful there,” Omori says. She remembers the morning sun playing across thatched roofs and farm fields as they arrived at the one-room school, remembers seeing an elderly man help two small boys up the steps. Parents helped children take off their shoes and line them up at the door — “big shoes and little shoes all in a row,” she says. Inside, light streamed through the windows as children learned terms of respect for their elders.
In shooting the film, Omori saw the Vietnam Ti.nh knew as a child. “When I go to Vietnam, all my senses come alive,” Ti.nh says. “People accuse me of romanticism. When they go to the country, they see dirt and want. It’s true, Vietnam needs some paint, but for me, it’s like you walk around for 30 years without a limb, and then you reattach it and you’re whole.”
Completing the Circle
After the first school was completed, Ti.nh learned it had been built on the grounds of an old Army base. Now no trace of war remains. The staccato of machine guns, the barbed wire fence, tanks and men in camouflage and littered shell casings — all have been replaced by laughing children.
The prisoners are still giving; they presented a check for $400 last spring. And the documentary is headed for another prison, where it will perhaps give purpose to other lives. Seventy-five hundred miles away, three foundation schools have been built; three more are scheduled. In an improbable circle of restoration, a refugee, prisoners and a torn country are all finding their way toward healing.
“Eventually they will make pills for everything,” Ti.nh says. “But no one will ever be able to invent a pill for regret — regrets for war, regrets for losing my country, for leaving. But to build the schools, my regret changes to redemption.”