My family just arrived to the U.S. My name is Thanh. This is my mother, and my two little brothers, Tam and Tu.
So begins ''First Halloween,'' a children's book by Trinh Vu, a 21-year-old Roxbury resident who left Vietnam with her family when she was 12.
It is unpublished, hurriedly written and illustrated for a class at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. ''I can do better,'' Vu says, echoing the sentiments of untold immigrants across hundreds of years and ethnic divides.
Still, the simple lines of Vu's words and pictures illuminate complex elements in the lives of roughly 1 million Vietnamese who have settled in the United States since the fall of Saigon 25 years ago, including 45,000 or so in Massachusetts.
There are the cultural differences, the generation gaps, the language barriers, the struggles to make a living, the reliance on family, the bittersweet memories of the place and people left behind. There also is the urge, and the need, to assimilate. Most of all, between the lines and the grammatical mistakes, there is the flute-and-violin siren song of Que Huong, the homeland, fighting to be heard over the pounding beat of Que Huong thu hai, the second homeland, America.
To be sure, no children's book could touch all the complicated issues facing Vietnamese immigrants and refugees as individuals and as a community, and Vu's is no exception.
Nowhere is the middle-aged pharmacist and former South Vietnamese Army captain who dreams of fighting communists while running a successful business in Dorchester's Fields Corner, the heart of Massachusetts' Vietnamese community. Nowhere is the Vietnamese language instructor at the Saturday morning school on Dorchester Avenue teaching his Americanized students to not only speak their native tongue, but to know what it means to be Vietnamese.
Nowhere is the Vietnam-born police officer who must overcome his ingrained subservience to elders when he needs to exercise the authority of his badge. Nowhere is the Boston University-trained lawyer planning a Vietnamese-American Community Center. Nowhere are the young refugees-turned-valedictorians, and nowhere are the young refugees-turned-gang members.
But Vu's book is a start.
Today is our first day of school. My mother is preparing lunch for us. I will have to take Tam and Tu to their class. ''Why don't you come with us?'' Tu stubbornly asked my mother. ''My dear son, as much as I love to take you, but I have to go to work.'' My mother pinched his cheek.
Discussions with Vietnamese immigrants and refugees inevitably begin with the question: When did you arrive? In most cases, the answer reveals not just how assimilated someone might be, how Americanized they have become, but more importantly, the status they left behind and the hardships they endured.
In just 25 years, there have been five waves of Vietnamese migration, similar only in the most general ways - an escape from communism and a search for economic opportunity. In other ways they are as distinct as the scars, the losses, and the memories the individual travelers bear.
First there were about 100,000 refugees who fled immediately after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. They were generally among the most educated Vietnamese, many of them former South Vietnam military officers and middle-class professionals. Many came with money and intact families, both of which helped establish them in the mainstream here.
Then, beginning in 1979, came the boat people. Thousands of families, many of them rural, uneducated poor, and ethnic Chinese, cast their meager lots into leaky skiffs. Some resented the perceived riches of the first wave while they had to rely on welfare.
Next, in the early 1980s, came those in the so-called Orderly Departure Program, the ethnic Chinese and others allowed to emigrate under less onerous conditions, often by plane, often with help from sponsors abroad.
In the fourth wave, thousands of young adults - the offspring of GI fathers and Vietnamese mothers - came to the United States with their families under the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act.
Finally, starting around 1990, came tens of thousands of former political prisoners, many of whom survived years of brutal confinement in what the communists called reeducation camps and the survivors call concentration camps. Years later, some still suffer physically and psychologically, particularly from post-traumatic stress disorders. Some also complain that their predecessors in America have grown soft, insufficiently anticommunist, raising American children who lack respect.
The result is that the Vietnamese community, in Boston and elsewhere, is hardly a monolithic ethnic enclave. Even in California and Texas, whose Vietnamese communities dwarf Massachusetts', community relations are often fractious. Some members share little more than a common language, one of just 100 Vietnamese surnames, and the label ''Viet Kieu,'' or overseas Vietnamese.
''For many who came in 1975, they are saying it's time to forget about the past and focus on the future; for those who have just come, they are angry, talking about demonstrations,'' said Long Nguyen, executive director of the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development, a nonprofit economic development organization in Dorchester, home to roughly 12,000 Vietnamese immigrants. ''The community needs to be working together, and too many times they are not.''
Tu has Mrs. Mai as his bilingual teacher. She taught the class about Halloween. Tu asked a girl who sits next to him, ''Why are you so happy?'' And the girl said, ''Don't you know it's the time when you wear a scary costume to go trick or treat for a lot of candies?'' ''Wow, candies! I always wanted to have a piece of chocolate back home,'' Tu mumbled to himself.
Tuan Nguyen is 12, a seventh-grade student at the Boston Latin School, but on this Saturday morning he is one of 45 students attending the Au Lac Vietnamese Language Center in Fields Corner. Au and Lac are the Adam and Eve of the Vietnamese creation story, the mother and father of their people.
Nguyen was born in Vietnam and lived there until he was six, but now he is starting to feel more like a child of America than the offspring of Au and Lac.
''I am somewhere in between. I like baseball,'' he says with a shy smile. ''My parents want me to learn how to speak Vietnamese, to know how to talk to my grandmother when we visit her there this summer. I should learn, I think.''
Housed in a building that also is host to Vietnamese social service and economic development organizations, the nine-month-old center offers free Vietnamese language classes to anyone who walks in the door. But language is only part of the point.
''We focus as much on culture as language. We teach respect for teacher and elder,'' says Nghi B. Chiem, 27, who arrived as a refugee in 1990 and is now the center's director. ''The children who are born here, or come here very little, they are cut off. They are going the more Americanized way, and they need to know our way.''
Tam, Tu and I walking home together. They couldn't stop talking about what they've learned in class, especially Halloween. ''Mother, will you buy us scary costumes for Halloween?'' Tu and Tam jumping around my mother. With a curious look on her face she asks, ''What is Halloween? And why does it have to be a scary costume?''
In the Kimmy Pharmacy in Fields Corner, Tuan Q. Tran is getting excited, and the more excited he gets, the harder he slaps the thigh of a visitor sitting next to him.
''We cannot stand having to look at people suffering, dying there every day. We have to rescue them,'' Tran bellows.
It has been nearly two decades since Tran escaped Vietnam by boat after spending four years as a prisoner of the communists. A former captain in the South Vietnamese Army, he has seen terrible things, but now he is the picture of success.
He runs a thriving pharmacy that stocks Southeast Asian groceries such as grass jelly, young green jackfruit in water, and lychee in heavy syrup. His wife works with him, and his four children make him enormously proud. Two attend his alma mater, the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, one is at Bentley College, and one was recently accepted to Boston Latin.
And yet, Tran boils with thoughts of overthrowing the communists who he says ruined his country and forced him to clear land mines with his bare hands. ''Twenty-five years is long enough. It is time for them to go,'' he says fiercely, vowing that he is ready to take up arms if necessary.
He scoffs at the younger Vietnamese who believe the best way to democratize Vietnam is through engagement. Some older Vietnamese shun those who visit their homeland and spend money they say benefits the communist regime.
Tran is not that rigid, but he is among the local Vietnamese who think they see the image of Ho Chi Minh in the painted blue stripe on the Boston Gas tank on Dorchester Bay: ''We feel very nauseous. People get panic when they see that picture. He is the one who brought Vietnam to the bad side, making it poor.''
Tran's store is one of about 40 owned by Vietnamese immigrants along the community's spine, Dorchester Avenue in Fields Corner. Most fall into one of just a few categories: food stores, beauty parlors, jewelry stores, restaurants, and retail outlets like Tran's. Other Vietnamese immigrants, particularly the younger ones who have overcome language and job-training deficits, have gravitated to computer companies, the financial industry, and professions such as doctor, lawyer, and teacher.
Because they are so visible, the Vietnamese-owned businesses are a particular source of pride. Eight years later, there is still pain at the memory of then-City Councilor Albert L. (Dapper) O'Neil's public comment that the area reminded him of ''Saigon, for Chrissakes,'' and that he would ''come back tomorrow with the checks,'' an apparent reference to welfare.
''The Irish or the Italians or other ethnic communities get resettled in the United States in a short journey with a happy ending,'' says Duy Pham, 37, who arrived in 1982 and serves as executive director of the Vietnamese American Civic Association, a multiservice agency. ''For the Southeast Asian, we came in a very horrible way. Some of our families were lost in the sea, or the jungle, or the reeducation camp. And still, we come in a new society and give back to the community. What he [O'Neil] says is wrong.''
Mayor Thomas M. Menino agrees. ''They're great entrepreneurs and they've been good for the Dorchester economy. They've bought homes and they're a good, stabilizing influence,'' he said. ''I look at the Vietnamese community and I see their great culture, their great food, their focus on education and community involvement. Whenever good things happen in Dorchester, the Vietnamese community is an integral part of it.''
I follow my mother into her room. She looks very sad and worry, while she counts the money from her little box. Right away, I could tell that she wants to buy new costume for us, but we won't have enough money to buy food for the week. I can't sleep just to think about it. All of a sudden, I came up with an idea. I jumped off my bed and go to my little brothers' room.
Old-timers at Boston's District C-11 police station in Dorchester still tell the story of the elderly Vietnamese woman who, needing help, waved to a police officer across a busy street. Interpreting her wave as a greeting, the Irish-American officer waved back and went on his way. What he didn't know was that in Vietnam, a wave is the polite way to beckon someone.
The officer was thinking like an American: If she needed him, she would motion with her hand that he should approach. But summoning someone that way in Vietnam is an insult, appropriate only to call a dog. The misunderstanding led to nothing more serious than hurt feelings. But it underscored Boston's growing need for police officers like 28-year-old Le Chau, one of the first Vietnamese immigrants on the force.
''I love it. It's challenging every day, solving problems and helping people,'' says Chau, who emigrated at age 5.
Along with four other Vietnamese-American officers and Tram Tran, a civilian liaison also based at the C-11 station, Chau works to help his community confront issues that cut across all ethnic and racial lines. One of the more vexing problems is domestic violence, which Tran attributed to economic and social stresses on traditional family structure.
''In Vietnam, male is dominant,'' she says. ''Women have to work here, so they see more, learn more. Men tend to feel they have lost control of the family members.''
Another problem is gang membership among teenagers left unsupervised while their parents work long hours.
District C-11 Captain Robert Dunford has no numbers on gang membership, but he said a small yet visible minority, including some who attend academically demanding exam schools, associate with the Crips, the Asian Boys, and the Uptown Boys.
For Chau, working with the teens is relatively easy, because he knows they retain the cultural training that compels them to comply with his orders as their elder. More difficult is having to make demands of his own elders.
''It's hard sometimes, to talk to them in a tone of voice in which you have the authority. Out of respect for them it is difficult,'' Chau says. ''That's something I am working on.''
''Tam, Tu! Wake up. I can make costumes for you guys,'' I yelled. They look at the trash bags in my hand and went back to sleep. I went back to my room and start creating costumes. It gets really late but I want to finish the costumes for my brothers. At least, my mom won't be worry anymore.
There is an empty lot at 42-46 Charles St. in Dorchester, but in the mind of Long Nguyen, it is a scene of hope. Nguyen, executive director of the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development, is spearheading plans for a $2.6 million community center on the site.
Organizers have raised about $1 million, and they need to raise an equal amount to begin construction as planned early next year. The building is designed to house a senior center, a child care center, recreation and meeting space, a small library, and a mix of housing and social service agencies.
''This will be the foundation for a permanent Vietnamese community here. It is about our future here,'' says Nguyen, 34, a graduate of Boston University Law School who escaped his homeland by boat when he was 14.
Some members of the Vietnamese community hope the center's primary accomplishment will be to bridge generational gaps.
''When we have the community center, I will devise programs that will help Vietnamese elders, but I will ask the young Vietnamese to help me, so we can be next to one another, so we can communicate,'' said An TonThat, 68, a former South Vietnamese diplomat who is now director of refugee and immigrant health at the state Department of Public Health.
''Wow, this is cool. Thank you so much,'' Tam and Tu amazed. I look at my mother and she has that happily and beautiful smile. It's getting dark outside. There are some kids on the street. I think it's time to go trick or treat.
Vu wrote ''First Halloween'' for a class on the American experiences of Southeast Asians, taught by Peter Nien-chu Kiang, director of the Asian American Studies Program at UMass-Boston.
''For the younger generation, Vietnam is not a place of loss for them,'' Kiang says. ''It's a place of opportunity, a place of connection. They see their future connected to it.''
That is certainly true for Vu, who is eager to visit Vietnam when she can afford it. In the meantime, she lives with her parents and dreams of becoming an artist or an actress.
''I think the hardest thing about being Vietnamese, expecially for kids, is trying to fit in,'' says Vu, one of 12 children ages 10 to 34, all of them born in Vietnam. ''I hope kids read my story and relate to it, make them think how lucky they are, how hard their parents work for them.''
And off we go. ''Trick or Treat.'' ''Here are your candies! Wow, those are cute costumes,'' the lady said. I never had so much candies in my life. In Vietnam, it was really expensive to buy a piece of chocolate. And look at all these candies we have right now. ''When is the next Halloween?'' Tu asks with a mouthful of chocolate. The End.
For her story, Vu received an A.
Mitchell Zuckoff is a member of the Globe Staff.
