The Strings Are Cut for Students

The end of the Vietnam war has created special problems for the over 2000 Vietnamese and Cambodian students attending U.S. colleges and universities. Uncertain about the conditions facing their families and relatives under the Provisional Revolutionary Government or in U.S. refugee camps, most are unsure that they will ever return home again.

There are about 280 Vietnamese students in the Boston area. Their visa restrictions have been waived by the Department of Justice, so they will not be required to return home after they graduate. Special legislation on the naturalization of these students has not yet been considered by the U.S. government, absorbed with the settlement of the Vietnamese refugees, and for the time being they will be naturalized under the lengthy normal immigration procedures.

Students cut off from financial aid from their parents may have that supplemented by a $10 million allocation for higher education in the $403 million aid bill passed by Congress last week. Rep. Paul Simons [D-Ill.] has introduced another bill that would provide $2500 a year for South Vietnamese and Cambodians already studying here.

Two Vietnamese students at Harvard talked last week about the effect the war and its ending has had on their lives. Suong-Hong Nguyen-Thi is a senior at Radcliffe majoring in economics. She had planned to return to her home in Saigon after graduation to work in her family's pharmaceutical company, but the capitulation of the Saigon government will force her to stay in the U.S. She came to Cambridge in 1972 to study at Harvard, and now lives off-campus with her six-year-old brother. He was sent to her last September when conditions in Saigon were deteriorating. She discusses how the twenty-year war affected her family and life in Saigon, and her opinions on American policy in Asia.

Ngo Vinh Long '68 is head of the Vietnam Resource Center, a Cambridge-based organization publishing information on Vietnam. A graduate student in his seventh year. Long is the author of Before the Revolution, a collection of Vietnamese writings on French rule with an introductory analysis. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese and Vietnamese studies. Long talks briefly about his personal experiences as a Vietnamese, concentrating instead on more general aspects of the war, such as the problems American intervention caused in Southeast Asia and the difficulties Vietnamese refugees will encounter assimilating into Western society.