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A Granddaughter of Vietnamese Refugees Becomes A Pharmacist in Springfield

Na Pham
/
Used with permission

“I grew up in Vietnam until I was like, 19 years old,” said Na Pham, a new U.S. citizen living in Springfield, Missouri.

Most of her childhood was focused on studying—that was typical, she said, of her young peers.

“We were born, we study a lot, and we try to get in to pass exams to be in colleges,” she said.

Her father was a construction worker—but the work was seasonal, she said. And her mother was a stay-at-home mom and tried several small business ventures out of the house, but the projects didn’t earn much money.

“My whole family decided to come to the United States because we wanted to have more opportunities, like for my parents to find jobs and then for my brother and I to have better opportunities to go to colleges.”

“My grandparents moved here in 1994, so they made paperwork for us,” Pham said.  Her grandfather had worked for the US government during the Vietnam War, which qualified him for refugee status later.

“My grandparents, or even like my mom or my uncles or my aunts, they remember the life during the war. It was really hard for them. It was really hard for them to even have the job to find enough food for the family,” Pham said.

“But I got here and, the weather--it’s just so dry, you know, it’s not like humid like where I grew up,” she said.

She started with an English as a Second Language class at OTC—and says she didn’t understand up to 50 percent of the content.

But she asked her OTC instructor to help her after class.

“So she usually stayed a little later, like, 10, 15 minutes to explain things to me, so I really appreciated her for that,” she said.

Public speaking class was a “nightmare,” she said—but eventually, she took some tests and discovered she could be a good pharmacist.

She completed pharmacy school through UMKC on the Missouri State University campus in May.

“On the graduation day, I did not really feel that I did something really big—like something big or something important, you know—but whenever I got the diploma in the mail, I [felt] that, ‘Oh, my name is on it!’” she said.

The thing she msises most about Vietnam is the food, especially all of the seafood—and the beach.

“What I like the most about, like, the freedom in America is like, the women can be very independent, and then we have like, a voice. Our voice can be heard,” she said. “It’s more equal.”

Na Pham, originally from central Vietnam and the granddaughter of Vietnamese refugees to the U.S., is now a United States citizen. Today, she works at a pharmacy in Springfield.