My friend's triumph over personal tragedy featured in a national magazine! - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

sfloriII · #1 02-20-2005, 08:12 PM

While reading the Washington Post Magazine in today's paper, I saw a picture of someone that looked strangely familiar. Upon closer inspection, my suspicion was proved right: I was looking at the picture of a close friend of mine who's triumph over personal tragedy was featured in one of the stories.

Hieu Stuart married a very close friend of mine John Stuart. John and I attended college together twenty years ago and were close friends. He died of cancer two years ago, but not a day passes that I don't think of him. Here is the story of his wonderful wife and how she has taken life's pitfalls and turned them into triumphs. She's an incredible woman who I'm proud to call a close friend.

BTW, she didn't even tell me about the article-- what class!!

A Vietnamese immigrant who lost her husband remakes her life surrounded by 20-year-olds

By Christina Ianzito
Sunday, February 20, 2005; Page W29

Hieu Stuart bounces into her blue Mini Cooper on a rainy Friday morning and cruises the two minutes from her apartment to her English class at Hollins University, a small women's college in Roanoke. Her assignment today is to continue to work on a persuasive essay. It's a tough assignment for Stuart, a native of Vietnam for whom English is a challenge even after more than a decade in this country. But she's probably the student here most confident in her subject: the relationship between positive thinking and success. "In my experience," she writes of sports, "the optimistic personalities really make a difference in performing and help to win the games."

"Where do positive attitudes come from?" Stuart goes on to ask. She's not sure, but irrepressible optimism is what's propelling her at age 32 to get a psychology degree after a life of trying to see the upside of some definitely downside situations.

Almost 12 years ago, Stuart and her impoverished family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam. She struggled to learn English as she worked low-level jobs. Her family had so few resources that Stuart pilfered furniture from roadside trash. "I was stuck," she says. "I did not want to dream because the reality was so sad." And just two years ago, she held her husband, John Stuart, in her arms while he died of a rare form of cancer.

Following a year of soul-searching and mourning, Stuart enrolled at Hollins in September, entering as a junior with the help of credits from Northern Virginia Community College and some financial aid. She's majoring in psychology, and playing on the soccer and tennis teams.

After she graduates, she wants to get her doctorate in psychology and go on to counsel fellow Vietnamese immigrants. They aren't typically comfortable with talk therapy, she says: "My people struggle with a lot of problems and never let it out."

Older students like Stuart are different from their teenage classmates. They know what they want and are focused on getting it, says Stuart's English professor, Marcy Trianosky. "They come to class having really thought about things," Trianosky says. "It really puts the [other] undergraduates to shame sometimes." Stuart is a shining example, she adds, "an incredibly hard worker and incredibly positive."

Hollins has a special undergraduate program, known as the Horizon Program, for what the school terms "nontraditional-age women." Many of the program's 80 students are in their thirties, women who took detours -- family, work -- on the way toward higher education.

Men can study as graduate students at Hollins, and some do, but you wouldn't mistake this for a coed school when you see the cafeteria full of clusters of young women, some still in their pajamas at lunchtime. Stuart blends right in, despite being a good 12 or 13 years older than the rest; she's a petite 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds. On this rainy afternoon, she hungrily grazes through the buffet line, plopping a heap of fried chicken fingers onto a large plate of salad greens, then strolling past students in chatty groups to sit by a window overlooking a playing field. She says her age is a nonissue because "no one ever guesses I'm over 21 years old . . . They can't believe it when I tell them my age."

During her first semester here, she's taken classes on cognitive psychology, sexuality and creative dance, as well as Trianosky's English course, "Writing for College: Inquiry and Genre." And she seems to have befriended -- or at least met -- the entire school after only a few months on this campus of about 1,000 students, waving cheerily to passersby after class. "Everyone knows me," she says, clearly pleased.

Celia McCormick, Hollins's dean of admissions, says Stuart "is probably one of the most enthusiastic, excited, ready-to-jump-in Horizon students I've ever seen . . . I would use the word 'energy' to describe her, even when she's sitting still."

Stuart's American friends started calling her "Action" a few years ago -- something that Stuart says blew her mind, since that's precisely what Hieu (pronounced Hugh) means in Vietnamese. "I was, like, 'Oh my God, this is so scary,'" she giggles. She often punctuates her sentences with "Wow!" and "Whoa!"

Beneath the buoyant exterior, however, there's a quiet, thoughtful side to Stuart, a reflection of her Buddhist upbringing. As a child in Vietnam, she was so involved with the temple that people in her village assumed she'd become a nun, she says. She still prays every night and meditates every morning. And she still struggles with English. She tells all her professors, "My purpose in this class is not to get A's, it's to improve my English," and seeks their help.

She says that when she recently asked a friend to point out her pronunciation errors, "I realized, I've been doing all this wrong! I say 'Engliss' instead of English. Wow! I said to him, 'Where the heck have you been?' "

But this is a woman who's had larger concerns in life than proper pronunciation. In Vietnam, Stuart was a top student in high school and wanted to be a lawyer. But the communists had seized her father's land and business -- he was a mechanic -- and her family decided to pack up and leave the country. Stuart joined her parents and four of her 11 brothers and sisters in their 1993 move to Honolulu, where an older brother was already living. As the oldest sibling in the new household, she felt the traditional Vietnamese responsibility to serve as family caretaker. Her first check from a job at a duty-free store paid for a microwave oven and for her younger sister Hang to enroll in a gymnastics program. Hang, now a 25-year-old gymnastics instructor near San Francisco, was an elite acrobat in Vietnam. "She sacrificed her education to take care of us," Hang says of her sister.

A local Catholic church helped them find a two-bedroom apartment in a poor part of Honolulu. "I was shocked," Stuart says. "In Vietnam, people talk a lot about America -- it's like a dream, and everybody is rich -- so when we got here, I was, like, 'Oh my God.' We didn't even have blankets. My sister and I found a mattress in the trash, and we were so happy."

Stuart eventually borrowed $40,000 to start a successful car service for wedding parties, paying off that loan in a year. By 1998, at 26, she was ready to see the rest of the United States and then, finally, get on with her education. One leg of the trip landed her in Springfield, where she crashed with the friend of a friend of a friend. She worked briefly as a waitress at a Vietnamese restaurant near Seven Corners called Huong Que (Four Sisters), where she met a customer named John Stuart, a burly 33-year-old who lived in Falls Church and had been working as a computer consultant in Europe. They hit it off in a big way, and she relocated to Virginia and started classes at NOVA.

By the end of 1999, she and John were engaged, planning for a wedding sometime after she graduated. But a month later, John learned that he had a rare form of cancer on his spinal cord called neuroblastoma, typically a pediatric disease. They married quickly, and spent most of their next three years together traveling around the country consulting with experts and trying various alternative treatments that burned through their savings. Stuart took classes when she could, but she frequently had to withdraw as her husband's condition deteriorated to the point of paralysis. He died while she held him, reciting a Buddhist prayer, two years ago at Arlington Hospital.

She took his ashes to Hawaii, where her family still lives. A few months later, she was back in Virginia. "I wanted to face reality and deal with it; I didn't want to run away," she says. After she finished her two-year degree at NOVA -- where Stuart took her first psychology class and fell in love with the subject -- a teacher suggested Hollins because of its Horizon Program.

[please go to next post for the end of the article]

sfloriII · #2 02-20-2005, 08:13 PM

Five months ago, Stuart moved into the drab student housing -- pale-brick block-like buildings with linoleum floors -- across the street from the bucolic campus. This is where she returns after lunch, dropping her book bag by the couch. The apartment is decorated with photographs of her soccer team and a dart board, and by one wall there's a big blue exercise ball and a mat where she likes to practice modern dance. She frequently has candles burning, and in the fall she scattered colorful leaves on the table and counter-top. Today she also has a fridge full of Vietnamese goodies she's cooked up for a party she's throwing later to celebrate the end of the season with her soccer teammates -- "the kids," as she calls them.

Stuart expects to graduate in the spring of 2006 and hopes to immediately jump into a PhD program, perhaps at George Washington University. This summer she plans to go to Vietnam to study the way psychological treatment is perceived there. Generally, she explains, it's considered shameful in Vietnam to seek help for problems of the mind. Stuart says she wants to "start a fire over there" regarding awareness of mental illness.

"At this age, you're not going to school to earn money," she explains. "It's something [deeper] than that."

Christina Ianzito is a frequent contributor to the Magazine.

PC Dave · #3 02-20-2005, 08:52 PM

Great story, Stefano. It's good to read things like that periodically to put the daily annoyances I take so seriously into perspective.

Thread Tools
Show Printable Version Email this Page
Display Modes
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode