Since moving to the United States in 1968 and becoming a citizen, the 55-year-old Kaneohe hairdresser has sponsored six distant relatives who have immigrated here. But now she faces a wall of barricades in bringing back her own children and grandchildren.
Faced with recent anti-immigrant legislation, welfare reform that has stopped government support for legal aliens, and a local economy that devours income from her seven-days-a-week job, the timing couldn't be worse.
"I prayed to God every single day to please bring back my children," said a sobbing Nguyen, squeezing her head between her palms as if hoping to push out an answer. "I've helped all my family, and now when it comes to my children, it's not easy unless you have money in the bank. I wish I could work eight days a week."
To be eligible to sponsor her son and daughter, their spouses and seven children, Nguyen would need an annual income of more than $56,000, or someone to share sponsorship, an obligation that means supporting each immigrant for five years without asking for government assistance.
Even after the five years, getting government help is complicated, officials said.
Before reforms, sponsorships lasted three years. But social-services officials said legal immigrants in true need were able to get help before the three years were up. Those days are over, with most welfare assistance to legal immigrants cut completely.
The waiting list for immediate family members to immigrate from Vietnam is approximately three years, a long time for nightmares to haunt Nguyen about her children's poverty.
Kim Nguyen:
“I prayed to God every single day
to please bring back
my children.”
That same year, her first husband died with a promise from his second wife to tell his children their mother's name and village. But instead, the stepmother told them their mother was dead, then forbade them to stay in the house. The orphans wandered through the war-torn countryside, surviving any way they could.
They eventually returned to the village, always believing their mother was alive.
Nguyen went back to Vietnam in 1987 and every year for the next decade to search for her children. She took out ads in newspapers and on television in Ho Chi Minh City, a place as remote to her children's jungle homes as Hawaii.
About four months ago, a traveling Vietnamese salesman, "like a god from somewhere," met Nguyen's son-in-law in a coffee house and said he thought he knew their missing mother. They planned to meet the next day, but the salesman disappeared. The information inspired the son and daughter to go back to the stepmother one more time.
"For three long days they begged on their knees," Nguyen said, crying though the whole story. She finally revealed the information. The son and daughter spent everything they had to travel the 300 miles to Nguyen's home village of Vinh Long. Within weeks, they met their mother in Ho Chi Minh City.