Chelsea retiree’s life: A lesson in navigating a small boat through rough waters

by Amy Heydlauff

Pifer’s story demonstrates the classic choice between the devil you know or the devil you don’t. If we opt to live the way we currently live, our results will likely follow the same trajectory. If life is not working, and we decide to get into that small boat, the waters ahead may be rough. Photo credit: http://smallboatsdeshiyuka.blogspot.com/2017/04/small-boats-in-rough-water.html

After reading last month’s article, “Failing Forward,” Trinh Pifer, retiring director of the Chelsea Senior Center, shared a glimpse of her life story with this writer. While Pifer is well known for her senior and outreach efforts in all five healthy towns, few people are probably aware of her harrowing story and how she came to be an American.

In April 1975 Pifer was a five-year-old child, living in Saigon during its fall. The capital of South Vietnam was collapsing, the American embassy and American troops were making haste to evacuate. The People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong were overrunning the city.

Desperate to survive, the family set sail on the Pacific Ocean in a small boat. An American naval ship rescued them, and life in a series of refugee camps began. Then, a church in Walled Lake sponsored her family, and they came to Michigan.

When Pifer started school, she could speak no English, and she didn’t feel welcomed. She describes herself as feisty even then, and she made up her mind: She wasn’t staying in school. As readers know, when a feisty child makes up her mind, she can make everyone miserable.

But miserable or not, her parents said (in Vietnamese), “Tough luck, little Trinh. Learning to speak English and being educated in the public school system, an amazing American asset, is the only choice we are allowing you to make, for your own good.”

Since there was zero chance she’d be able to communicate or connect with her classmates for some time, her parents had set her up for short-term failure. Painful as their ultimatum was, they felt confident they were assuring a successful future for their child.

No doubt, the challenge of figuring out how to make life work and take advantage of opportunities helped stimulate Pifer’s growth into an effective problem solver. Unlike most of us, she knows what a failed society looks like. She knows about life-or-death escapes and generosity in the midst of discrimination (or perhaps discrimination in the midst of generosity).

As much as failing forward, her family stumbled forward, making one tough decision after the other. They gave up many things. They worked hard to assimilate into a world they knew to be better than what they left behind, even if the new place wasn’t always nice.

Pifer’s story demonstrates the classic choice between the devil you know or the devil you don’t. If we opt to live the way we currently live, our results will likely follow the same trajectory. If life is not working, and we decide to get into that small boat, the waters ahead may be rough.

Pifer and her family took action to build a better life. Her story demonstrates that life-changing work can be harder, sometimes scarier, than any of us would prefer—and more rewarding than we could hope. In the end, the risks this famly took benefited them and their communities.

Four facts about immigration:

1. “By a wide margin, the U.S. has more immigrants than any other country in the world. As of 2015, the United Nations estimates that 46.6 million people living in the United States were not born there (14.4%). This means that about one-in-five international migrants (19%) live in the U.S. The U.S. immigrant population is nearly four times that of the world’s next largest immigrant destination – Germany, with about 12 million immigrants.” Source: Pew Research.

2. Applications for asylum come “mostly from China, followed by the Northern Triangle countries. Nearly 22 percent of individuals who were granted asylum affirmatively or defensively in FY 2016 came from China, followed by El Salvador (10.5 percent), Guatemala (9.5 percent), Honduras (7.4 percent) and Mexico (4.5 percent).” Source: National Immigration Forum.

3. “In FY 2017, as instability in Central America’s Northern Triangle showed few signs of ending, immigration judges decided over 30,000 asylum cases, a considerable increase over the roughly 22,300 asylum cases decided in FY 2016. Source: National Immigration Forum.

4. “As of July 2018, there were over 733,000 pending immigration cases and the average wait time for an immigration hearing was 721 days. The backlog has been worsening over the past decade as the funding for immigration judges has failed to keep pace with an increasing case load.” Source: National Immigration Forum.