The development of this curriculum guide was funded by the Orange County Human Relations Council. Online production was sponsored by the supporters of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance and Tolerance.org projects.

Co-Editors

Mariam Beevi, born Lâm Thục Uyên, is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with emphases in Asian American Studies and Women’s Studies. Her research and teaching areas of specialization include the Vietnamese American community, Vietnam studies, the French Vietnamese, Asian American Studies and comparative diasporic studies. Her dissertation is entitled “Surfin’ Vietnam: Trauma, Historical Memory, and Cultural Politics in 20th-Century Literature and Film.” She immigrated to the United States in 1976 and has lived in Orange County, California since 1978.

James Lâm (Lâm Hong Chung) is associate director of the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance. He has experience in non-profit management, youth program development and affordable housing finance and development. He is a graduate of Orange County public schools, the University of California, Irvine, and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he received a Master in Public Policy (M.P.P.). He belongs to an extensive family clan that has lived in Orange County for over twenty years.

Michael Matsuda works as a coordinator for the Anaheim Union High School District Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program. He also teaches multicultural education in the teacher education programs at California State University, Fullerton, and Chapman University. He is a two-time “Teacher of the Year,” an Orange County Human Relations Award recipient, a Parents and Teachers Association service award winner, a former national diversity trainer for the American Jewish Committee, and a founding board member and current Chairperson of the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master in Public Administration (M.P.A.) from the University of Southern California.

Committee Members

Eun-Jung Bae is a program coordinator at the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Alliance. She provided the initial administrative and development support for the project. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Asian American Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Communications & Public Relations from California State University, Fullerton.

Mary Anne Foo is the executive director of the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance. She has more than ten years of experience working with the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) populations, especially with low-income families and national, state and regional policies affecting these groups. She is a graduate of the University of California,Davis, and holds a Master in Public Health (M.P.H.) from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Anne Frank is the founding librarian of the Southeast Asian Archive at the University of California, Irvine Libraries. The Archive was established in 1987 to document the refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam who resettled in the United States after 1975. She has been active in the Refugee Forum of Orange County and the California State Refugee Forum. Anne received a Bachelor of Arts in History and Master in Library Science (M.L.S.) from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Arts in Public History and Historic Preservation from California State University, Dominguez Hills. She is also a board member of the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance.

Robert Hayden teaches Ethnic Studies at Shoreline Community College in Seattle, Washington. He is a graduate of Washington State University and the University of California, Irvine, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Cultures. While at U.C. Irvine, he served as an advisor to the Vietnamese American Coalition student group and taught the undergraduate course, “Vietnamese American Experience.”

Duc Nguyen (Nguyễn Đình Đức) is a program coordinator at the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Alliance. He provides Vietnamese translation and handles Vietnamese media relations for the project. Besides his assistance to the project, he helps coordinate several programs that prevent tobacco use among youths and provide health education to the elderly on immunization, diabetes and heart disease. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences from California State University, Long Beach.

Tu-Uyen Nguyen (Nguyễn Ngọc Tú Uyên) is currently a doctoral student in the department of Community Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health. She works with Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the mainland United States and Hawai’i to understand cultural differences in accessing, screening, developing and promoting cancer education, in order to find and facilitate culturally specific Islander community capacity for cancer prevention. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology, a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and a Master in Public Health (M.P.H).

Diep Tran (Trần Ngọc Diệp) is a program coordinator at the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Alliance. She is responsible for the post-production administrative activities of the curriculum project. In addition to her work on the project, she helps coordinate a regional research, education and outreach program promoting the prevention of breast and cervical cancers among Vietnamese American women. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from the University of California, Irvine.

Huy Tran (Trần Đại Tưồng Huy) teaches World History at Orangeview Junior High School in the Anaheim Union High School District. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and a Master in Education (M.Ed.) from National University. He has been actively involved in the Vietnamese American community since his undergraduate years at U.C. Irvine, when he was involved with the Vietnamese American Coalition, a student organization focusing on social and political concerns affecting the Vietnamese American community. He currently hosts a radio program on Little Saigon Radio for and about Vietnamese American youth.

Online Production Team • Southern Poverty Law Center
Project Managers • Jennifer Holladay, Ashley Day
Technical Producer • Laura Maschal
Contributing Writer • Brian Willoughby
Design Director • Russell Estes
Designers • Thomas Dilbeck, Valerie Downes
Technical Lead • Brian Youngblood

Acknowledgements
The Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance extends its gratitude to the Orange County Human Relations Council for its generous grant and ongoing support. Without their generosity, this curriculum guide would not have been possible.

Many individuals volunteered their time and efforts to ensure the completion of Vietnamese Americans: Lessons in American History. We are deeply grateful to the volunteer and staff editors of the curriculum guide: Michael Matsuda, Mariam Beevi, and James Lâm.

This project is the brainchild of Michael Matsuda, a local teacher, college lecturer and our own Chairman of the Board of Directors. He spent many hours in developing and coordinating plans in this guide. He was also responsible for coordinating the first all-day teacher training on the curriculum guide with thirty teachers of the Anaheim Union High School District. He continues to lead our efforts in promoting the curriculum guide at the local, state and national levels.

We are deeply grateful for the dedication of graduate student Mariam Beevi to this project. She devoted countless hours to all phases of the project, sandwiched in between her teaching commitments and dissertation work. She was responsible for the development of significant sections in the guide as well as the editing of the guide to its final form.

Our own associate director James Lâm also played a key role in ensuring the success and quality of the curriculum guide, assuming editing and coordinating responsibilities for the entire project. We also thank the other members of the Project Committee who volunteered their valuable time and expertise.

Special thanks are also extended to the individuals who were responsible for the success of the first teacher training on the curriculum guide. We are very grateful to Jane Davis (Anaheim Union High School District) for her tremendous support in ensuring necessary resources for the training. We are also indebted to Suzie Đông-Matsuda, a member of our Board of Directors, for sharing her own immigrant stories and coordinating other guest speakers for the training. She has been and continues to be a strong community supporter and advocate of the project.

We very much appreciate the following individuals who volunteered their expertise as outside reviewers of the curriculum guide: Professor Dorothy Fujita-Rony (University of California, Irvine), Professor Gina Masequesmay (California State University, Northridge), and graduate student Thom Trần (University of California, Los Angeles). Their invaluable contribution has helped raise the quality of the curriculum content.

We thank the following individuals and organizations for their contributions to the curriculum: Ly´ Kiến Trúc (Văn Hóa Newsmagazine), Professor Min Zhou (University of California, Los Angeles), Professor Carl Bankston (Tulane University), Minh Lương, Etcetera, Amerasia Journal, Anaheim Union High School District, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, New Horizon, Project Ngọc, San Jose Mercury News, Stanford University Press, U.C. Irvine Main Library Southeast Asian Archive, Vietnam Forum, and Vietnamese American High School Alliance.

Lastly, we also thank project graphics designer Alan Tao and my colleague Alice Ishigame-Tao for their patience and support of the arduous process of curriculum development.

Mary Anne Foo
Executive Director