Maryknoll Lay Missioner Thu Tam Hoang, whose family fled Vietnam, serves in Cambodia, where she brings hope to impoverished people.
By Terry Friel, UCA News
As a terrified 10-year-old girl, Thu Tam Hoang fled Saigon with her family as the South Vietnamese capital was overrun in April 1975, the deafening sound of bombs and gunfire ringing in her ears as she scrambled onto an overcrowded barge on the Mekong River to the safety of international waters.
After a perilous voyage and a sea rescue by the U.S. Navy, she and her family were taken to a refugee camp in the Philippines, before being flown to the barren U.S. coral atoll of Wake Island, 3,700 kilometers northwest of Honolulu, under the U.S. military’s “Operation New Life” and then finally on to the United States, sponsored by friends of her diplomat father.
“One minute, I was in Vietnam. The next minute, I was in the Philippines and then on to Wake Island, and the next thing you know, I’m in the U.S.,” says Hoang.
Half a century later, the 60-something proudly Vietnamese-American now working in Cambodia as a Maryknoll lay missioner says she has always been one of the lucky ones, “guided by God’s hand.”
“Looking back at my journey of faith, my life journey, God’s hand is in it all the time,” she told UCA News. I felt like I am called. I don’t know what I can do, but I am opening myself to wherever God calls me.
“If I could alleviate any kind of pain and suffering — even one person at a time — I will do that.”
From refugee to missioner
Her night-time escape from Vietnam inspired Hoang to volunteer 35 years ago, while still in college, at a Vietnamese refugee camp in the Philippines run by the Daughters of Charity in desperate need of Vietnamese-English translators.
Her odyssey has been both physical and spiritual, leading her from being a refugee to working with refugees, and from being a Buddhist to converting first to the Baptist faith and then to Catholicism at the age of 30.
Maryknoll Lay Missioners, one of Maryknoll’s four branches, was formed in 1975 — the same year Hoang fled Vietnam — in response to the Second Vatican Council’s call for greater lay involvement in the Church’s mission work. The organization emerged from the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers and the Maryknoll Sisters. The fourth arm is the Maryknoll Affiliates.
She was sent to Cambodia in January 2024 on a three-and-a-half-year mission, just a month after officially becoming a Maryknoll Lay Missioner.
Hoang works with churches in Cambodia, particularly assisting ethnic Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Filipino minority communities in the port city of Sihanoukville, located 134 miles (215 kilometers) southwest of Phnom Penh. She also has a particular interest in fighting human trafficking.
The recent conflict between Cambodia and Thailand brought a flood of memories from her final days in South Vietnam.
“I got very nervous when I heard about [the conflict]. It brought back all of this,” she says.
There are about 25,000 Catholics in Cambodia, many of them ethnic Vietnamese. Before the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, there were about 100,000 Catholics. Many fled or were killed before starting to return after the United Nations intervention in 1992.
In a country facing strong budgetary demands, charities and NGOs such as Maryknoll, Caritas Cambodia, Missionaries of Charity, and Jesuit Service Cambodia play a critical role, often at the community level.
A lifetime of serving the most vulnerable
After her first mission abroad in the Philippines more than three decades, Hoang returned to graduate school, where she completed her Master of Public Health from the Virginia Commonwealth University and went on to serve in the Texas and U.S. governments in a range of positions, including working with refugees and immigrants.
For Hoang, everything leads back to refugees and the disadvantaged.
“From an early age, there has always been this thought that I have always been very lucky, and I guess, I just felt I needed to do something about it because of this overwhelming sense of gratitude that I knew I was lucky,” she says.
“It started even when I was in college, the last few years in college, when the whole world was looking at all this news and everything, how people were fleeing by boat, dying at sea, and all this stuff was going on.”
She began raising money to help Vietnamese refugees in a camp run by the Daughters of Charity in Palawan, an island in the Philippines, at the end of the Sulu Archipelago, about 310 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of the Malaysian part of Borneo and 840 (1,350 kilometers) southeast of the Vietnamese mainland.
One of the sisters at the camp said they desperately needed Vietnamese-English translators to help the UN Refugee Agncy interview unaccompanied minors and to be house mothers in group homes for those children. So she went herself.
That experience fueled her passion for helping those in desperate straits.
Hoang’s other journey has been spiritual, from Buddhist to Baptist to Catholic — and equally as long and fascinating.
The journey to discovering her faith
Soon after her family arrived in the States in 1975, their sponsors came by with Christmas presents. Among the toys and sporting goods were two books. Because the children could not yet speak English, the books were put away in the basement.
A few years later, by then a voracious reader with good English, Hoang found one. It was an illustrated children’s Bible. She was fascinated by the pictures and stories.
“And then, you know, I started praying. I would kneel in front of my bed every night, praying to this God even though I didn’t even know who he was,” she says.
But her mother found the Bible hidden under the mattress.
“Oh, my gosh! I got a good whipping,” Hoang recalls.
Over the years, Hoang was drawn to the Baptist faith and was baptized. But she also kept going to Catholic Mass and looking deeper into issues such as the role of priests. At age 30, she became a Catholic.
In a world that can seem overwhelmed by conflict, poverty and despair, Hoang vividly remembers a lesson from Mother Teresa. She was reading in a library during a retreat in El Paso, Texas. “I just randomly pulled out this book by Mother Teresa,” she recalls, emotionally. “And I happened to open it at this one page, just one sentence. And it still resonates with me. This is what sparked my current mission.
“Mother said something like: ‘Yes, you are a drop in the ocean of water. But the ocean would miss that drop of water.’
“If I ever feel discouraged because I’m ‘a drop in the ocean of water,’ I know that that drop means something.
“It helps you to humble yourself in the midst of a world of problems. I may not be doing something great. But great in people’s eyes is not the same as great in God’s eyes.
“Don’t give up. Never think that that drop of water means nothing.”
Featured image: Maryknoll Lay Missioner Thu Tam Hoang (far right, in hat) visits a family in Cambodia, where she arrived in 2024 on her first assignment for the mission organization. Hoang, whose family was forced to flee Vietnam in 1975, worked in a career in the United States that included refugee resettlement. A convert to Catholicism, she values the approach of the faith-based overseas mission organization. (Courtesy of Thu Tam Hoang/Cambodia)
