Whither Vietnamese Catholic Communities in America? Catholic Youth and the Clash of Faith and Culture (Part 4)

Whither Vietnamese Catholic Communities in America? Catholic Youth and the Clash of Faith and Culture (Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)

Part 4

Interviewee: Srs. Duyên Anh and Hằng Nga (Houston, TX)

12 June 2020

Anna Nguyen

These interviews were conducted via Zoom and are published with only light editing for clarity. They are intended to supplement my initial research and provide a better understanding of different perspectives in regards to the sustainability of Vietnamese-American Catholicism. 

Sr. Duyên Anh Bùi currently teaches religion to elementary and middle schoolers at a local Catholic school in Texas. She originates from Canada and learned about the religious life through her own experiences in youth group. Sr. Duyên Anh has taught sacramental classes on the weekends at her parish in the past, and is now involved in the St. Catherine Convent vocation office as an administrative assistant. 

Sr. Hằng Nga Nguyễn was born in the United States and grew up with the sisters at her local parish in Houston. She began her vocation of religious life in 2004 and has experience teaching catechism to several Confirmation classes. Sr. Hằng Nga is now teaching two theology courses to students at a Catholic high school, and additionally helps out Sr. Duyên Anh as an assistant in the vocation office.

AN: I’d love to know more about your experiences teaching youth, whether that be in grade school or high school. I went to a Catholic high school, and I am assuming that my experience there might be different from your experiences teaching Catholicism in Houston.

HN: My experience was a continuity because of the age group that I was teaching. I was very comfortable teaching high school like in Confirmation, or grade school. But the difference was the full time ministry because with catechesis, you see them once a week. And for some reason, I would say there seems to be a closer relationship with those students because many of them are not receiving the education like that. With the weekly formation, you’re able to see growth easier with them than those you meet on a daily basis because some do take their faith for granted. When they’re studying on a daily basis or since pre-K or kindergarten, by the time they reach me only some cherish this particular gift that they’re allowed to receive, which is to have the Catholic education. And so having those two spectrums for me, it was a challenge in the beginning to ask: how do you continue to feed that within their hearts, since it’s really the desire of our human hearts to be in relationship with God. But seeing that teaching theology in a Catholic school is a core requirement, I want to help the students know that this is hopefully as important as math, science or the other core classes. I still enjoy teaching and the full time ministry of grade school teaching, I guess you can call it. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back into the weekend catechesis unless there’s something that changes up. Ever since I was younger, it was a passion for me to teach. And so there’s challenges, but it’s just because of the situation. I was always willing to accept whatever comes my way with the students that I have.

DA: Oh, I actually kind of enjoyed teaching both in the regular school on a daily basis and then on the weekends. I enjoyed the weekends because I always saw them once a week and then it’s like a push. And so I actually developed the strong relationship Sr. Hằng Nga was talking about because we always saw each other once a week. But of course it ranges, there are always those students who really want to learn and so they’re really connected with you and then you have some who will just come laid back, they don’t really want to do anything. But the relationship there, generally speaking, was strong. I did like the weekly teaching as well because we got a chance to engage with them one-on-one on a daily basis. But once again, some also take it for granted as well. I guess it really depends on the background of the students themselves. The reason why they go into the weekend classes is because they have to do it, kind of out of necessity because their parents forced them. They’re not what we call “Jesus freaks” in this house, where they’re on fire about Jesus and really want to learn about him. 

And then for the weekday students, the majority are just there because they have to take it. It’s a Catholic school, so I guess it really depends on how I’m engaging them, personally. If I’m engaging on that day and am interested in a topic, they’re lit and they’re on fire. They’re really listening. Other than that, they’re usually like, “Oh my god”, you’re reading the textbook again. I don’t know if I really answered your question. 

AN: What do the demographics look like for the students who teach? Are they Vietnamese for the most part or do they come from other backgrounds?

DA: Well for me, the weekend, it’s all Vietnamese. We go teach the Vietnamese parishes. At the school that I taught the past two years, it’s puny, like one Vietnamese student. The majority is American and Hispanic.

HN: Same thing with my ministry. For the weekend ministry, it was Vietnamese parishes. For the daily ministry, it’s because the high school is really the only high school in the Diocese of Fort Worth. I don’t remember how many schools feed into that one school, there’s quite a few. We have 19 schools in that entire diocese. A good number of them, but not all of them feed into this school because they’re all so spread out. The majority are American families. I’m not going to say the demographic with the kind of income, because it’s a private high school. It’s more “well to do” families, higher income families. I think it kind of also sometimes plays into loss of their faith and how serious they take their faith or not, because it also depends on the parents and how they feed off of that. I know that even with the ministry, I don’t let that be the reason why a student is standoffish in developing their relationship with Christ. But sometimes it does play a factor unfortunately. We kind of get bumped down, I think, in the totem pole compared to the other subjects when it comes to work and stuff.

DA: Right. Not to mention, for this past year in addition to helping with vocation, I helped a lot with Thieu Nhi Thanh The, which is the Vietnamese branch of the youth ministry. I do that often. 

HN: I’m grateful for the Asian culture, the Vietnamese culture. We say that and also often for the Hispanic culture, since faith is so important in both. But again, with our situation growing up here in the US, I could be going to mass on the weekend with my family and be involved but even with that it doesn’t necessarily mean I take ownership of my faith. When I’m teaching the students, even though I have a few Vietnamese students at the Catholic high school, my philosophy in teaching theology is more like instead of we’ve been inherited [as Catholics], we’ve inherited our faith. That applies to everyone who is a Cradle Catholic. How do we take ownership of our faith, and ownership in a way not to be possessive but like to say, “Okay, now I know why mom and dad want to be baptized. Now I know why mom and dad want me to continue my faith journey. So when I get older I’m not saying it’s because mom and dad forced me, rather mom and dad helped me love what I believe in.”

And so you know, we want the kids to succeed in school, we want them to go off to their dream college. But at the same time, I’ll ask them: “This dream college of yours, does it have a Newman Center or a strong Catholic community nearby?” They say “Well, it may or may not.” I have one student, a strong Catholic, that went to college in the Bible Belt. She said there’s a Catholic community there and she’s gonna make her best effort to be involved as much as she can. It was a very small Catholic community there but you know, trying to balance between our faith and being successful is hard and oftentimes we sacrifice our faith over what we think is our success. So I just want to get a feel for where we’re at. I’m assuming you go to a public or state university? Portland, is that a Catholic school? I mean the school that you ended up going to for college. 

AN: I currently go to the University of Oregon.

HN: Okay, so Oregon, a state school. Yeah. So like going to a state school, right? There’s maybe a Newman Center. But the effort now is up to you, right? That’s the ownership part. Like, do I make that effort to go to participate?

But one thing is to also know that it’s not going to be like everyone in these communities. It’s not going to be like our Vietnamese communities, they don’t have that fanfare. That’s the beauty and richness of our faith. We make it very elaborate, it goes a long way and it’s also good, but at the same time, some kids really don’t understand why we got to do this and so they don’t understand it. They kind of just disconnect themselves from it. And I think it’s with anything, not just with Vietnamese culture, but even with students who don’t understand the message of the liturgy. If they don’t fully know what’s going on, they’re disconnected. 

AN: What are some challenges you have faced as a Vietnamese sister in America? Your response can be connected to your religious experience or it can revolve around some challenges with the culture. 

DA: Okay, challenges I faced. Uh I would say weather. Haha, it’s the first one, sorry. When I think of Houston I think of the humidity. That’s the first challenge. If you can withstand the Houston weather, then you’re good.

Well, I guess a major challenge I went through would be getting adjusted to this new environment as a sister. I guess it’s not so much America because in the convent, it’s really, really protected. We’re very enclosed, so to speak. So my whole understanding of my vocation here or my time here in America is really situated around the parameters of our community. The greatest challenge for me was getting adjusted to understanding who I am and what my faith is really about. Before I became a sister, I was just a once a week churchgoer and youth group participant. But that was just because I wanted to get a good resume for my future medical career, which I was heading for. And so getting to be in the youth group only helped me to have a well balanced kind of resume. That was actually the only reason why I joined youth group. But yeah, I guess it is really about learning my faith, what it really is about and then understanding my vocation, all in the midst of getting used to this environment of this sisterhood. Yeah, I guess that’s cool. It’s kind of difficult.

HN: As for me, that’s a good question. I took this one way with me as an American, born and raised Vietnamese Catholic. I’m going to talk on a personal level: I’ve been that cross generation, a child of immigrant parents, and so when I had entered into my vocation I had faced challenges. Even though I was a cradle Catholic, I faced challenges entering into my vocation because it was more of a question of why would you give up everything to enter in about this life? That was basically totally ironic of what our parents test drive for, it’s almost like taking a step back from what they try to leave. My parents met each other at a refugee camp in Malaysia, so my brothers and I are all born in the U.S.

And I’m a cradle Catholic. I eavesdropped in on a conversation between my dad and my uncle, and I think my uncle had asked my dad why he allowed my brothers and I to be baptized. My dad is not Catholic, but my mom is. I think it was out of like, in order to be with my mom, you have to make that promise. So my grandpa, who I’ve never met, but I remember watching — you know Vietnamese people, they like to record everything, even funerals? We were watching a funeral as a family thing, back in 1995. And I remember hearing that conversation and that’s actually when I found out my dad was not Catholic. I grew up thinking we were all Catholics. So I remember hearing in 2004 that at the time he was not Catholic. My family went to visit Vietnam and we went to my dad’s side, and I noticed there was no crucifix or a Marian statue anywhere in this house. That’s when I asked my mom, and I kind of confronted her but in like my limited Vietnamese. My Vietnamese was more like: “Is Dad a Pagan?” rather than not Catholic. And so then it was when it finally hit me, my dad was not Catholic. Growing up that’s why I suppose my dad never expressed he wasn’t happy. I couldn’t place it in the body language that he was sad, but I did get a lot of family members questioning me. Why do I want to enter?

And at that time, to be honest with you, I just knew it was what was right for me. I was very at peace with that decision, but I want to answer your question more on that internal side. I think that’s how I understood what it meant for me because I originally wanted to get married. I had my desires, but as a true Asian child I wanted to do what my mom wanted me to do: become a nurse. One of my first intentions was to get married, so that’s why it was a shock for my family to think like: Why would you do this? No one in my immediate family that I know of is a priest or in the religious life. That’s what was almost like a cultural shock for my parents since I was the only daughter in the family as well. You know, as a Vietnamese daughter, you have responsibilities. It was just so many things kind of being thrown back at me, like we’ve done this for you, and you shove that back into our faces. So it was kind of rough patches in the beginning.

AN: What are some challenges young Vietnamese Americans face in the realm of Catholicism today? You already elaborated on that, but if you have anything you’d like to share that you’ve learned from the folks that you’ve taught in these Catholic schools, any experiences that they have struggled with, I’d love to hear it.

DA: I found that with the Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể group that I was with this past year as well as my confirmation classes, the youths tend to associate themselves with the multicultural pod. It is kind of like this notion of living inside society and kind of blending in and getting enculturated, so to speak, into the American culture.

And in terms of the American “faith”, their American faith is they don’t have a faith. I mean, I believe that they have so associated themselves with the culture that they kind of lost themselves within the culture. And because they’ve lost themselves in the culture, they lost themselves in their faith. I guess the clash I see with the Vietnamese traditions is the idea that because you’re born Vietnamese and you’re born Catholic, and we’re going to baptize you. This turns into kind of like a passing on kind of thing so that the notion of a Cradle Catholic faith is able to be passed from generation to generation. And because this faith is passed on, the youth don’t really value or treasure their faith because they don’t understand it. In order to love something you have to understand it first and I guess they never really experienced that as something shoved down their throat.

And so in terms of prioritizing their faith, there is no priority at all. Priority is whatever the secular world claims as important, which is your monetary value, wealth, name, popularity and all those kinds of stuff. Because we are so infiltrated and soaked into this mentality, I find that they kind of lost their way because they don’t understand the meaning a bit and because the parents kind of forced it down to their generation. Vietnamese-American youths won’t understand the value of their faith until they pass on to their children. And so I find that it’s getting weaker and weaker, because it started somewhere and nobody is explaining it initially. So they don’t really appreciate it. The foundation is not there, and by the time they get to college, their faith is gone.

HN: I think there’s just so many ways we can see it. You can probably see it within our families, right, because one of the things is that it’s just so forced. There is some good to it, though, because we get to understand it and when you’re young you need someone to direct you. But in regards to this issue, I think within the Vietnamese culture because I can see within my own family. And so just looking within my own, I think that with a lot of these families, the parents were harsh on us and it’s just caused these ruptures which contribute to a lot of our young Vietnamese Catholics losing debates and leaving the faith because their elders want them to be so rooted in the Vietnamese culture. Even to the language, it’s hard for youths to really develop these skills when they don’t have school. They have to choose between Spanish, French, German and Latin, right, and there’s no Vietnamese. And so now they’re losing their way to communicate. And parents are trying to force them, which is not helping them to understand. But I think that’s where the disconnect is because you know, the force, like I’ve seen it. 

They kind of just disconnect themselves from it. And I think it’s just anything, not just with Vietnamese culture, but even with students who don’t understand the message of the liturgy, if they don’t fully know what’s going on, they’re disconnected. Vietnamese Catholics in the US are trying to teach the next generation, you know, and a lot of these lessons are falling on deaf ears on these kids who do not understand. They say things like: “I’m not going to make the effort to understand since they’re just going to just tune me out.” But then at times I have to say it’s not the parents’ fault either. This is what the older generations know, and that’s what worked for them. Unfortunately though, it’s not how these kids are, I guess, they are being seduced to the secular lifestyle because they’re more exposed to the American culture. 

But it is something that I have to actually bring up when I was teaching catechism to Vietnamese students to help them understand. Yeah, it’s tough, but we get it from our parents. I told my students, I don’t think ever in my life heard my parents say to me, I love you. Like even in Vietnamese. And the kids are like wow, but I’m like no, I saw it in their actions, my brothers and I. And so we responded back in our actions as well. I was obedient to them. Vietnamese Catholics are like “I love my faith. I want my children to understand too.” So there were little sacrifices for kids.

AN: Do you think that there are any solutions to try to mitigate this resistance to understanding the faith? Are there different ways to engage with the youth in learning about their faith in a more sustainable way?

HN: In the sense of trying to get parents out of their comfort zones, I think one of the things that we in the cross generation can do to help is communicating with one another. We can listen to one another and help kids understand their parents and what they’ve gone through, right. 

I kind of get it, my parents also tried to understand their kids’ culture. So wherever the parents have an openness to their kids, it’d be awesome to have like a panel or that kind of thing. It would be an open discussion where parents are like: What is it? How can we help you? And then the kids can share how they can help the parents get them more. But to me, the younger generation has to have a more open heart and see what our older generations have gone through. And it’s not easy for them.

My mom and dad are limited in their English to communicate with us, and you know, that’s a great way to move forward with both sides. But now that we’re getting further out, I don’t think they’ll be great with our generation like this now. There’s a beauty in our Vietnamese faith but what parts of it do we preserve? All the fanfare? Probably not. There are richer things like the stories of the martyrs, right, the saints, and not forgetting what the war has done to our people. It separated us; it divided families and that’s why you can understand why there is such a distaste for that. It kind of brings back some of that angst that they have left. So to know that you hold on to that, the history, the right to learn from history so that we don’t let history repeat itself, even within our own family.

DA: Just to elaborate a little bit, I do agree with what Sr. Hằng Nga said, but regarding the second generation Vietnamese Americans, I would say that I don’t have a concrete solution because I think it’s quite hard. I found that if we can help secondary gens communicate with the first generation, it is very good because we can help the children understand. But what about the children who are already in the second generation? I think there’s this understanding from the second generation parents of what their priorities are. And they just have to re-emphasize that. 

Say for example, the parents tell the children: “You have to be good Catholics, you have to go to Thiếu Nhi Thánh Thể, and you have to do this and you have to go here. And then you have to get top honors and your sacrament class.” The kids have all these priorities, and their parents want to have academics during the week to be on top. But they also have sports or extracurriculars and piano lessons and all kinds of things like that. And so what happens if you want a weekend and they have like a sports tournament? The parents will say, “Okay, so I guess we can’t go to Mass, because sports are more important. And this is your soccer game. It’s so important. So we have to go and this is going to make you like the star of the team.” Like what’s your priorities? If the Catholic faith is truly important, then you will stress that with your children, you allow them to lessen other things a little bit so they can give more time and energy to what’s important. I find that this is because the parents themselves don’t quite value what was expected of them, and they don’t value it themselves in order to be able to pass it on to their children. And as to how to inform those parents is kind of hard because you can’t be like, okay, all these second-generation parents come to this meeting, and we’re gonna give you a conference. Well, they’re not gonna go to the conference, right? So I don’t know how to get to them. But I think if we’re able to help out with the parents, we can then go down to the children, because our faith is really passed on. It’s apostolic tradition, the Catholic Church, a thousand years ago, was passed on as all this continues to be passed on. This is a matter of how important it is to have this passed on.

HN: I think one way we can think about it is to think about what it is to recatechize. Even American cultures recatechize families, especially young families, so that they know how to send that to the children. And that’s actually something that I was looking at in my ministry, like, oh, there’s nothing wrong with our feed. I think besides the dialogue, the open table dialogue, we also do the recatechizing. 

First off, what is a family like, what does the church say a family is called to be. Then we find the uniqueness of our own Vietnamese faith. The church always says that the first church that a child experiences is the family. They are the domestic church. So we incorporate our own Catholic culture, our own Vietnamese culture into what we continue to pass on as the foundation of the family. Because that’s really key. If we keep that in their foresight, and then educate them in their faith, we let them grow in their faith. That’s the greatest gift that a family can give to their child is their faith. 

DA: You know, I guess it helps to get the pastoral view, if we can talk to the priests and squeeze it in a little bit, every homily, or every little something. But the father’s gonna be bilingual.

HN: I mean, I know that we’re not here to come up with some kind of solution, we’re just brainstorming. That’s going to be something that we have to look at even with the incoming postulates, right. Not all of them, like three of them are fluent in Vietnamese, and a good amount of Vietanamese for the others but a good majority of them don’t speak.

HN: We’re now mostly trying to do this because it also plays a part in choosing our routes as Vietnamese Dominican sisters. Our roots are in Vietnam, our mother house is in Vietnam and we have like a daughter house here in the U.S. But now we’re trying to open it up to other ethnic backgrounds. So I’m just making these connections with what we’re talking about, like how the family us gets affected. There’s just so many ways we can answer that question. There needs to be re-catechizing because our faith should be this ongoing formation. Even after we receive the sacrament of Confirmation it’s still ongoing; we’re not just waiting for marriage prep. Some parishes do that, they really recatechize the parents while their kids are going through the sacramental classes. So if a kid has a question, then the parents can answer it. There were one or two parishes I was aware of that were doing that. And the parents were great, they’re grateful. They’re like: “How come no one ever taught this?” You were taught that when you were your child’s age, seven or eight years old, and we get that you forget it. So it’s an ongoing formation. And that’s one thing, I think we lack in our faith that we forget it’s ongoing formation.

Our conscience is never fully formed, and that’s the same thing with our faith. There needs to be a continual catechesis at every age group, but in a way that the desire to learn is not forced. How do you make it desirable? I guess God saying “I love you” is not enough. I don’t know how many times God can say I love you, in order for someone to say, “Oh, you really love me?” Like, he’s been saying that since the beginning of time. 

AN: Has Vietnamese Catholicism changed much in the past few decades? How do you envision this community 5, 10, or 15 years from now?

HN: Hm well the faith should be the same. 

DA: It’s supposed to be the same. 

HN: I actually think that is the case because this is from my own experience of teaching and being involved in and knowing parish catechesis. And I think that’s one good thing that we were teaching in the Vietnamese parishes because you do see these young Catholics, like around our age or maybe slightly older. They’re here and we see them on fire, we see how they love their faith. And that fire of theirs pours over into the youth because having strong men in their faith is so important. It’s easy to see a strong woman in her faith. It’s almost like expected. But if you see a strong man in his faith, that’s different. That’s what I say even with families. If you have a strong father who is strong in his faith, it will usually be the foundation of the family and the children’s faith. And I saw that because of how these particular men drew in youth, especially other boys. That’s like a manly thing to do, not only to have those heroic virtues, but to be willing to say this is what I love and not be ashamed of it. They take pride in it, and I just see now how beautiful that played a part in those students when I was teaching catechism. 

And this all goes back to the catechesis of not just the family. They have conferences about the feminine genius, which is basically the dignity in the world of the woman. And they have something for the guys, I don’t know what the exact term is, but it talks about the second theology of the body as a very beautiful document. We haven’t lived that long to see if there’s been a substantial change but I think that we’re kind of behind in that area. I try to encourage these young Vietnamese kids who are good with youth ministry to see if they want to consider going into that as a full-time ministry if the parent is willing to pay. But like that’s one of the things that our parents don’t focus on, considering the fact that youth ministry is something that we might love as a benefit for the rest of our lives.

Out here we say that it’s okay to work for the church. You might not be making much money but at least you’re doing something that you love. Even with the professions, we tell the kids that you want to have a career that’s going to be in line with your faith. Because oftentimes, you’re going to sacrifice your faith for what you’re doing. For example, if I click this, there’s nothing wrong with the medical billing. There’s a lot of these issues that are not okay, you know, like abortion is a hot topic. You’re going to be a gynecologist or an obstetrician performing abortions in the hospital because it’s going to be your job. You’re putting your faith in jeopardy because it’s always easier to sacrifice your faith. It’s a strong thing to not sacrifice your faith for something that you think is a greater good.

DA: Okay, so when we were talking about seeing the faith, many think that you’d see a little bit of resurgence here and there. I agree with that too, since there is proof if we think in terms of the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Movement as well. There are strong leaders whose interests are in participants, so they will continue to try to live out the life of a role model. We need good, strong role models. But I do see that there’s a dwindling in the faith, and it’s because there’s that clash between the American culture and what it strives for and what the Catholic Church strives for. It doesn’t have to necessarily clash but the American nation contradicts what the gospel teaches, like poverty and how it leads to the benefits of humility and virtues like that. So because of that, in the culture that we’re living, I do feel that the faith is dwindling. 

And where do I see us within 10-15 years? Well, it is hard to say because when the church first began, there was persecution, right, you thought that would wipe out the Christians. But that gave more spurts since the faith moves stronger even if they’re being persecuted. And so I guess it’s really hard to see, but I would say I don’t know how many more Catholics will be left. I hope that God will work in the souls of all those who are open to receiving God’s graces and be those beacons of light.

HN: We’re very slow. I’ll be honest with you, we’re very slow in trying to move as a Vietnamese community in popping this or something out for the current generation. But sometimes I tell myself, if we’re doing that then how is it any different? How’s it any different from these conferences that they have on an annual basis or every two years or something like that? Why reinvent the wheel in that sense? I know that we’re wanting to keep it centered on our identity, so how does Marian Days happen? How’s that able to happen every year? What stirs up people to come together? Because in the beginning, one of the reasons why people started coming together was to find each other, meet up with each other again.