Word: lu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just before leaving for his second tour of duty in Iraq last September, Lance Corporal Victor R. Lu of the U.S. Marine Corps took his mother aside in their family home in east Los Angeles for a quiet conversation. The fourth of six children?and the first boy in the family?Lu, like many other young Americans, had enlisted in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. In the three years that had passed, the change in him was unmistakable. He had been an indifferent student, a bit of a troublemaker in a mischievous, harmless sort of way. But after 9/11...
...Every parent has fears when their sons or daughters go off to war. In the case of Xuong and Nu Lu, Victor's parents, those fears were shaped in part by their memories of another war that ended a generation ago. Like more than half a million of their countrymen, the Lus came to the U.S. as refugees from Vietnam, having fled their native Saigon with their two young children after the Communist government took power in 1975. They made their home in east Los Angeles and had four more children. Victor was born in the summer...
...handful of others, like the family of Victor R. Lu, the two wars have become bookends of tragedy, conflicts that upended their worlds forever. Xuong and his wife Nu lived in Saigon, and he worked as a skilled technician in a profitable machine shop. Like millions of other Vietnamese, the Lus are ethnic Chinese, and were residents of a part of Saigon known as Cholon, where many Vietnamese of Chinese descent had settled. Like Chinese diaspora the world over, the one in Saigon was tight knit, industrious and relatively prosperous. Even as the war in Vietnam intensified in the late...
...even to those determined not to get involved, the reach of the war was inescapable. Xuong Lu did not escape the war's reach. His skill as a machinist meant that the South Vietnamese army asked him to go to combat zones to help repair critical equipment. He would be away sometimes for a month or more at a time, and occasionally witnessed heavy fighting. When her husband was away, Nu sold cigarettes on the streets of Saigon to support their two children. By 1974, Xuong's concerns about the war's course had grown. He had never thought...
...first time in the United States, in Seattle, the eldest sister, Nanci, then just a girl, remembers charity workers giving the entire family warm winter coats to ward off the unfamiliar chill of the Pacific Northwest. "I was only 7, but that's something I'll never forget." The Lu family had finally left the war behind...