Christy Anh-Thu Trinh-Malarney

Christy Anh-Thu Trinh-Malarney was born Trinh Ngoc Anh-Thu on April 25th. 1967 in Saigon,Vietnam. The daughter of a family of northern and central Vietnamese ancestry, she spent her early years growing up in both Saigon and Hue. As with thousands of other Vietnamese of her generation, her childhood in Vietnam came to an abrupt end on April 29th, 1975 when her family fled Saigon by boat as the North Vietnamese army approached the city. Although she was only eight years old, she vividly remembered her mother taking her and her sister to the side of the boat and telling them to take one last look at and remember the Vietnamese coast as it faded in the distance.

After several days at sea, she and her family were picked up by a United States Navy vessel and, after several stops, were ultimately transported to Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Her father had previously studied in the US and the family had the good fortune of having his doctoral advisor immediately agree to sponsor them in the U.S. The family moved to Rolla, Missouri, where Christy arrived in late May 1975, speaking not a word of English. As they began settling in, her family decided that given the fact that most Americans could not pronounce her name, she needed to choose an English name. She initially chose Cathy, but after meeting a charismatic young girl on the playground named Christy, she came home and informed her parents that Christy was to be her English name.

Over the next several years her family moved between Missouri and Oklahoma until they finally moved to Southern California in January of 1980. In 1985, Christy began her undergraduate studies at Cal Poly Pomona and in 1987 she transferred to the school she had long wanted to attend, UC Santa Cruz. Her years in Santa Cruz gave her the opportunity to develop several interests that she would pursue for the rest of her life. From an early age she had been interested in education, particularly of immigrants, refugees and low-income students who faced challenges in the classroom. Prior to moving to Santa Cruz, she worked as a bilingual teacher’s aid helping new immigrants at an elementary school in Rosemead.

While in Santa Cruz she worked part-time at a Montessori school and also worked as a University of California SAA/EOP tutor helping minority and low-income students with political science and history coursework. During her late teens she had also become interested in Asia. She took a double major at UCSC in Politics and East Asian studies and received honors in politics. Finally, her years of living as an immigrant in the US had sharpened her interest in her Vietnamese identity and the Vietnamese community in the U.S. After moving to North
ern California, she became involved with the Walk for the People Walk-a-Thon in San Francisco to raise money for Vietnamese refugees and in Santa Cruz she become a member of the university’s Vietnamese Student Association. She later served as the association’s president for two years.

Christy graduated from UCSC in 1990 and in the autumn of 1991 she moved to Hong Kong to find work in the colony’s Vietnamese refugee camps. She spent over two years working in Hong Kong for Save the Children, UK, where she served as a pre-school coordinator for refugee children living in the Argyle and Whitehead Detention Centers. Her experiences in the camps re-kindled her interest in continuing her education and in December of 1993 she left Hong Kong to begin a Masters degree in East Asian Studies at Harvard University. She finished her degree in 1995 after writing a thesis on refugee policies applied to Vietnamese asylum seekers fleeing Vietnam in the post-1975 period.

While at Harvard she met her future husband and they married at the end of 1995. In early 1996 she moved to Tokyo to join her husband who had already begun a job there. She later described the next seven years as the happiest of her life as she devoted herself to her family and to being a mother to her two sons, Liem and Kien, born in 1997 and 1999. Her interest in her native country, however, did not fade. While in Tokyo she occasionally worked for the UNHCR as an interpreter for Vietnamese asylum seekers in Japan. Then, in 2001-2002 she and her family moved to Hanoi for her husband’s sabbatical leave. When she was a graduate student, Christy--who was a skilled cook with a mastery of a wide range of Vietnamese dishes--had become interested in the culture and history of Vietnamese food. During her year in Hanoi she began a research project on Vietnamese food cultures that she hoped to turn into a series of articles and a book that would explain to a popular audience the historical and cultural dimensions of Vietnamese food.

Sadly, a month after returning from Hanoi in the summer of 2002, Christy began to experience a series of debilitating health problems. These intensified to the point that she required hospitalization in October and by early November she was diagnosed with an advanced cancer. She bravely fought through four rounds of chemotherapy, paralysis, and spinal surgery, but the cancer proved intractable and she passed away in Tokyo early on the morning of April 29th, 2003, twenty eight years to the day after her family fled Vietnam. As those who survived her noted, she had lived an extraordinary life in those twenty-eight years.
The Christy Anh-Thu Trinh-Malarney Student Award seeks to recognize a graduating UCSC student who shows a similar commitment to educational achievement and to Vietnam and the Vietnamese. From her late teens onward, Christy had devoted herself to her native country and its people, but her potential contributions to them were never fully realized due to her untimely death. It is hoped that the winners of the award will carry forward in their lives and work the same spirit and commitment that Christy had in hers.

To learn more about this Student Award, please go to: http://giveto.ucsc.edu/stories_of_support/profile-malarney.asp