Valuable experience
Vietnamese refugee is new Catholic Charities board president
Vi Le brings her experience as a refugee from Vietnam to her role at Catholic Charities.
Vi Le remembers her childhood visiting a host of historical sites and other attractions in Oklahoma and across the country.
However, there was a building at 425 NW 7 that she and her parents visited more than any tourist destinations.
As Vietnamese refugees, Le and her family spent many mornings and afternoons there because it housed Catholic Charities.
Memories of making the trek to the faith-based agency with her parents came flooding back to the Yukon woman in the weeks since she was installed as the organization’s new board president on Aug. 31.
Le proudly embraces her heritage as a Vietnam refugee. She has come full circle as one of the leaders of an agency that welcomes and guides refugees who make Oklahoma their home.
It’s an experience that she knows personally, so she and her family couldn’t be happier.
“Catholic Charities is part of our DNA,” Le said. “Any immigrant, any refugee — this is a touch point for them.”
Le, 45, said her parents, Nghi and Phuong Le, brought her to the U.S. when she was 18 months old. An attorney, she is currently regional general counsel for Mercy Health System in Oklahoma and Arkansas, responsible for the legal and regulatory landscape of Mercy in the region.
Patrick Raglow, Catholic Charities’ executive director, said he didn’t know Le’s personal story when she became a member of Catholic Charities’ board several years ago, but he liked the fact that she had deep roots in the Catholic faith tradition and a connection to Mercy, which he said is doing powerful and positive things in the community, just like Catholic Charities.
He said Le is a good fit as board president. “She is a formidable talent, and she’s got a real strong presence. Then you hear her story, her heart, her character and her desire to serve, and you can’t help but love her and where’s she’s coming from,” Raglow said.
Welcome to OKC
Though she was too young to remember anything about her family’s journey from Vietnam to America, Le said she has heard many stories about it and considers her parents to be extremely courageous to have made the trip.
She said they arrived in April 1975 at Fort Chaffee, just outside Fort Smith, Arkansas. She said her parents brought her, an infant, as well as two of her mother’s younger siblings.
“I don’t know if I could be as brave as they were,” Le said.
She said her father had been a pilot with the South Vietnamese Air Force. He had come to America to receive training at several military bases.
After the fall of Saigon, her parents arrived at Fort Chaffee and decided that they would work any job they could find in order to give the three young people they brought with them access to educational opportunities.
The family lived in Houston at one point. They ended up in Oklahoma on what was to be a pit stop on their way to a Catholic Charities host sponsor in Kansas.
However, Oklahoma City had three things that encouraged them to put down roots there instead: The refugee family felt embraced by the local Catholic Charities; Our Lady’s Cathedral, a house of worship that welcomed the devout Catholics; and the growing Vietnamese community in what would steadily become a thriving Asian district near and around NW 23 and Classen.
That many Vietnamese resettled in the area after the Vietnam War has been attributed in large part to Catholic Charities.
“When we got here, there was such wonderful infrastructure. It allowed my folks to have other families — Vietnamese families — around them,” Le said. “Our parish, Catholic Charities and the big pocket of Vietnamese here — those were our safety nets.”
She said she can recall sitting outside the agency’s building on NW 7, which had what she described as a kind of 1960-70s iconic brickwork, waiting for one of her parents. These days, she looks with fond memories at a black-and-white photo of the building that hangs in the Catholic Charities headquarters at 1232 N Classen.
Le said she remembers that the agency always had a Vietnamese spokesperson who helped ease refugees’ transition to their new home.
“We felt comfortable with Catholic Charities, and that helped on our path of citizenship,” she said .
Education and service
Her parents’ motivation for coming to the U.S. manifested in their determination to see their daughter fulfill her dreams.
She remembers living in apartments in what is now the Plaza District and attending preschool at Gatewood Elementary School. Le said she didn’t speak English very well so her first half of kindergarten was what she called the “Peanuts experience”— with a teacher speaking English but what the young student heard was “Wah-wah-wah.”
By the next year, she had improved so much that her teacher had her translating and helping other Vietnamese students in the classroom.
Her mother did factory work for Braum’s while her dad worked in construction and at a CocaCola plant while attending school at night. Eventually, the family moved from Oklahoma City to Yukon, which wasn’t far from a company where they were employed for 22 years: Western Electric, which evolved into Lucent Technologies.
Le graduated from Yukon High School and, in 1991, earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Oklahoma State University before earning her law degree from the University of Oklahoma Law School.
Her parents watched on with pride as she and her younger brother Huy Le, who was born in Oklahoma, achieved their goals. The family’s sacrifices and long-term vision, coupled with Le’s talent, paid off.
Her first job as an attorney was a position as the first legal information coordinator for the Oklahoma Supreme Court. She also worked for Lucent. She joined Mercy in 2007.
Serving on the board of Catholic Charities made a lot of sense and filled her desire to give back, which her parents instilled in her as a child. “From a young age, there was a heart for service,” she said.
Later, she watched examples of caring service in the people who helped her family at the refugee camp and at Catholic Charities. “I feel like the Sisters of Mercy grabbed me when I first got here because Mercy and Catholic Charities became that guiding light for me over the years,” she said.
She is trying to instill a sense of compassionate service to community in her own two sons, Van and Hugh, with her husband, Brian Winkeler. The family attends St. John Nepomuk in Yukon.
“It’s our duty to make sure that we are giving our time and talent to make a better world. That’s kind of what’s been instilled in me,” she said.
Thus, she was delighted to become Catholic Charities board president.
Le said she’s proud of the agency’s ability to evolve with the times to continue coming alongside refugees in need of a support system in their newfound home. “Catholic Charities has been flexible and evolved with the needs of the community now. I remember being happy and sad that agencies change, but times change. How can we move people from being a refugee to citizenship?” she said.
“This is sort of the pinnacle of what I can do to serve in this capacity.”
Raglow said Le and her family embody what Catholic Charities is all about. “She sort of embodies and encapsulates the refugee experience. They arrive with great uncertainty and try to reorient themselves in the community. Before you know it, they turn around and share their talent. The next thing you know, they are making opportunities for others.”