Sister Thuy Tran is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, where she also serves as the Director of Community Relations for St. Joseph Hospital. In this interview she discusses the Sisters of St. Joseph’s early impact on her family, community outreach, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected her work.
KEYWORDS: Catholicism, pandemic, COVID-19, healthcare, Vietnamese, AAPI leaders, community, anti-Asian racism,
Interview Transcript
In 1975, the Sisters of St. Joseph took my family in, they were refugees, and from Vietnam to the U.S. And so before I was born, the Sisters of St. Joseph took my family, the refugee family. And so a couple months later, I was born at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. So it’s actually one of our hospitals. So 30 years later, I ended up becoming a sister, one of them.
[Community Outreach in Orange County]
The first thing I did when I came to St. Joseph Hospital was to bring all of the leaders in our different ethnic community, in our API community, bring them all in. A part of it, what I’ve experienced—from the Korean community, Vietnamese leaders, Chinese leaders, and Cambodian leaders—[we] still need to work around the Asian Pacific Islander community as well. That they have been invisible. And the past two years that have worked with them, is advocating for them. Is inequity in their community, that they don’t have a voice at the table. And so a lot of the work that I have been doing is uplifting our leaders, building trust with them. Because what they have experienced is that they have come to our mainstream doors, and yet they have closed on them. And so now they feel like they have to survive by themselves.
[How Has COVID Affected Your York?]
So the first thing because I’ve been working with our API community these past two years, first is kind of looking at the health of the community. And immediately when this pandemic happened, I knew that they don’t have the support system. So right in the beginning I reached out to them and say, “What do you need? What kind of resources do you need?” And I was able to get, not homemade, but masks for them. So specifically paying attention to our API community, because they needed that attention, while there’s so many things that were going on in our community. But yet they did not have anybody to pay attention to [them]. That’s the very beginning of the pandemic. And slowly people started helping.
[Sisters of St. Joseph’s History With Pandemics]
The only history that I had read about was when the sisters—our religious community—in 1918, the reason why they came into health care was the [Spanish] flu epidemic. And a lot of people died, and they risked their lives to be there with the people.
[Anti-Asian Racism During COVID]
And what we’re doing is, as you see the COVID pandemic that’s going on right now, the anti-racism that’s going on in the community, and people are more out there, expressing that. And I think what’s the problem with us, for example, with Trump saying that, “No, this is a Chinese virus.” And then [that affects] all of us, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re Chinese, you’re Vietnamese, you’re Korean. We are all lumped into it being Chinese, under that category. And yet, they don’t understand that we are different, ethnically, culturally. And so all of this discrimination, racism, these gaps is because people don’t understand, and it’s easier to lump everybody together.
[Final Thoughts For The Community]
My hope is that we continue to learn about different cultures, different ways [to] care about our community. For me if I did not do this work around the Asian American community, I would not see the gaps, the need. And from there, like I got engaged civically, I got engaged in areas that I know that can make a difference. So I hope future generations break away from your peers and take that risk and know what’s going on in your community and start advocating because we all need to be a part of this journey together.
Interviewers: Christine Nguyen and Anne Lim
Related Resources
- This interview was conducted on May 31, 2020 and represents a moment in time; but the work of Sister Thuy and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange remains ongoing. Please visit their website to learn more about their initiatives, programming, and progress. Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange. http://csjorange.org/
- Meg Waters.“New Chapter in Long Standing Love Story.” Orange County Catholic, August 1, 2017. https://occatholic.com/new-chapter-in-a-long-standing-love-story/
- Matina Kilkenny. “Missing Faces: The impact of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 in Humboldt.” The Humboldt Historical Society, The Humboldt Historian, Winter 1994. https://www.humboldthistory.org/gif-med/missing-faces