In Arkansas: An M.D. from Saigon

It's still King Cotton here," says William Place, mayor of Wilmot, Ark., as he drives the short distance from his house to the aging Deyampert Gin. Most of the cotton trailers that are used to haul the bolls to the local gins sit idle in the fields, their fenced wire walls speckled with tufts of white. Route 165, running north-south through this part of the cotton belt, is littered with cottontail puffs left over from the fall picking season.

Wilmot (pop. 1,202), just five miles from the Louisiana border, is a farm town: cotton, beans, rice and some cattle. A railroad track runs down the main street past a pair of gas stations, an auto-supply store, Jane's Grocery, the Wilmot Bank, the Bennett Pharmacy and Aunt Martha's Antique Shop. Next to the police station (one chief, two patrol officers) on the west side of the street is Lake Enterprise, so low in this drought year that the tangled roots of the cypress trees are visible above the water line. One lone fisherman pilots his boat across the darkening surface. "It's best to keep on driving," a young Wilmot woman advises cheerfully, suggesting that there is nothing much in Wilmot to detain a passing stranger. But that has not proved true in the case of Dr. Thieu Bui.

Three years ago, Wilmot, like thousands of other rural towns, all over America, had no doctor. The last M.D. had moved off to Memphis (more profitable), and the nearest was 30 miles away. But on the other side of the world Saigon was falling. Among the thousands of refugees aboard the final military flights in April 1975 were hundreds of doctors, bound first for American bases in the Far East, then for U.S. camps. Bill Johnson, a wealthy farmer and president of Wilmot's doctorless Medical Center Board, saw an opportunity. In May 1975 he went to Fort Chaffee, Ark., on a recruiting mission. There he eagerly agreed to sponsor Dr. Thieu Bui and Dr. Ton That De, both former South Vietnamese army officers.

In June the two doctors checked out of the camp and moved with their families into a couple of rent-free houses owned by the Wilmot public school. Townspeople collected donations of furniture, clothing and kitchen items to help the new doctors and their families get started. Johnson helped them obtain temporary medical licenses. The town applied for funding from the National Health Service Corps, which provides needed health care in underserved areas of the country. "The first day the clinic opened again," recalls Mayor Place, "people were standing in line."

The Wilmot Doctors Clinic is situated in half of a shabby, cinder-block building just off the main street. In the other half is a nursing home owned by the mayor. Since Dr. De left for Michigan in December 1977, Dr. Bui has been running the clinic alone. In May, with the approval of the town, he resigned from the Health Service Corps and the clinic is now a private facility. "He has his own business now. How large it grows depends on how hard he wants to work," says Mayor Place. "We are trying to make him as happy as we can."

Most days Dr. Bui, 44, a slight, shy man with a boyish cowlick, is up by 6 a.m. and on his way in his 1975 Ford Granada to Chicot Memorial Hospital in Lake Village, Ark., 35 miles away. By 10 a.m. he is back in his clinic.

Dr. Bui sees 15 to 20 patients a day. Most are poor and black, their ailments mainly heart trouble, high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes. Just before noon the hospital calls to tell him that an obstetrical patient is in the last stages of labor. Bui hurries to his 1975 Ford Granada for a trip he sometimes has to make four times a day (half an hour each way). He speeds toward Lake Village, chain-smoking Vantage 100s, but when he reaches the town, he is too late. Barbara Jones is already lying on the delivery table smiling at her newborn girl, her first baby in 13 years.

At lunchtime, Bui pulls into the driveway of the spacious four-bedroom, $36,000 house that he and his wife Simone have just bought and renovated. Three beautiful almond-eyed children rush up to greet him. "Gimmee some Co-ak," shouts 5 1/2-year-old Thienan (nicknamed Firecracker) in a disconcerting Southern drawl. "I speak Vietnamese to him and he answers me in English," says Dr. Bui. Thien Nga, who at 3 1/2 is nearly as tall as her brother, and Jo Ann, 2, both born in the U.S., compete for Bui's attention. The household also includes 14-year-old Loan, Simone's child by her first marriage. Bui's son Tuyen, 17, also from a previous marriage, is at an Arkansas boarding school that is run by the Catholic Church and has several black students.

The family's lunches are cooked by Mary, the Bui's black maid. But Simone usually prepares a Vietnamese-style dinner. She buys ingredients in bulk (20-30 lbs. of rice noodles at a time) from specialty stores as far away as Virginia and Baton Rouge, La. Their house is a meeting of East and West. Lacquered tables made by Vietnamese artisans and imported from Paris, a Chinese screen bought in Washington, a cowhide rug, a color TV, thick carpeting and soft upholstered sofas. "You show your Penney's card and take what you want home," chuckles Bui, who has quickly adopted the U.S. system of easy credit. But he adds: "Of course we know we will have to pay some day."

Thieu Bui was better equipped to be assimilated into middle-class American life than most of the 156,000 Vietnamese who are trying to take hold here. He got excellent medical training in Saigon. In 1967-68 he also served as a resident at a West Virginia medical center, where he passed the crucial foreign medical graduates exam.

When Saigon fell, he was a colonel in the Vietnamese medical corps and had no alternative but to flee. His son Tuyen was close to military age and Bui, fearing the boy would be "drafted or used by the Communists," brought him along with his new family. Three other young children stayed behind with their mother, Bui's first wife. Bui's own mother and a brother who teaches school in Saigon also refused to leave. Once in the U.S., Dr. Bui encountered only one major setback. The first time he tried, he failed his national licensing exam. But after taking a three-month review with emphasis on reading English, he passed in December 1977 with the highest grade given that session in the state of Arkansas.

For Simone Bui, educated in Paris, trained in the law, reared in what would be upper-class circumstances in the U.S., a rural town in Arkansas presents frustrations. "In Viet Nam it was a good life," she says. "Even in the middle class you could hire at least two people to help you. Here I'm a bit of everything--cook, barmaid, what you call domestic engineer. And sometimes I get lonesome."

The Buis are well enough off that she can sometimes fly to Arlington, Va., to see her sister, or even, occasionally, to Brussels to visit her three brothers and catch up on her law studies. She has accepted the fact that her career plans must be postponed. "We are lucky because my husband had the training," she says. "It's good for him, but it's not good for me." There are few people in Wilmot for the sophisticated, ambitious and rather restless Simone to share her feelings with. The resentments she candidly voiced about life in Wilmot at first provoked understandable criticism. Now she prudently tries to keep them to herself.

Like many others of their class in Wilmot, the Buis send their school-age children (except for Tuyen) to a private academy 17 miles away, although the integrated public school is equally good academically. The new life in America is perhaps most puzzling for Loan, a pretty eighth grader at Montrose Academy. She is caught not only in the gap between childhood and adulthood, but in the breach between two continents and two races. "In Viet Nam, parents are strict with their children," says her mother. "They're taught to respect their elders. But that doesn't last in America." Discipline sets Loan apart in Wilmot, more than her appearance. Her classmates are free to come and go, and have few responsibilities. Loan is expected to help with the cleaning and cooking and taking care of the smaller children. But the old ways break down. Loan wears cutoff blue jeans and goes barefoot. She has proudly hung up in her bedroom a drawing of Snoopy that she made herself. "I let her do what American children do," says Simone, "but I won't let her go on a date with a boy. I wish she could see that we're not so strange."

Loan's room is decorated with stuffed toys, and pictures of the current crop of teen idols--Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett--are pinned to her bulletin board. But she often feels out of place here, confused by the racial tension in the schools, insecure about her own fledgling identity. So remote does her former life seem to her and her classmates that she is surprised when an American visitor recognizes the name Danang. She is even more astonished at the memories the name provokes. But she is only a teenager, a sheltered one, and she recalls little of the fighting. What she does remember is that "we had a big house in Saigon and there were banana trees in the yard. And the people looked just like me." --Anne Constable

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