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Vietnamese immigrants’ son to become 3rd doctor in family

Saturday, May 22, 2010

May 22, 2010

SIU student’s parents struggled after escaping Communist country

Quoc Pham gets a hug from his mother, Ngoi Van, as family, including sister Dr. Sapa Pham, and brother-in-law John Doan arrive in Springfield for Quoc Pham's graduation from SIU's medical school on Friday.

A hail of bullets killed Quoc Pham’s aunt and injured one of his sisters when his family got onto a boat in southern Vietnam to flee the Southeast Asian country in 1979.

But the chaos following the Communist takeover at the end of the Vietnam War, and the struggles with language, finances and health faced by Pham’s parents after they immigrated to the United States, failed to stop the working