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Connecticut News
ONE LAO COMMUNITY LIVES IN A WORLD APART
MARK S. DEL VECCHIO; Courant Staff Writer
THE HARTFORD COURANT

One Sunday evening in 1979, Daniel and Carolyn O'Leary sat watching a television news report about the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese packed into United Nations refugee camps in Thailand.

The eyes of malnourished children, waiting to escape from war and to America, caught at their hearts.

The O'Learys reached across the world to help one child; they wound up sponsoring the move of an entire Lao family to rural eastern Connecticut.

Then they sponsored another. That family helped a third. The third brought a fourth.


And so on for 14 years.

The legacy of the O'Learys' decision can be seen in the pocket of Lao families who, unlike most of their compatriots who gravitated to urban areas, make their homes in Brooklyn and Killingly.

At least 115 Lao live in the town of Brooklyn; they're the only Asian-Americans in a town of 6,681 and represent nearly 2 percent of its population. Together with the 69 who live in Killingly, they form the largest community of Asian-Americans living outside the state's cities.

Of the seed he planted, Daniel O'Leary said: "I just felt it was the right thing to do.

"When there's people in the ocean drowning and you're in a lifeboat, when do you stop pulling them out? You don't. They just keep coming."

The line from the Phommascanh family -- the first sponsored by the O'Learys with the help of Catholic Charities, to the most recent one, who arrived just seven months ago -- zigzags across time and family.

Naly Sacksith came to Brooklyn in 1987, after three years in Illinois. She had heard that the pay at a mushroom farm in North Franklin, where most of the Lao work, was better than what she was making.

"We got a relative, a cousin, and the cousin bring cousin and more and more and more, and we all stay here together," she said.

"It made me feel better, my friends, my cousins. Like I stay in the middle, then I was on the end," said Sacksith, who lives with her ex-husband, Chanthavong, and two daughters, Eddy, 16, and Terry, 13.

Along with many of the town's Lao residents, they inhabit an apartment complex that once housed French-Canadian mill workers and was known as Quebec Square. About two blocks from Route 6, the major artery through the quiet greenbelt of eastern Connecticut, it is an area locals refer to as "Lao Village," a few with affection, many with derision.

The three brick buildings, which sit along Elm Street, are a stark and barren splotch of urban life in a country town, a place apart from the mainstream of American life.

"We live mostly like a family, like cousins. When some have problems, they come to talk. Mostly we live like a small group together. We try to help each other," said Sopha Somviengxay, 48, a leader of a Lao association that helps new families resettle.

Somviengxay, a former soldier, was the ninth in the chain of sponsorship begun by the O'Learys. He came in 1981 with his wife, two sons, two daughters and two nieces. His family has since sponsored six other families -- pledging and giving support so other relatives, friends or war buddies can get visas and come.

The community is becoming so established that its origins already are passing from memory. Many residents of the village do not know that before Daniel and Carolyn O'Leary brought the Phommascanh family, there were no Lao in Killingly or Brooklyn.

The O'Learys' role as founders of the Lao community completes a circle.

Daniel O'Leary remembers how his mother was fascinated by books she'd read by Dr. Tom Dooley, an American doctor who established remote jungle hospitals in Laos in the 1950s with the proceeds from two best-selling books. She never forgot the place the Laotians -- both the majority Lao and the minority Hmong peoples -- had in Dooley's heart.

O'Leary's mother died in March 1979; the first refugee family sponsored by the O'Learys came in September. What the O'Learys didn't know until the family arrived was that they were of the Lao people.

"I always thought she'd really be smiling, be happy with what was happening," Daniel O'Leary said of his mother.

O'Leary, who owned a flower shop on Danielson's Main Street and now is a manufacturer's representative, tried to prepare his neighbors for the refugees' arrival. He spoke at schools about Southeast Asian culture, got community groups involved in their settlement, went to the local newspaper with information.

"I didn't want to be run out of town," he said. "I made it very clear to these people [that they] couldn't take food stamps, go on welfare, [that they] had to work."

But some residents, whether out of racism or fear that the Lao would take away jobs, were not so open to the newcomers. O'Leary said he has received angry letters and obscene phone calls.

"There's still people who hate me to this day, I hear," he said.

And some townspeople are simply unaware, or indifferent to, the Asian element that has been added to their community -- a waitress and a bartender at a pizza place less than a quarter-mile from the complex couldn't say where the Lao lived.

"Some people they didn't get close to us, some people pick on us, some make friends on us," is the way Somviengxay summed things up.

Inside their neighborhood, many of the immigrants acknowledged they have little contact with their host country.

"Sometimes we go to work, we come home, sleep, and we don't know what Americans do everyday," said Lakhone Phanhtharath, Sacksith's sister, who lives with her two daughters along Elm Street.

Outside their apartment, Phanhtharath's boyfriend, Khamphanh Insixiengmay, stood wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers, preparing to go to a soccer game at a town recreation field.

Soccer is a favorite sport among the Laotians. They have two teams -- Lao A and Lao B. They play only against one another.

"We hope to play the Puerto Ricans. They have a team," Insixiengmay said.

Somsack Soraseun, 43, a former soldier who now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three stepchildren, said he found it easy to imagine he never left home.

"I feel like I stayed at Laos," he said through his son. "All the people here speak the same language. There is no big difference."

Like many Lao men his age, Soraseun fought the Vietnamese and fled the country after the 1975 takeover by the communist Pathet Lao, which was supported by North Vietnam. He came to Brooklyn to join his two brothers.

One recent afternoon, his 8-year-old stepdaughter, Soupany, ran into the living room and sat on the couch next to him; he paused in his tale of fighting in the jungles of his homeland and gently fixed her tiny sandal.

Soupany ran out and joined the other Lao children, who give life to the street's daytime. They laughed and teased in English with a smattering of Lao as they ran on the asphalt road and gravel courtyard that is their playground.

In the courtyard, some residents gathered to admire a new, electric-blue sports car that stood not far from a junked pickup truck, its windows smashed, tires flat. The car's proud owner, Koumany Sylakone, coolly accepted compliments and envy with the pride of having succeeded in the neighborhood. Some Lao families have moved out, but return regularly to visit.

In the buildings, doors open and close, open and close, then are finally left open, in seeming surrender to the constant visits by children and adults.

Behind one apartment block is a large fenced garden that yields the green, leafy vegetables that go so well with sticky rice, the staple of the Lao diet. Behind another, shirts and colorful blankets dangle from a clothesline.

Down the street that runs between the buildings -- and about 10 feet from their front doors -- cars buzz by constantly, most of them older models, slightly beaten up and headed for the next block, a neighborhood equally spare but populated mostly by whites.

The Franklin Mushroom Farm is as diverse as the Lao

neighborhood is homogenous.

At home, nearly everyone and everything is Lao; at work, 60 Lao toil in a United Nations force of 200 pickers, mostly from Mexico, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Cape Verde Islands. There are a few Filipinos, Jamaicans, Santo Domingans, Indians and Colombians; four Poles, one Hmong woman and a Chinese man who recently lost his dishwashing job at an Uncasville restaurant.

The 340,000-square-foot indoor farm produces 27 million pounds of mushrooms a year.

Naly Sacksith is a fast picker, at times hitting a pace of 73 pounds of mushrooms an hour, sometimes for as long as 13 hours a day, five days a week. She may make a little more than most pickers, who on average earn $25,000 to $30,000 annually.

She and the other pickers rise early, hitting Route 6 at 6:30 a.m. to make it to the farm by 7:30. Their workday varies with the crop and buyers' demands for it; they get home anytime between 6 and 9 p.m.

In teams that are mixes of experience, age and ethnicity, Franklin's pickers scramble up and down the 4-by-6-foot wooden boxes of sterilized compost and peat moss that yield up to 90,000 pounds of mushrooms daily. Wielding small knives, they twist the easily bruised white fungus, pull it out, slice off the stem and drop it in a plastic basket while making a decision on size and condition.

"It's hard work, but I like it," Sacksith said.

The vast differences among the troop of 200 pickers don't seem to intrude upon the camaraderie apparent among the mushroom stacks and in the lunchroom. In broken English, jokes are tossed across the beds of mushrooms between Hispanics and Lao. At one lunch, a Mexican woman sat with a group of Lao to share a meal of sticky rice and some Elm Street-grown Laotian greens.

The company periodically holds "international week," during which each ethnic group shares its native foods, music, arts and crafts and clothing with people from a dozen other countries.

"I think there's a nice appreciation of each other," personnel manager Nancy Smith said. "The newness is worn off of dealing with another culture other than their own. They see each other as humans."

Though the pay at the farm is good, and their community is comforting, there are some Lao who want to venture out of the confines of the two worlds.

After six years working at the mushroom farm, Naly Sacksith earned enough seniority to change her schedule so she could take English courses on Mondays and Tuesdays.

"I don't know how to read, I don't know how to write. I can read a little, I can write a little, but it's not enough, and maybe someday I get another job," she said.

Among students who are Japanese, Albanian, Portuguese, Greek, Haitian, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Chinese, Sacksith was one of two Lao people awarded a certificate of successful completion after two semesters in an English as a Second Language program in Danielson.

"The Laotians who come to class are the ones that are really trying. They've been through horrors you and I can't imagine," said Hope Gilbert, Sacksith's English teacher two days a week.

While many of the younger Lao are more plugged into American culture and life in their adopted hometown, most of the adults remain in a world apart, speaking Lao, eating Laotian food, reading

Lao newspapers and watching movies dubbed in Lao. Many do not speak English well, leaving their children to do much of their communicating for them.

For the children, who are absorbing not only the English language but American culture and values as well, the lifestyle can be difficult.

"In Laos, life was good. Here, it's like a jail," said Phouphiang Soraseun, 15, gesturing at the parking lot of the apartment complex. He came to Brooklyn in 1988 with his father, Somsack, his mother, Bountieng, and his brother and sister; he baby-sits while his parents work.

Like any teen, Phouphiang looks forward to getting his driver's license and buying a car.

"Sometimes I want to stay here for the family," he said, "but then when you get outside, you want to speak English, because English is the future.


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