FROM CHEMIST TO THE COLLAR

This summer like most summers, Khin Vu, a professional chemist in Orange County, can be found after work sitting in the parking lot of a Garden Grove Phantom Fireworks booth. He’s not there because he’s a chemist. He’s there because of his bi-vocational job as the pastor of a local Lutheran Church and his personal passion to raise funds for medical mission work that serves his original home of Vietnam.

Vu first came to the United States when he was just 15 years old. “I vividly remember coming to the U.S. as a teenager in 1975 right after the end of the Vietnam War, Vu recalls. “I was raised in a Christian family in Vietnam which was not commonplace, but not all that unusual, “he continued. “My paternal father was brought to a faith through American missionaries in North Vietnam in the 1940’s long before I was born,” he added.

In 1954, when Vietnam divided into two countries, his maternal grandparents left the North and emigrated to the South seeking a more Western lifestyle. “That was the first time our family ran away from the Communists,” he shared. “In 1975, we ran away again, this time not just from the Communist but from our country”.

Vu credits his uncle (his mother’s brother) a professor of Political Science at the time at Kearney State University in Nebraska, as being the critical connection to government contacts who helped his family relocate. In fact, his parents were able to get work through the U.S. Embassy by way of one of his uncle’s friends, a Senator for Nebraska who personally sponsored the family. “He was very connected and even had the inside scoop when the Watergate Scandal happened and President Nixon resigned,” Vu explains. He recalls remembering being told that with President Nixon’s departure, so departed the terms of the Peace Accord that had until then kept his family relatively safe in Vietnam.

Vu came to his new country already knowing some English he had learned in public school in Vietnam. “In sixth grade you picked a foreign language to learn. While others picked French, I picked English. In high school by grade 11 you can pick alternative languages for further study.”

He and his family settled in Pasadena where he excelled in high school. He soon went on to study chemistry at the University of California in Irvine. It was during these college years that he met his wife through a college church group in Long Beach. Remaining in Southern California, Vu went on to work successfully for nine years as a full-time professional chemist. Although raised in a Christian home, it wasn’t until Vu had an extremely personal crisis in his own life that he felt called to also turned to ministry.

A young father, his first daughter was born with asphyxiation. Medical professionals explained to him that she literally was unable to exit the birth canal soon enough and had gone into fetal distress. An emergency C-section was performed but by the time doctors pulled her out she had suffocated on her own amniotic fluid. Distress had triggered the baby to take her first breath inside the womb.

“It was very disheartening for my wife and me. I remember