Meet Your Neighbor
Thoai Tran
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

Date of birth: March 28, 1965
Hobbies: Playing guitar,
family scalloping, clamming,
soccer, being with family
Likes best about Nantucket:
The quiet wintertime
Likes least about Nantucket:
The craziness of summer
Favorite TV show: Seinfeld
Meet Thoai Tran, whose friendly nod and wave are cheering to those he passes each week on his United Parcel Service delivery route. Tran has many reasons to be happy - he has a loving wife, Cygie, daughter Lili, 17, and son Christopher, nine. They have a cozy, long-term rental that makes the family feel secure, Tran has a good, steady job and he has the satisfaction of knowing that he, his mother, brothers and sister have all found new lives in America since fleeing Vietnam 28 years ago.

Tran was born in the town of Rachgia in South Vietnam where he was raised with seven siblings. He said that though his family could have left Vietnam when the war ended in 1975, his father did not want to go so they stayed together. His father bought a duck farm after the war where Tran helped raise the birds. But in 1979 all the family except his father, who is still alive and in touch, determined to escape from living under Communist rule. When that happened they became separated and Tran fled as one of the "boat people" to Indonesia where he spent a little more than a year in a refugee camp.

"It was tough," he said. "It was, 'What do I have to do to survive?'We depended on the Red Cross and United Way who brought food to us."

Meanwhile, a couple of Tran's brothers had made it to the United States where they were taken in by sponsors. In June 1980, at the young age of 15, Tran traveled alone across continents to join them in Silver Spring, Md.

"It was a big move," he recalled, adding that in time his mother and a sister and another brother were all reunited there.

"I don't know how it happened but thank God for that," he said. "Not many have the opportunity to do that."

Because Tran did not speak English but wanted to build his life in this country he went to school to learn the language. In 1985 he left Maryland for New Jersey where he held various jobs for a year before moving to Worcester, Mass. In 1987 he enrolled at the Wentworth Institute to study architecture. Though that was a career he wanted to pursue, he could not afford to complete his education and he decided to find employment in Boston. That was where he met his wife who had lived on Nantucket in the 1970s but left for a few years to study photography.

"We moved to Nantucket in 1990. She brought me here - we came down for one weekend and I fell in love with this place and I said, 'Can we move here?' When Lili was born we moved down here and that was it."

Tran's first work on the island was in carpentry with Steve Lindsay. Later, he landscaped, painted houses and tried other trades until he learned in 1992 that UPS was in need of a delivery driver. He applied and immediately got the job, which he has kept ever since and for years has had the Madaket route.

"I enjoy my work," he said. "I like my customers more than my job, I guess. I have a lot of nice customers. I'm very happy right now. I'm grateful to be here in this country, but I would like to go back to Vietnam someday and take my kids with me to show them

where I was born and raised." I