One Family’s Drive Leads To Six Degrees Of Success Couple From Vietnam Has Helped 6 Children Graduate From College

More than 20 years after Thuc Dinh escaped from Saigon just ahead of the communists, he and his wife are celebrating an American success story.

The Dinhs worked at menial jobs and saved and sacrificed to put all six of their children through the University of Virginia. The last of them, 21-year-old Thuy Dinh, will pick up his degree on Sunday.

Six grads in one family is just one shy of the record for sibling graduates at the school founded by Thomas Jefferson.

The children should get all the credit, Thuc Dinh said. “We just tried very hard to help them.”

The drive from Springfield in suburban Washington to the university in Charlottesville is one the youngest knows well. Thuy’s been doing it since he was 5 years old and his oldest sister, 34-year-old Thuy Tu Bich, decided to attend the university.

When the next child, David, picked the same university, the younger brothers and sisters knew where they were going to college. Thomas, now 26, didn’t even bother applying to any other schools.

“By that time I pretty much had my mind made up,” said Thomas, who graduated in 1993 and is now an economic analyst with a Washington law firm.

Row upon row, thousands of empty chairs are lined up in front of the university rotunda, waiting for this weekend’s graduates. Surveying the lush green lawns and the buildings planned by Thomas Jefferson almost two centuries ago, Thuy talked about how his parents always expected their children to go to the state university.

“In high school that was my biggest thing - to get to college. Whenever I went out I had the thought in the back of my head, ‘Should I be studying?”’

For a family that fled the ruins of collapsing Vietnam 21 years ago and arrived in America with nothing, education became the key to success.

Thuc Dinh had been a journalist in Vietnam. In America, he began working as a parking lot attendant. His wife, Thanh, a literature teacher in Vietnam, first stayed home with the children and then worked in a cafeteria.

After a few years they moved up - he to a job at Xerox as a stock handler, she to a job in a small computer company. For 13 years they worked opposite shifts so that one parent would be home with the children.

“We miss the old country but we feel we are lucky to come here for the good futures of our children,” said Thuc Dinh.

The whole family tried hard, working and saving the money for college. Tuition alone for all the children came to more than $62,000. The children are still paying off their student loans.

“Thinking back, I find it hard to believe that they were able to stick to it for so long, despite all the hardships,” Thuy wrote about his parents in a letter to university President John T. Casteen III.

“They threw away all their dreams and accomplishments by leaving their homeland in 1975, and have instead given us the love and support to allow us to achieve our dreams.”