Rhodes Scholar gains interest in international affairs
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By COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
In her dreams, Xuan-Trang Ho keeps returning to Vietnam.
She dreamed this the other day:
She’s in England, waiting to catch a bus to London. She stands with friends she met at Oxford University. She’s bound for the airport to fly home to Lincoln. But the bus stop is next to a Vietnamese rice paddy.
My best childhood memory is: Stealing peanuts. We lived on a farm in Vietnam. Our neighbors were wealthy compared to us, and I didn’t like then very much. There was a trench that separated our farmlands, and they grew peanuts on their side. My sister and I would steal peanuts and eat them in the trench. Well, they found out and told my brother, and he whipped us with bamboo sticks.
My biggest childhood fear was: Walking home. I was really scared of ghosts in Vietnam. We lived in a village. Bamboo trees were everywhere. Sometimes, when we walked from our neighbor’s house at night, I’d hear the bamboo creak, and I used to think ghosts were in there.
The food I could eat every day and not get sick is: Pho — Vietnamese noodle soup. It was my staple in England, now it’s my boyfriend’s staple. I taught him how to make it.
If I could invite anyone to a dinner party, I would invite: Regular people, intellectuals, people who can talk about anything, people with various viewpoints. I would be much more into that than having a tailgate party. You walk away with so much more insights than talking with people who think the same way you do.
If I could have a superpower it would be: I think being able to fly would be really cool. I always have dreams where I’m Super Woman, and people are chasing me, but then I always raise my hand and fly up into the sky.
She laughs.
“It was all messed up. It didn’t make any sense.”
Trang’s dreams may have a more international feel than most people’s because she’s been so many places.
To Vietnam, where she was born the youngest of eight.
To the United States, where she immigrated at age 11 with her family.
To England, where she spent the past two years at the prestigious Oxford University as a prestigious Rhodes Scholar and graduated this past July. (“The ceremony was in Latin,” she said. “I had no idea what was going on.”)
To Argentina, where she studied the country’s political structure.
To Germany, the country of her boyfriend, whom she met at Oxford. (He loves her Vietnamese pho noodles.)
To France, to show Paris to her mother, a former teacher in Vietnam who now works long, hot hours at Lincoln’s Paramount Linen & Uniform Rental on South 27th Street.
Since winning the Rhodes, Trang has been to 14 countries.
The Lincoln High and Nebraska Wesleyan graduate returned to Lincoln the other day to hang with family and friends and favorite teachers and to take a big, deep breath before beginning the next phase of her journey — her first real job.
She found her dream job in New York City with the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, as a program officer for the Office of Governance and Multilateral Affairs for UNICEF. It’s a one-year training position under UNICEF’s New and Emerging Talent Initiative.
She hopes to stay with UNICEF for a while and gain experience in international affairs.
UNICEF’s goal is to improve the lives of women and children in developing countries, and that’s her passion, too. She understands, from her own life how poverty works. She knows how farming systems work, how rice grows, how humbly some people must live.
In New York, she will live in a beautiful brownstone apartment in Harlem with some friends. She will have an exciting life in the city.
But she won’t forget where she’s been, she said, and she finally can achieve one of her biggest dreams – to send money home to her parents in Lincoln and to relatives in Vietnam, where a sister needs a new house.
“When you do move up the ladder, academically or work wise, you should always remember those that helped you,” she said. “And be grateful.”
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
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