Posted on 07/13/2006 8:20:37 PM PDT by Dysart
HALTOM CITY -- Late last month, Quang Nguyen received word that she was being evicted from her government-subsidized apartment.
She had been accused of hitting a maintenance man in the head as he was bent over working on a water pipe.
But Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant who doesn't speak English, says it never happened.
She is 101 years old.
“I did not do that,” Nguyen said Thursday morning, through an interpreter. “I did not touch him. I did not do anything to him.”
Sitting in a kitchen chair inside her tiny apartment, Nguyen said she is afraid of what might happen to her. She said she has no place to go if the Haltom City Housing Authority throws her out.
“I’m old already,” she said. “Where am I going to stay?”
For now at least, Nguyen will be staying put.
After being contacted by the Star-Telegram on Thursday, the Haltom City Housing Authority said it is no longer going to evict Nguyen.
“We’re going to dismiss [the eviction suit] right now,” said Larry Wilshire, the attorney representing the housing authority. “Bottom line, we felt like we wanted to do the right thing and give her another chance.”
Interpreter Tom Ha, vice chairman of the Vietnamese American Community of Tarrant County, contacted Nguyen and her daughter Thursday afternoon to deliver the good news.
“They were so excited,” Ha said. “They said it was like lifting a thousand pounds off of their shoulders. They asked me five times, ‘Are you sure, Tom?’ It is a miracle to them. They couldn’t believe it.”
Born in Vietnam in 1905, Nguyen came to the United States, along with her daughter and grandchildren, as a refugee sometime in the late 1980s.
She isn’t sure when she moved into the government-subsidized apartments in the 2700 block of Moneda Circle, where she pays $171 a month in rent, but she believes it was about four years ago.
Nguyen, who has arthritis and can barely see through her outdated glasses, can’t get around without the help of a cane, walker or wheelchair. She spends much of her time lying in a little bed pushed against a wall in the kitchen.
Her daughter helps care for her, along with a home health care aide.
Nguyen was hoping to live in her little Haltom City home until she died.
And then, on June 23, she received an eviction notice:
At approximately 10:00 this morning you openly hit the maintenance man in the head as he was bent over working on a water pipe. Striking a housing authority employee is grounds for immediate lease termination.
Nguyen and her 63-year-old daughter, Kim Nhung Nguyen, who lives in the same housing addition, said they were shocked.
Nguyen denies doing anything wrong.
The woman said she was inside her home the morning of June 23 when she noticed that the water had been turned off. She said she looked out the kitchen window and saw a man in the back yard, apparently working to repair the problem.
Nguyen said she used her walker and briefly stepped outside to see what was going on. She claimed she never even spoke to the worker, much less assaulted him.
But in his written report to the housing authority — which was provided to the Star-Telegram by attorney Wilshire — the maintenance worker said he was repairing a broken pipe when “out of nowhere” he felt a hard slap to the back of his head.
“When I looked up, it was Mrs. Nguyen ... yelling and screaming,” the worker wrote in the statement. “I was furious because it shocked me because it was so unexpected. I told her not to hit me, but of course she didn’t understand me.”
The worker wrote that Nguyen then tried to hit him again.
“I grabbed her wrists as she attempted to hit and told her no!” the statement said. “She then left and started yelling [at a neighbor] who lives next door. ... I guess Mrs. Nguyen was mad because her water was shut off.”
Nguyen was ordered to appear in court Monday morning for an eviction hearing. According to the notice, Nguyen violated the rule that requires residents to “refrain from acting or speaking in an abusive manner towards neighbors and management staff.”
During the interview at her home Thursday morning, Nguyen, crying at times, said she wasn’t even sure she was well enough to make a court appearance.
“I’m afraid that I won’t be able to make it,” Nguyen said. “I won’t be able to walk. I cannot walk. How can I go to court?”
Nguyen repeated that all she wants to do is stay in her little Haltom City apartment.
“I just want to live here,” she said. “That is all I want.”
At least for now, the woman has gotten her wish.
You called them refugees.
Didn't you get the memo?
The r word is a very bad word. Very un-pc.
They are e-vac-u-ees.
I was expelled from PC Camp for behavior which cannot be repeated here...
I didn't see anything in there about them not being citizens, or anything about them never working. Where are you getting your information from?
.....LOL>...knowing those little old ladies....she probably did whack him a good one......haha......
"Chili, if we move
Vietnamese,
they are evacuees. If they come to us to be
evacuated, they are refugees."
I said "probably not citizens" (the elder spoke no English) and the elder was about 80 when she came. Not a real strech to read the indicators.
So the oldest member of the family was old when they arrived here. What's your point?
I was wondering how she qualified for public housing.
Probably the same way anyone else qualifies.
I am amazed at some of the comments on this thread.
Smart ass remarks about a 101 year old woman who had faced losing her home over what sounds like BS is not something to let your prejudices out on.
I'm glad she's here in the US and damn glad she can keep her apartment.
Hear, hear!
That was in the olden days.
Now 'refugee' is a pejorative term.
Applied correctly it is still a pejorative term.
Let's not forget the man in DC who lost his job because he used the word niggardly.
They were allies and we bugged out on them. The Vietnamese, like the Cubans, are kind of a special case, and like the Cubans they are on our side. They are not leftists. They mostly do not like leftists and they vote Republican, that is pro America. Many of the ones that wound up in public housing are there due to the very aggressive recruiting of the various welfare agencies. I watched that here in the eighties. I heard welfare folks tell newly arrived Viets that if they did not sign up for all the welfare packages, housing, food stamps, medicaid, ALL of them, they would be deported. The first Viets here were averse to anything from government because their experiences of government, two kinds of government, were mostly bad and the Catholics had recourse to the Diocese whose people told them what the welfare folks could not really do. The Catholics stayed mostly out of the welfare trap. The less educated pagans, with no information recourse, got trapped. For a long time the lesson they learned was that in America you do all your business "under the table" but most realized after a few years of that that there is a ceiling on that sort of entrepreneurism and they mostly extricated themselves from the welfare trap and are out making businesses and earning legitimate money for their 401-ks.
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