From the 3rd floor
of the Webb City Public Library
Webb City Area Genealogical Society
What’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this? That thought often crossed Teyet “Snow” Houang Speer’s mind the first few years after she came to the United States. She was the young bride of an American ex-GI in 1971 when she left the comfort of the family nest near Saigon, South Vietnam, to live in a country so different that it frightened her.
But she never forgot her family. Eventually she sponsored 19 relatives as they too came to live in the land of freedom.
Fifteen years after her unsettling arrival, Snow is happy. She’s an American citizen. Her entire family is in the U.S. now, most of them in Jasper County. And late last year she scratched a five-year itch by opening her own oriental restaurant, Webb City’s first in the new Madison Square Shopping Center.
She admits that she’s come a long way from that awed young woman who arrived in her new country in October 1971.
“When I got off the plane in San Francisco, I thought, ‘Oh, God, where am I?’” she says. “You see nothing but lights and cars.”
She and her husband, Michael Speer, first moved to Lacey, Wash., where he owned a service station. Snow, an outgoing and strikingly attractive woman, had difficulty adapting to a life in which the close family ties she had enjoyed in Vietnam suddenly were snapped.
“When you first come here, you’re so backward,” she says. “If I’d known what I know now 15 years ago, my life probably would be a lot different.
“I mostly stayed in the kitchen. You don’t open up like you do now.”
At times she had second thoughts about trekking halfway across the world and leaving her family behind.
“I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I come here, I just stay home. Everybody goes to work.
“You can’t cope. You’re just alone here.”
Adding to her problem was not knowing how to speak English very well. She took two years of high school English but learned the language mostly on her own.
In 1973, shortly after the first of her four children was born, Snow and baby Becky flew back to Vietnam to visit her family. She had trouble finding milk for the baby. They came back early when Becky became gravely ill due to that change in climate.
“I thought I’d lost her,” Snow says.
She and Michael, a 1966 Webb City High School graduate, moved to Florida for about a year and then back to Washington before settling down in Webb City in 1974. Snow applied for a job at Elder’s Manufacturing Co. but didn’t think she would hear from them.
“I thought, well, who’s gonna hire me?” But the shirt manufacturer called her, and she spent about eight years working there off and on.
In 1975, South Vietnam fell to the Communists. Snow’s youngest sister, Nhung, then 21, escaped – barely.
“The last plane that left there, she got on it,” Snow says. “I felt so happy, but then still yet, I said, ‘Why did she leave by herself?’
“But she’s so stubborn, she wanted to stay in Guam and wait until the last plane left Vietnam to be sure my mom and dad got out.” Nhung waited in Guam for three months, but her parents never showed.
Snow called Nhung several times to tell her to come to Fort Chaffee, Ark. “I say, ‘If after two months they’re not coming, they’re not coming.’ But she still stayed three months.”
Nhung finally came to Fort Chaffee, and Snow sponsored her out after just one day of processing. Today, Nhung lives in rural Joplin and works for FAG Bearing; her husband Binh Nguyen works at International Multifoods in Webb City. They met in a refugee camp.
In 1978, Snow took her oath of American citizenship. Two years later, she finally got the rest of her family out of Vietnam.
About that time, the Communist government began allowing some people to leave. In February 1980, Snow’s mother, father and widowed sister, Be Hoang, and her six children came to the U.S. Snow sponsored them and another nine the next February when her sister and brother-in-law, Lang Hoang and Dinh Nguyen, and their seven children came to America.
They had to sell all their possessions to the government before they could leave. Her parents received four ounces of gold for their two-story house and then had to pay eight ounces to process all the paperwork required at each level of government – local, city, state and national.
“Every time you have to pay,” she says. It reminded her how much it cost just to get her marriage license recorded in 1971.
The family had run what she calls a “stand” near the Tan Son NHut Air Base just outside peaceful Saigon. The war was far away except during the 1968 Tet Offensive when a few rockets fell in the area.
The sisters sold food and mixed drinks to soldiers in training, doing a good business until the GIs began pulling out in 1969. Snow and Michael met at the stand.
Even after their wedding, , they couldn’t ride together in a taxi anywhere. If a policeman caught a Vietnamese woman with an American, even though they might have a valid marriage license, she would have to pay the officer a bribe to let her go free.
A Vietnamese bride does not take her husband’s surname. Snow says Michael had trouble at first convincing her to change her last name to his.
In October 1980, Snow hired on at Montgomery Ward in the Northpark Mall as part-time Christmas help. After Christmas, the store decided to keep her on in the men’s department, and she stayed until Oct. 12 of last year.
That’s when she opened her family operation known as Snow’s Oriental Restaurant.
She had been wanting to start up a small restaurant ever since her large family began moving to Webb City. Finally, her husband said, “Go for it! Go for it!, telling her she should have gone into the restaurant business five years earlier. Some of her best customers are her former manager and coworkers from Montgomery Ward and customers who miss seeing her at the store.
“They keep me in good business,” she says.
She serves one Vietnamese dish called Cha Gio. It consists of ground pork, white crab meat and rice noodles rolled in rice paper. The other meals are Chinese.
Most of the family members help out in the restaurant. Everyone from the owner to the dishwasher,” Snow likes to say, takes turns cooking and serving and doing whatever else needs to be done.
Although Lang and Dinh live in California now, Snow feels fortunate to have the rest of her family here, including her parents, Nhac Hoang and Chin Nguyen. She remembers how frustrating it was after the Communists took over and she and her loved ones were separated by miles of land and ocean.
Whenever she wanted to send family pictures back to her parents, she would cut Michael out of the picture. It was either that or worry that someone might harm her family because she had committed the ultimate sin, marrying an American. But now that they are all safe at home in the U.S., Snow sees no reason to ever to return to Vietnam.
“There’s nothing like freedom,” she says.
Freedom and a good oriental meal, that is.
Many of Snow’s family have since moved to California for better opportunities. Though her sister and brother-in-law, Nhung and Binh Nguyen, have stayed.