A-B Tech Student Tells of Life Filled With Struggle, Determination, and Hope
A-B Tech student Ashley McRowan has come a long way, both physically and emotionally, from the Thai refugee camp where she spent many years.
"Education is a privilege."
So says A-B Tech student Ashley McRowan, an attractive, petite 35-year-old, who in a crisply tailored navy suit looks like a typical wife and mother on her way to the office. No one would guess she spent many of her formative years living in a refugee camp in Thailand.
"People don't believe me when I say I am a refugee," she says. "I've come so far. I'm a part of the mainstream now."
Hers is a story of The American Dream, a dream that started 29 years ago and more than 8,000 miles away.
In 1974, Ashley, the fifth of six children, was living with her family in quiet middle-class comfort in Vientiane, Laos. Her father was an engineer for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and her mother owned a successful beauty salon. Their lives were shattered when in one month her father was killed in a fuel tank explosion during a routine inspection, and Laos fell to Communist power after the U.S. pulled out of Saigon. Ashley was six years old.
Because of her father's ties with the United States, the Communists targeted the family for persecution. Her oldest brother was sent to a concentration camp to be "re-educated" while her mother arranged for the remainder of her siblings to be separated and smuggled out of Laos to live with various relatives in Thailand. It would be seven years before she was reunited with her family.
Sent to live with her grandfather in a small village in Thailand, Ashley was able to attend school and live in relative comfort and safety. But she missed her mother and siblings, and six years after leaving Laos, she was elated to learn of her mother's defection to a Thai refugee camp in 1981.
When Ashley went to meet her family in the Napo refugee camp, she was stunned to see the area surrounded by two rows of barbed wire with an armed watchtower in the center. The camp, run by the Thai government, had deplorable living conditions. "I felt like we had done something wrong. We were treated like criminals."
For four years she and her family of 10 cooked, ate, and slept in a 10-by-10 foot room, sleeping on a concrete floor, with only the most basic necessities of life. Books were not considered a necessity. Education was not considered a necessity. Ashley, now a teenager, spent her time trying to educate herself and helping others as much as possible by distributing food, clothes and blankets donated by relief agencies. She dreamed of being relocated to America. "You've got to have hope, all we had was hope - otherwise you go insane. Coming to the U.S. was the ultimate. Here you have freedom, you can have an education and raise your family with dignity."
In 1984, their hopes were realized when an American official agreed to give them an interview. Ashley recalls going into the office and initially being turned down for immigration. The official did not believe their lives were in danger and instead thought they were fleeing for economic reasons. "Color drained from my mother's face, tears started to well up in her eyes," Ashley says. "Then she took off the sole of her shoe, and tumbling out.... was my father's USAID identification card." Her mother had been hiding it from the Communists in the sole of her shoe for six years, just waiting for the opportunity to prove their connection to the U.S. Within a year, they were on a plane to San Francisco.
Ashley was 16 years old and did not speak English except to say "thank you" and "I'm hungry." She was placed in the 10th grade in a small community of about 10,000 in Faith, NC, where her oldest brother, sponsored by a local church, had been living for three years. Finally, the entire family was together, but in a strange land with unfamiliar surroundings. "I got lost in a Roses parking lot," Ashley recalls with a laugh. "I was so confused, everything was so big."
Going to school with no translator was a challenge Ashley met with determination and a strong will to learn. She taught herself English and passed her classes by memorizing the shapes of the words she knew were important in her textbooks. Later, she would look for those shapes again on her tests, and mark them as the answers. "I read, but I didn't understand what I was reading. I would just memorize how to spell a word."
Before graduating, Ashley married and moved to the state of Washington, where she started a family. She decided to get her GED and passed on her first try. When her husband was transferred to Mission-St. Joseph's Hospital, she decided it was time to take her education even further, and enrolled at A-B Tech. She will complete an associate in science degree in December. She has maintained a 4.0 average and is the vice president of the academic honor society PTK. She is one of two students at A-B Tech nominated to the All-USA College Academic Team. She volunteers at the Help desk at Mission-St. Joseph's and is a board member of the Laos-American Community, Inc., a non-profit agency that helps Laotians assimilate in America.
It has been a long, difficult journey to this café on a college campus where she sits and tells her story. But looking at this woman, who was born with the name Oulayvanh Keovilay, but adopted the name McRowan in homage to the first U.S. county she lived in, one can see the light of intelligence and determination in her eyes. She is dedicated to taking her experience and using it as a catalyst to help others. After graduation, she will continue schooling and eventually get her medical degree. She plans to work for the World Health Organization to give back what others have given her.
"A candle can illuminate a whole room," Ashley says, "and similarly, an altruistic act can banish darkness from humanity."
