Hùynh Family
Be Free: How Skiing Became One Family’s Unlikely American Dream
LEFT: Krystin Norman (age 4) and her older brother Ian (age 6) cheesing for the camera in the spring of 1993 at Heavenly Ski Resort, CA, on a family vacation. Two years later, their parents moved the whole family to the top of Keller Road across the street from Heavenly. Photo: Norman Family Archives
RIGHT: Sasha Dingle (age 6) learning to ski at Smuggler’s Notch, VT. In elementary school she would get posters signed at the fall ski-film premiere in Burlington, hang them all over her bedroom walls and tell her parents she wanted to be a big mountain skier when she grew up. Photo: Dingle Family Archives
BOTTOM: The Dingles visit the Normans in the winter of 2001 for a Christmas ski vacation. Cúc Hùynh (top left) and Liên Hùynh-Norman (top middle/right) would dress in matching Christmas sweaters to ski for the holiday, while Steve (top left/middle) and Pete (top right) showed off the latest ski styles of their respective coasts. All of the kids wore their ski-racing (Adrian and Sasha, bottom left) or mogul-skiing (Ian and Krystin, bottom right) uniforms. Photo: Norman Family Archives
The U.S. Air Force cargo plane from Saigon was packed with row after row of refugees. It was April 1975 and the South Vietnamese capital was about to fall to the North Vietnamese Army, largely ending the Vietnam War. On the plane, sisters Cúc Kim Hùynh, then 16, and Liên Kim Hùynh, then 18, their parents and four more siblings were fleeing for fear of persecution, leaving behind most of their extended family and the only home they’d ever known. Cúc clutched a family photo album, her only personal possession.
“We were overwhelmed with sadness and the thought of having no country,” Liên says. “This feeling was indescribable; it was like losing a family member.”
Upon arriving in the United States, the Hùynhs spent three months in tents at a makeshift refugee camp at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. The family moved to Inglewood, in southwestern Los Angeles, where they learned English and got whatever jobs they could—taxi driver, busboy, typist. Cúc and Liên finished school—Cúc went on to study engineering, while Liên learned computer programming.
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