Court clerk shares enthusiasm for America

Phu Le White is the person you're most likely see if you're called to be on a jury at Palmer Superior or District courts. She's also a familiar face helping people at the counter as they navigate their ways around court forms, documents or marriage licenses.

"Make sure you buy two presents for your wife, not one," White is known for saying in friendly asides to engaged couples. Speaking in a slight Vietnamese accent, she adds, "and make sure you never forget an anniversary."

Most of all, prospective jurors might hear her speak praise for America's judicial system. "Perhaps this is our most highest privilege: to have a jury trial -- not many countries have that," she said. "So few people have a say about what happens."

White knows whereof she speaks. She was born and raised in Vietnam during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. At the tail end of the Vietnamese war in April 1975, just as the communist regime moved toward Saigon to claim it, she was working at Codoc Hospital as a lab technician.

At barely 21, life for her so far had included being raised in a strict Catholic environment, taught by nuns, raised by devout parents.

"We were told to just get a college degree, and don't date," she said.

On that fateful April day hospital administrators prepared for the communist Vietnamese army moving in and destroying documents and releasing less critical patients.

"There was so much chaos in the streets, people running and being pushed by the mass of people pushing you."

White was told by her hospital boss to get on a helicopter preparing to take out five nurses and two lab techs. She wanted to say goodbye to her parents and sisters, but there was no time.

"For some reason, at the last minute I picked up a dictionary -- English/Vietnamese -- and put it down my shirt," she recalled.

In those final minutes before leaving her country, she grabbed an airport janitor and handed him the contents of her pockets, placing them in a cup. On the outside of the paper cup she scrawled a hasty message she told the man to get to her parents: "I have to go. No time to say goodbye."

The helicopter carried White and the others to a refuge camp in the Philippines, then they were moved to another camp in Guam. There, American Red Cross workers helped relocate people from the camps.

"I had the name of my (Catholic) godfather who lived in America. I knew so little about him -- that his name is Joe Blair and so little else." Yet the Red Cross was able to locate Blair -- in Chugiak, and before the year was out, that is where she was sent after a stopover at California's Camp Pendleton.

The Blairs sponsored White's journey to America and housed her when she arrived. "Talk about feeling lost," White remembers now.

Her first job was at Leroy's Pancake House in Anchorage. She didn't speak English, and had not finished her college degree, so she was a bus girl.

Soon she was taking English courses at the Adult Basic Ed Center on Northern Lights, then at the University of Alaska, where she met her husband, Roy White.

"It is really true that America gives you a second chance. I really love this country for giving me more than I can ever pay it back -- a very real second chance."

White's parents and sisters had a much more difficult time. The hospital janitor was able to get through the mobs and find the family to give them the message scrawled on a cup. Later White contacted them to let them know her location. Yet it would take from 1975 to 1991 to wade through all the red tape to get them out of Vietnam. U.S. Sens. Ted Stevens and Frank Murkowski helped Phu Le and Roy White until finally they were able to bring the family to America.

From 1980 on, White found permanent employment as a court clerk in outlaying areas: Healy, Nenana, Glennallen, Barrow and finally, Anchorage and Palmer.

"At the small courts you do everything, filling many roles," White said. She was responsible for the front counter and for serving as clerk for each presiding magistrate. Sometimes the two tasks over-lapped.

"I set out a bell for people to ding when I was on the bench. Then tourists coming through who needed to pay their traffic fines could let me know they were out there. I would go collect their fines, put the money in a safe and go back to the bench."

In the past few years, White said she has known the happiness of seeing her five sisters accepted in America, now living in California and Colorado. Her own parents' stay in American was short-lived. They died two years after arriving here, in 1997, the same year White lost her husband of 22 years to cancer.

"I lost all three of them within months of each other," White says.

Now she has a loyal involvement not only with the Red Cross, which came to her aide so many years ago, but also to Hospice of Mat-Su and the American Cancer Society, which helped during her husband's fight with cancer.

And as jury and traffic clerk at Palmer Superior Court, White says she likes interacting with jurors. She relishes the chance to tell others how much she loves America. "Someday, I really want to pay this country back for all it has given to me," she says, eyes shining above her characteristic smile. "What I would really like to do is sign up for the draft and go to fight."