When the communists sent her husband to prison, Ha Luu baked bread.
The year was 1975, and Luu — better known to Portlanders as Christina, the amiable matriarch at Vietnamese soup restaurant Ha VL — suddenly found herself raising five young sons without a partner, or a home. So Luu did what she could to survive, hawking clothes on the street, collecting plastic for a recycler, baking baguettes for simple sandwiches.
Luu, 75, died Monday at home with her husband. The cause was cancer. She is survived by husband William Vuong and sons Hung, Peter, Richard, Han, Steven and Kenny Vuong, as well as two sisters, a brother and 20 grandchildren.
That Luu was eventually able to make the perilous boat crossing to the United States, raise a family and open a restaurant widely considered one of Portland’s best might be less impressive than the very fact that she was able to keep herself and her family alive during that harrowing decade after the fall of Saigon.
“The communists kicked me out of my home,” Luu told The Oregonian in 2019. “I had no house, no car, no money. I had four boys, my first son was only eight years old, and I was six months pregnant. They didn’t want my son coming back to school, because they said, ‘He’s the son of CIA.’”
On Tuesday, Luu’s sons gathered once more at the family’s home in Southeast Portland’s Mill Park neighborhood, one traveling by car from Kansas. An altar along the living room’s south wall was filled with flowers, fruit and photos of Luu and her ancestors.
Luu was born in Hanoi in 1947, then moved with her family to Kon Tum province in the highlands above central Vietnam in 1954. She first met Vuong, an English language instructor, while attending a Catholic girls school there. The pair were married in 1966. During the war, Vuong served as a translator and intelligence agency asset for the United States embassy in Saigon. An American general’s promise of safe passage out of the city evaporated in the chaos of April 1975, and Vuong was arrested for his role working with the United States.
“She took care of my five children while I was in prison,” Vuong said during an interview at his home Tuesday. “She worked very hard, selling clothing on the pavement to collect money. She was the wife of the officer at the embassy in Saigon, so she had a very hard time with the communists.”
Hung Vuong, the couple’s oldest son, remembers being homeless during those years, and times when they had no food.
”We were starving,” Hung Vuong said. “My second brother (Peter) and I would go out on the street to collect all kinds of stuff and sell it to a dealer. Plastic, things like that. We would stay up all night washing it while my mom was doing her work.”
With meat hard to come by, the family’s bánh mì stand sold bread grilled with butter and sprinkled with what sugar they could afford.
“Sometimes I can’t imagine how we could survive until today,” William said. “It was a very tough life with the communists.”
After eight years behind bars and a further two under a restrictive probation, William was finally freed in 1985. It would be another seven before he and Luu were able to leave Vietnam. During that time, their four oldest boys fled the country by boat, first landing at Malaysia’s notoriously crowded Bidong Island refugee camp. Eventually, Vuong and Luu paid to send their sons to Oregon, one-by-one, where their residency was sponsored by a former student of Vuong’s. The family wasn’t fully reunited until the early 1990s.
“I sent four boys by boat to the United States, and I didn’t know where they were,” Luu said in 2019. “Long time every night I cry.”
Peter, their second son, was the first to leave.
“We did not receive any information for three months,” William said Tuesday. “I thought he had been killed by pirates. Every day Christina and I went to many fortune tellers in Saigon to see what’s going on. But we were lucky. He survived.”
When they arrived, Luu and Vuong briefly ran a convenience store on Southeast Holgate Street, then opened their first restaurant, a cafe and deli about a mile up 82nd Avenue. At the time, Ha VL specialized in strong coffee and sandwiches, but the couple soon became interested in adding soup.
“I saw other restaurant menus had 200 dishes,” William said. “But we decided we would only cook one.”
Starting with a spicy yet elegant bún bò Huế, Luu and Vuong recreated soup recipes from memory and fanatical recipe testing. One soup became two, then a dozen, with two offered each day, six days a week, each with its own noodle, toppings, garnishes and labor-intensive broth. Local chefs, restaurant critics, television crews, magazine writers and James Beard Award voters took note of what the restaurant proudly describes as its “meticulous soups.”
Bamboo Shoots Chicken Noodle Soup - Bun Mang Ga: bamboo shoots and chicken with vermicelli noodle in chicken broth. Rose VL Deli, located at 6424 S.E. Powell Blvd., is the sister Vietnamese restaurant to Ha & VL. LC- The Oregonian
In 2015, the couple handed Ha VL over to Peter Vuong and opened a second restaurant, Rose VL, with many of the same soups, only served on different days. For fans of Vuong and Luu’s restaurants, Rose VL’s 2018 addition of cao lầu, a Central Vietnamese noodle dish rarely seen on American restaurant menus, was treated like a city-wide holiday. According to William, Luu tested 16 different iterations of the dish’s essential sauce.
If you were lucky enough to visit Ha VL or Rose VL when Luu was in the kitchen, you might have experienced her signature hospitality, asking about your family’s health then explaining the nuances of a dish. Small details about her cooking stood out over time. The quality of the broths. The creamy center of a perfectly cooked quail’s egg. Golden-brown chicken that was clearly roasted before going in the soup.
After 55 years of marriage, the couple stepped back from restaurant operations during the pandemic. Peter and wife Loan Vuong remain in charge of Ha VL, 2738 S.E. 82nd Ave. #102, while Rose VL, 6424 S.E. Powell Blvd. has been run by Steven Vuong, wife Helen Huynh and her family (Steven and Helen recently relocated to Dallas, but are back in Portland for the time being). Ha VL plans to remain closed from now through mid June.
Earlier this year, doctors recommended hospice care for Luu after cancer was found in her lungs and liver. She died just after midnight on Monday, May 29. A Buddhist nun was brought to the house to pray for her soul’s safe passage to the next realm.
A prayer service, viewing and cremation will be held from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday at Omega Funeral & Cremation Services, 223 S.E. 122nd Ave.
— Michael Russell; mrussell@oregonian.com
Our journalism needs your support. Please become a subscriber today at OregonLive.com/subscribe