KimChi Vu ’00 and her family have crossed the globe looking for home: Her parents fled Vietnam at the fall of Saigon by setting off on a cobbled-together boat through an ocean roiling with pirates. Later, Vu found a home and voice of her own at Brooks, and now she’s a hub of her small town nestled in the mountains of Wyoming: She owns a Vietnamese restaurant that’s quickly become a can’t-miss stop for locals and visitors alike.

“Home can be somewhere you least expect it to be,” KimChi Vu ’00 reflects. “I would never in a million years have thought it would be in Wyoming.”

Vu is speaking with a reporter during a lull in service at The V Cafe, her small Vietnamese restaurant housed inside the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Dubois, Wyoming. The town is microscopic (900, in the busy summer season; also, it’s pronounced “DOO-boys,” Vu will quickly emphasize) and it’s one of the last outposts where you can buy groceries, get a hot meal or procure supplies before heading off into the wilds of the Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.

Vu is quick to say that her life, especially as a Brooks graduate, is unconventional. For example, she reveals proudly, she has a trail name now: The steady flow of Continental Divide hikers who pass through Dubois, and who stop at The V Cafe for Shaking Beef, garlic shrimp noodles and fried pork with lemongrass, have embraced her as one of their own. “They’ll come in and say, ‘I’m looking for ‘Golden Leaf,’ and that’s me,” Vu says, chuckling.

 Vu’s journey is remarkable, and not just because this Brooks graduate — who won the Headmaster’s Prize on her Prize Day — landed in a small town in the closest America still has to a frontier. It’s also remarkable because of the real-life journey her parents took before she was born.

A Perilous Voyage

After Saigon, Vietnam, fell at the end of the Vietnam War, Vu’s family spent several years unsuccessfully trying to escape Vietnam and its communist government. Finally, in 1979, they saw a new opening: A group planned to escape by sea on vessels they built themselves out of whatever they could find that would float. Vu’s parents, her two older, then-infant siblings, and a score of extended family and friends became part of the mass of “boat people” fleeing Vietnam, Vu explains, hoping to make it far enough to reach the shores of a neighboring country.

Within days, the flotilla was stopped by Thai pirates. Vu stresses that the pirates were not violent; they simply, she says, did not want the Vietnamese refugees to land in Thailand. After blindfolding their captives and pulling them out to sea, the pirates left — with the group’s compasses. Vu’s family sailed for another week, Vu estimates, before reaching the shores of Malaysia.

Within six weeks after landing, paperwork was processed and they were en route to America, and Orange County, California, where Vu was born and raised.

Finding Her Voice in the Wilder

Fast forward to one of the moments at Brooks in which Vu found her voice: The first time Vu told the story of her family’s escape across the ocean was as a third-former, when she won the Wilder Speaking Competition.

Vu had arrived at Brooks through the A Better Chance program, after meeting with former admission officer Crystal Dixon P’26, P’28, who had traveled to Southern California for a middle school fair. “I remember falling asleep reading all the admission catalogs from Brooks,” Vu says. “There was no looking back once I was accepted.”

Vu arrived at Brooks and was met with, she says, “culture shock.” She came from Santa Ana, California, a city that she describes as having large Latino and Vietnamese populations. “Here I was,” she says, “suddenly on a campus that was predominantly white and wealthy.”

Vu found a haven in her teachers — she names her advisor Don Cameron, faculty emeritus Leigh Perkins ’81, P’14, P’18 and now Head of School John Packard as particular supports for her — and in the small gestures of her community: For example, the DiResta family, she says, took her to church with them every Sunday. She became a manager for the football team, and slowly found her footing.

She excelled academically, and she considers winning the Wilder as one of her crowning achievements at Brooks. “I knew that I had done something good,” she says. “I decided to keep capitalizing on that and using that as a way to find my way to the next thing, and to keep thriving.”

How to Measure Success

After graduating from college, Vu started an e-commerce business with her husband, Elvis Nguyen, before her story took a hard twist: She battled cancer twice, which she says left her exhausted and “in a dark place.”

That experience, coupled with a chance to relocate to Wyoming during the COVID-19 pandemic, helped Vu realize that “you don’t need to aspire for something big and grand. Elvis and I needed each other, our health, our kids and our love. If we were ever going to live a quieter, slower pace of life, moving to Wyoming was our chance to do it.”

Life, Vu says, is measured by the connections one makes to the people around them.

Opening The V Cafe helps Dubois, Vu says, because it gives restaurant patrons an Asian eatery in a place where there had previously been none. It’s also helped her, she says, because she’s found a new way to tell her story, and a new way to grow bonds with the people around her. The bustling interior of The V Cafe is more than just a small business in a remote town; to Vu, it’s a symbol of her own journey, and her family’s journey, toward visibility, fulfillment and home.

Vu says that Brooks taught her to understand who she was and what her strengths are, and to use that to find her own happiness. “Closing up shop every night is such a great feeling,” Vu says. “I feel such love and fulfillment. After all those years of being sick, battling cancer and not being sure whether what I was doing was good enough, to find that sense of peace is a great feeling.”

“It almost feels like my family’s history came full circle when I opened a Vietnamese restaurant inside a VFW post that hosts a lot of Vietnam War veterans,” she says. “And now, as I approach my 25th anniversary of graduating Brooks, I’m telling my own story to the school also. The connections I made at Brooks are ones that I’ve carried with me. It could have been decades since I’ve seen or heard from a person, but the love is not lost, and that’s what I appreciate about the community we formed there.”

Read more alumni stories in the Bulletin magazine.