Mary Truong (center) stands with Marylou Sudders, Sec. of Mass. Executive Office of Health and Human Services, and Gov. Charlie Baker at her swearing-in as head of Mass. Office for Refugees and Immigrants.From the time she was a young girl in Vietnam, Mary Truong was taught to be compassionate and independent. These lessons have guided her as a refugee, as an active community member, and now as the newly sworn-in head of the Massachusetts Office for Refugees & Immigrants (ORI).

Truong has been settling in to her new job, eager to offer assistance to others navigating the all-too-common struggle of immigrants adrift in a new country. In an interview with the Reporter, the 54-year-old Truong was engaged and expressive as she described her new role.

“I’m passionate about using my personal story and experience to tell other refugee newcomers that there’s hope,” she said. “This is the land of opportunity, and there are a lot of people and resources to help you.”

Her office works with partner groups to secure job and language training for immigrants as well as help them with the education and guidance they need to become full US citizens and set them on a path to self-sufficiency.

Though she has never lived in Dorchester, Truong and her husband, Nam Pham, the long-time VietAID director and recently appointed assistant secretary for business development in the Baker administration, have been active members of the neighborhood’s Vietnamese community.

Truong’s substantial list of roles, both volunteer and professional, includes work on the Boston Human Rights Commission, board positions on the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, the Dorchester Board of Trade, and work as director of multiple departments at Carney Hospital. She also served as director of external relations and later director of patient relations at Dorchester House prior to accepting her current post in the Office of Refugees.

Joel Abrams, a former president of Dorchester House, said Truong was “exactly what we needed” as he praised her commitment to the community and crucial Vietnamese outreach. “I felt really good about her as a good, decent, hardworking person,” he said.

The values passed along by her parents still guide her, Truong said. Her mother was a communications worker for the town, her father a wealthy businessman. “She was so ahead of her time,” Truong said of her mother, who gave her dolls of multiple races. “The whole idea was to instill a respect for diversity for us early on, the respect for people who look different than you, who speak different languages. … We have the same wants and needs.”
Mary Truong, right, with her husband Nam Pham.
A middle child – she has two older sisters, two older brothers, and four younger brothers – Truong grew up near Saigon in a house full of music and cross-cultural awareness. She is multilingual, speaking Vietnamese, English, French, and Spanish. “You would laugh,” she said. “But I listened to more French music and American music than Vietnamese.”

When Truong was 12 years old,her mother died from complications from a gunshot intended for her father. Even now, decades later, she still wonders who she would be if her mother had continued to be a presence in her life.

Two years after her mother’s death, her father gathered Truong and her eight siblings together and told them they were going to flee the country. They left the day Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.

The trip seemed incomprehensible to Truong at age 14. It involved bribes, close calls, negotiating their way onto a cargo ship, being collected by an allied fleet, and bouncing from a refugee camp in the Philippines to one in Pennsylvania with the help of an American Army doctor.

In 1980, five years after her arrival, she became a naturalized citizen. “I felt so, so proud...in tears, feeling, really, paradise,” she said.

The entire family moved to Boston for the siblings’ education, but financing college was a daunting task. Truong initially thought she wanted to be a flight attendant, but she realized during her undergraduate business administration studies at Northeastern University that she had made the wrong choice. She transferred to UMass Boston where she completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

Pulling inspiration from her difficulties, Truong initially worked as a higher education counselor. “At the time, there were a lot of minority students,” she said. “So the work I did, I thought it was very meaningful to guide high school seniors through going to college, and to be able to pay for it when I myself struggled.”

Truong’s father, who passed away recently, worked as a janitor to support his family after they arrrived in the United States. He told her to never rely on anyone for her well being, to be independent.

Immigrants, Truong said, rarely want to subsist on government aid, which is fortunate because the government does not have the resources to support them indefinitely. What they do need, however, is a clear support structure to help them acclimate and become independent.

In a statement, Baker welcomed Truong to the office. “Her background and years of service to the state’s newest residents qualify her to fill this important role to work on strategies for supporting our immigrant-owned small businesses, increasing employment and strengthening communities throughout the Commonwealth,” he said.