Journey to freedom from Vietnam shaped new prosecutor’s life
On a Saturday in February 2003, The Boston Globe put a new Suffolk County prosecutor on the front of its Metro section. Fifteen years earlier, he had been a teenager on a raft in the South China Sea. This is the story the Globe told that day, set down again in our own words.
The article followed one life across two countries: a boy who left Vietnam by sea, a student who worked his way through Boston’s schools, and a young lawyer who gave up a bigger paycheck to become a prosecutor in Dorchester.
Leaving Saigon
In 1988, Vy Truong was 15 and living in Saigon. His father had supported the United States government. His mother paid about $2,000 in gold so that he could go.
He left on a raft with 64 other people. For more than four days they drifted, lost, on the open water. Then, at last, the raft reached an island near Malaysia.
A new language, a new city
From there he came to the United States as a political refugee, first to an uncle in Houston. Then he moved on. As he saw it then, the best colleges all had Boston in their names, so Boston was where he meant to be.
Much of his English came from watching Mister Rogers. He finished Cathedral High School in Boston’s South End in three years. Along the way he was one of twenty students chosen for the Supreme Judicial Court’s Youth Corps, which put him to work in the court clerk’s office.
Working his way through school
Boston University came next, on a Cardinal Medeiros scholarship that covered his full tuition for four years. The university gives that scholarship to graduates of the Boston archdiocese’s Catholic high schools, for leadership, grades and service to others. He graduated magna cum laude in 1998, with a dual degree in political science and economics.
He worked while he studied. Lori Zarkower, of the university’s financial aid office, nominated him as BU’s student employee of the year, and he was chosen. Years later she told the Globe, “He stood out then, and he still stands out.”
He went on to Northeastern University School of Law and earned his law degree in 2001. Through college and law school, he also worked as a legal assistant in the general counsel’s office of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department.
Taking the pay cut
He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 2002 and became a staff attorney for the Sheriff’s Department, representing inmates of the Suffolk County House of Correction at bail appeals, parole hearings and disciplinary hearings. He had now seen the system from the side of the people held in it.
In early 2003 he moved to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office as an assistant district attorney: the lawyer who brings cases for the state against people charged with crimes. The move cut his pay by $16,000. He made it anyway.
Sworn in at home
His swearing-in did not happen in a courthouse. It was held at Dorchester’s new Vietnamese community center, among the community he had come from. The Globe called him “one of the state’s first Vietnamese-American prosecutors.”
The city noticed too. The Boston City Council declared February 18, 2003, Vy Truong Day in Boston. WCVB Channel 5’s Chronicle also featured him as a new Suffolk County prosecutor; that segment is on our Press page.
At the ceremony, District Attorney Daniel F. Conley summed up the work in one sentence, and put Vy’s name in it.
“Our job, and soon Vy’s job, is to give voice to the voiceless.”
What came after
He was assigned to Dorchester District Court, where he went on to handle a full docket of cases every year, juvenile and adult, felony and misdemeanor.
In 2004 he opened his own practice, the Law Offices of Vy H. Truong, P.C., on Dorchester Avenue. He took the District Attorney’s words with him: “Voice of the Voiceless” is the firm’s motto to this day. More than twenty years on, he still works in the same neighborhood, in English and in Vietnamese, for people who need someone to speak for them.
The office handles immigration, criminal defense, real estate, family law, personal injury, business law and civil litigation. The work has grown since 2003. The promise behind it has not.
We retell the Globe’s story here because it is the plainest answer to two questions new clients often have: who is Vy Truong, and why does he do this work? The original article is linked below, for anyone who wants to read it in the Globe’s own words. And if you have a question of your own, the office is one phone call away, in English or in Vietnamese.