‘I’m just an instrument’

After she and her children survived communist Vietnam, Van Phan pledged to always serve God

Outside an Everett grocery store on a dark, drizzly November evening, men who seem to be carrying the bulk of their belongings gather under an overhang to escape the rain. 

A white van pulls into the parking lot, its passengers looking for people in need.

“You want some food?” the driver asks.

Several volunteers from MercyWatch, an outreach to people living on the streets of Snohomish County, emerge from the van with bags of sandwiches, fruit and water. They offer clean socks and basic first aid supplies.

One of the volunteers is 84-year-old Van Phan (pronounced Von Fan), who offers toiletries and hand warmers to the men. A large man wearing a beanie and with a lollipop stick jutting out of his mouth asks no one in particular, “Can you do me a favor and pray for us all out here?”

Phan, a member of St. Mary Magdalen Parish in Everett, immediately places her hand on his arm. Bowing her head, invoking the name of the Lord, she prays then and there.

Afterward, Phan asks, “Do you pray the rosary?” She pulls a rosary of green plastic beads from her coat pocket and puts it in the man’s hand, showing him how to wear it on his wrist and wrap the cross into his palm. 

Then the group is back in the van, headed off to the next alley or parking lot to offer food to others in need. 

Phan rides with the group of volunteers every Tuesday and Thursday evening without fail — “unless she’s sick,” said Deacon Dennis Kelly, who founded MercyWatch seven years ago. “But she’s hardly ever sick.”

That dedication to volunteering would be remarkable enough, but MercyWatch is just one of many ways Phan said she serves God.

A retired nurse and mother of five daughters, Phan regularly volunteers at an Everett medical clinic. Before the pandemic, she spent Friday nights praying with inmates at the Washington State Reformatory at the Monroe Corrections Complex, where she provided hospice care to dying inmates. She has also spent considerable time providing hospice services as a volunteer with Providence Hospice and Home Care.

She has saved the money she made working part time at an eye surgery center to pay her way to poor countries to serve alongside nuns and priests there: El Salvador, Sri Lanka, India, Haiti and twice back to her home country of Vietnam. Last year, she visited Tanzania and Uganda. In January, she volunteered in Puno, Peru. 

“We call her St. Van,” Deacon Kelly said. “When we have personal things we want people to pray for, we ask her to be our intercessor.”

Phan said that kind of attention embarrasses her.“I don’t feel comfortable with that, when they say, ‘You are a holy woman,’” she said. “Only God is holy. Praise the Lord — it’s not from me, it’s from God. To say thanks to the Lord for me is OK,” Phan said. “But don’t praise me. I’m just an instrument.”

Catholic faith forged in Vietnam

Phan clearly remembers becoming Catholic during her youth in Vietnam. Her parents sent their five sons and two daughters to Catholic school. “My oldest brother, me, and my young sister became Catholic,” she said. 

But it was much later, married and with children of her own, that she truly embraced her faith. 

She recalls the days in the 1970s, following the U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam, when communists took over the country. Phan believes her husband, a private ship captain and harbormaster, was killed when he was mistaken for a member of the South Vietnamese military. She was sent to a re-education camp.

“They interviewed me — every day, every day,” said Phan, who had a 1-year-old child at the time.

They asked if anyone could come and take the baby home. Her husband’s brother, from the north part of Vietnam, came and took the baby into his care.

Then Phan and her other young children were made to work in remote rice fields with “water up to your chest,” she remembered.

“They say, ‘You plant the corn.’ I don’t know how to plant the corn,” said Phan, who had worked as a midwife. “You have an acre to finish before you can go home. There’s soldiers with the gun. You stay there until you finish it, then you go home with just one bowl of rice with white salt.”

She lived under communist rule for seven years, sometimes hearing word of a brother who had gotten out and arrived in Guam, or of one of her children who escaped a work camp but was recaptured.

“Sometimes I have nightmares” of that time in her life, Phan said. “When you go with the evil, you need to become evil, otherwise you will not survive.

“In confession, I say, ‘God, I did a lot of evil things when I was in Vietnam before. I ask for forgiveness.’” 

‘God, help me raise the kids’

Phan was able to get out of Vietnam and make her way to the United States, but her family was “very, very poor.” 

They did have shelter — two bedrooms for all of them, Phan recalled. “I prayed: ‘God, help me raise the kids.’”

In the U.S., Phan was able to go back to school to become a certified nurse. She raised her children here, and they have raised their own children.

That’s why “I kept my promise to God, to serve him,” she said.

Phan says she “lives poor,” and has no need for fancy things.

“We have shelter, we have food to eat, we have clothes. That’s enough,” she said. “We are so blessed.” 

In her semi-retirement, Phan said she had a vision to volunteer for people who were dying. That led her to Providence Hospice.

Phan would respond to calls at 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. if a patient was close to death. “I will go right away,” she said. “I don’t want a patient to die before I see them.”

Her role was to sit at the bedside and maybe comfort loved ones who aren’t sure what to do. 

“Sometimes the patients are not Christian, not Catholic. We respect that,” Phan said. “But inside my heart, I pray.” 

It was God, Phan said, who led her to the prison ministry at Monroe. She visited for Friday night Mass, sometimes just sharing her beliefs and praying. She also provided hospice care in the fourth-floor hospital ward; she said families weren’t allowed there, so she visited inmates to comfort them.

“Van was very faithful in coming every Friday evening,” recalled Al Larpenteur, a member of St. Teresa of Calcutta Parish in Woodinville who was the Catholic chaplain at Monroe back then. The inmates, he said, “valued her presence and attention.”

Phan said she taught the inmates how to pray. “I tell them just three (things): ‘Jesus, I love you, have mercy on me and save my soul.’ I say, ‘You keep saying that. You are not alone in here.’” 

She says she has witnessed miracles through her work, like the inmate in hospice who said one night his cell grew really bright and he saw Jesus. The man told Phan, “I don’t want to be here. I want to go with him.”

‘Help us to see you in them’

Back in Everett, the MercyWatch crew is almost out of sandwiches, so they decide to finish the night visiting some common faces outside an auto parts store. 

Emerging from the van, Phan walks toward a tent and some belongings set up against the store wall. 

“Hi, Russ! Food for you,” she calls out. 

But the man she knows as Russ is walking into traffic on Rucker Avenue, shouting unintelligibly. 

It’s a reminder of earlier in the night, before loading into the van, when Phan led the group of volunteers in prayer.

“Jesus, help us to find our brothers and sisters in need,” she said. “Help us to see you in them.”