Dr. Bui Tran Phuong is president of Hoa Sen University in Ho Chi Minh City and she has an interesting story to tell, one that is rarely heard publicly in Orange County, California.

When she was ten, his father, who was in the Viet Minh resistance movement, was arrested with her by the south Vietnamese police under then-Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem. She was released after a day, but her father spent several years in prison, enduring torture.

Thus began her political awakening, that brought her to Paris where she joined in distributing agitprop resisting both the south Vietnamese government and U.S. invaders to her homeland, from the political active and (at the time) leftist Vietnamese diaspora abroad. After graduating from Sorbonne, she returned to Saigon and took part in the liberation movement.

Today she is a university president and grappling with the challenge of improving higher education in Vietnam in an era of globalization.

Interviewer: Daniel C. Tsang, show host.