Thu Hằng Trần

Gia đình chúng tôi vô cùng thương tiếc báo tin Bà Trần Thu Hằng, sinh ngày 10 tháng 8 năm 1945 tại huyện Tiên Du, tỉnh Bắc Ninh, Việt Nam, đã về an nghỉ ngày 18 tháng 10 năm 2023 tại Chicago. Hưởng thọ 78 tuổi.

Thu Hằng (née Trần Thị Loan) was born in Tiên Du, Bắc Ninh, Vietnam, in 1947 as the only child of parents from Hải Phòng. She lived briefly in Hải Phòng before her mother died, and her father sent her to live with a relative during the mass migration of people from the north to the south in 1954 (Bắc 54). From the ages of 7 to 12, Thu Hằng lived in Ban Mê Thuột, where she was forced to be a household servant. When she was 12, she ran away from home by hiding in a truck that was transporting rambutan fruit from Ban Mê Thuột to Saigon—a distance of over 300 kilometers!

Thu Hằng then lived in Saigon for the following few years. At age 15, she entered motherhood and had her first child, during which she registered her legal birth year to be 1945 so that she would have more rights as a teenage mother. She later became a single mom at age 18 when she moved to Đà Nẵng. She would go on to describe her time in Đà Nẵng as some of the best years of her life. By the late 1960s, she gave herself the name Trần Thu Hằng, taking inspiration from the Moon and Thẩm Thúy Hằng, an actress whose beauty she admired.

At age 27, Thu Hằng moved from Đà Nẵng back to Saigon in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. She lived in Saigon for several years until she left Vietnam when she was 36 and resettled in Chicago, where she lived for the past 40 years. While in Chicago, she built her career in cosmetology as a hairdresser and witnessed her children get married and her grandchildren grow up, go to college, and start their own families. In her lifetime, Thu Hằng had 12 children. She is survived by 7 of them, Thu Hà, Sonny, Linda, Julie, Eyvon, Christina, and Lisa, along with her 19 grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the U.S. and Vietnam.

Rest in Peace, Thu Hằng Trần (August 10, 1945– October 18, 2023)

In closing, some memorable quotes from Thu Hằng:

● "A lot of Vietnamese people pride themselves on where they were born or where they are from. I don’t care. I’ve lived in all the main regions of Vietnam, so I’m a woman of all three regions! Tôi là người đàn bà của cả 3 miền đất nước Việt Nam!"

● "No man ever did shit for me."

● "Every woman has her Victoria’s Secret."

● "If you made my life into a movie, I bet a lot of people would watch it."