Cooking opens Luong’s eyes to other Asian cultures

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  • By Megan Prather, Staff Writer

Work leader for the Avionics Flight of the 550th Commodities Maintenance Squadron, Thu Luong, immigrated to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“That somehow led me to Oklahoma and I’ve been here since. It’s my second home and I’ve been here a lot longer than my native home, so this is my home,” she said. “Everybody wants to come to the USA for the freedom.”

Luong has worked at Tinker Air Force Base for the past 13 years, where she started her career in Federal Service as an electronics mechanic for 550th Avionics Flight.

Prior to starting a career at Tinker, Luong had obtained a two-year degree in aviation and worked for the education department at Lucent Technologies. While working at Lucent, a program was initiated where the company would set up course sites for employees to take classes. Employees could take the courses offered to work in that job field. One of the programs provided was an electronic technician program that was about a year long. Luong enrolled in that program, completed it in minimum time and received a promotion.

Luong says that completion of that program and receiving a certification in A & P maintenance were instrumental in her accepting a job offer at Tinker AFB as an electronics mechanic. Her extraordinary leadership skills and attention to detail, coupled with her outstanding social skills with peers and superiors alike, helped her to quickly ascend to a work leader position for the 550th.

Five years ago, Luong decided to join the Asian-Pacific American Heritage organization on base where she could use her social skills to learn more about the cultures of other Asian-Pacific Americans. 

“APAH has done very well at bringing the many Asian-Pacific American cultures together,” she said.

Luong also wants to emphasize that APAH is not just for Asian-Pacific Americans, but all races and nationalities are welcome to join the organization, as it is an organization that encourages unity of people and cultures for the betterment of all societies.

Luong iterated that she was most surprised by underlying similarities between the various cultures and a big part of what opened her eyes to their similarities was through cooking. 

“One of the things I enjoyed most was in the past year we’ve done events where we cook food for new Airmen who may not get to go home for Christmas or Thanksgiving,” she said.

Luong also noted that she feels Asian cultures are more acknowledged by Americans in the past ten years than at any time before, which is something she really appreciates.

“I appreciate all different types of people and we should all learn more about the life culture of eachother,” Luong said. “We’re all human beings.”