Silas Cha’s American story began with his birth in Laos during the Viet Nam War, his family’s move to a refugee camp in Thailand when he was six-years-old, and their subsequent move to America three years later. They landed in Nashville, where Cha jokes his first three words in English were “Yes, No, and Hee Haw!” Beyond the joke, however, Cha found a kinship with the so-called “hillbillies.” He points to the home of the Hmong in the mountains of Laos, and their lack of access to education and health care as being three common factors in the cultures.
Two years later Cha’s parents gathered up their ten children and moved to Fresno, where Cha attended E.S.L. classes at Kings Canyon Middle School and eventually graduated from McLane High. He subsequently earned a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from U. C. Berkeley and a Masters at Fresno State in International Relations. He is now a first year law student at San Joaquin College of Law.
His trek, in many ways, parallels that of Ty Kharazi, a 1996 SJCL grad and the founder of the Kharazi Book Scholarship. Kharazi was a 16-year-old college student in 1977, studying in the Los Angeles area on a scholarship from his home country of Iran. Six months after he arrived, so did the embassy takeover in Tehran. Ty found himself without finances and family. He managed to land a job at Jack in the Box where he worked all day and a job as a valet along the Sunset Strip at night. He eventually switched to working at McDonalds and tried to take at least one college course at night every semester. Ten years later, he achieved his Bachelor’s degree in Biology from CSU Bakersfield, followed by his Masters in Health Care Administration. Kharazi has established both the Kharazi Bar Study Support Scholarship to offset the cost of a bar review course and this book scholarship, recalling those two expenses were outside the very tight budget which he lived by during law school.
Cha, who says he never learn his birthday and describes his age as “pushing 50,” has two daughters, ages six and ten. He believes “Having family gives you a different perspective.”
Cha says he has only succeeded by trying “to capitalize on every opportunity,” adding “If I didn’t succeed, it is because of lack of discipline.”
Over the years, he has worked for a non-profit assisting Asian Refugees, as well as serving as an adjunct professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at West Hills Community College, College of the Sequoias, and Reedley College.
Still, it’s not enough. “I always wanted to be a lawyer,” he says. He acknowledges the credibility and social prestige the title brings, but is more interested in something else. “I will always be a servant to my family and my community,” he says. “This will give me the insider track to truly help my community.”