After the 1975 fall of Saigon, Tho Nguyen, a South Vietnamese army veteran, spent a year in a prison camp. Once released, he and his wife Lachanh tried to escape from Vietnam, taking their four children and her mother in an overcrowded boat. One by one, the children and Lachanh’s mother died. The boat was intercepted by a Russian ship and the passengers imprisoned. Lachanh was released, but Tho spent three years in prison before escaping. Once reunited, Lachanh, then pregnant, persuaded Tho to leave the country without her. He made his way through Cambodia to refugee camps in Thailand and arrived in Tacoma in 1981. A year later, Lachanh and their daughter, Trang, were rescued, and in 1983, the family was reunited in Seattle.

Here, Tho Nguyen kisses his wife, as their almost four-year-old daughter Trang stands by her mother.

Caption information source: “At last the new land is not so cold”, by S.L. Wykes, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 27, 1983, page D1.