Long-Lost Family Found Just Miles Away : Reunion: Westminster man was separated from his girlfriend and their children 20 years ago as Communist forces swept through South Vietnam. Red Cross workers locate them in Rosemead.

Twenty years and three freeways separated them.

Pulled apart in Saigon, Ronald Yohe wondered where in the world his girlfriend and their children were living. They were 30 miles away, he discovered Wednesday.

In the final days of 1974, Yohe, then 42, watched the Communists sweep through Saigon. Everyone was bailing out and Yohe was next. Ny Pham, his 23-year-old girlfriend and mother of his two children, had to find her mother in the Mekong Delta.

Authorities told Yohe that if he followed her, he was dead. When he said goodby, she wept but refused to look back at him.

That was 20 years ago, and Yohe, an American aircraft repair contractor, continued to hopscotch the globe, landing in Iran and Thailand and even Honolulu before living the past two years in a Westminster efficiency apartment covered with pictures of military aircraft and pinups of Vietnamese models.

On Wednesday, the American Red Cross called to say that Pham and her children were living just miles away in Rosemead. Yohe, now 62, who had made numerous inquiries through the Red Cross and the Catholic Church to locate his family, was given a telephone number.

It was up to Yohe, the Red Cross said. Did he still want to see them?

Yohe picked up the phone and dialed. He spoke to Pham and suggested they all meet Saturday. No way, she said. The family would be in Westminster in a couple of hours.

“It was like it was yesterday the way we spoke,” he said. “They all wanted to see me right away.”

And so they did. Hugging and crying and laughing in the parking lot of a Westminster apartment complex. Pham, now 43, brought their two children, Bao Quoc Pham, 21, and Binh Pham, 19, and Pham’s other daughter Candy Phan, 25, herself a mother of two. Yohe had a larger group of his relatives there as well.

“It’s been 20 years,” the snowy-haired Yohe whispered to Pham.

“I know,” she said. “I remember you.”

Pham pulled a blurry black-and-white photo of the young couple in Vietnam out of her handbag.

“I can only keep one picture,” she said of the government’s restrictive policies. “I kept it for 20 years.”

Binh Pham could not let go of Yohe, tugging at his cheeks and kissing him again and again. She practiced saying “daddy” as if it were a foreign word she was trying to memorize.

“Every family had a daddy and I didn’t have one,” she told her father. “Bao and I didn’t have a daddy.”

“Now you have one,” he said softly.

Inside the tiny apartment, the women gathered around Yohe on his bed, flipping through faded photographs taken in Vietnam.

Yohe said he had forgotten much of his Vietnamese vocabulary over the years, but he and Pham nervously traded recollections of the five years they were together. Yohe would point at a photo and Pham would laugh at the woman who sold Coca-Cola or the humorous American acquaintance who sat at the dinner table with them one night.

“You get the checks and the letters I send you?” Yohe asked.

“I keep them all,” Pham said.

Yohe had worked for Bell Helicopter, fixing the copters that kept being damaged during the war and teaching the South Vietnamese something about maintenance. He met Pham in Tuy Hoa, on the coast of the South China Sea, through a friend of a friend. Separated from his wife in the United States, Yohe began a five-year relationship and she followed him as he traveled throughout the country fixing aircraft.

In the end, he left her with the television and the refrigerator and the kids and a promise that they would meet again someday in the United States. He sent her $100 every two weeks and she sent him letters. But within six months, the Communists had taken Saigon and all communication was lost.

While Yohe, now divorced, was still working overseas, his siblings and parents did what they could to try to find his Vietnamese family, even contacting Camp Pendleton to seek their help.

In December, Yohe contacted the Southeast Asian specialist for the Orange County Chapter of the American Red Cross. As it happened, the Phams had placed a request earlier in the year through the Red Cross chapter in San Gabriel Valley.

“They were in the same area of Southern California and neither one of them knew it,” said Kara Lakkees of the Red Cross. “Now they’re together.”

Asthmatic and living on disability, Yohe settled in Westminster two years ago. About the same time, the Phams relocated to Rosemead after living in the Philippines. Pham got a job as a seamstress. The children are in school.

On Tuesday night, an hour after being reunited with his family, Yohe’s head was still spinning, he said. Was he going to move everyone into his apartment? Would they all live together? He still hadn’t figured it all out.

“I want my dad to live with me and my family,” Binh Pham said without hesitation. “For 19 years, I never had a dad.”