So Close and So Far : After 20 Years, American Finds His Vietnamese Girlfriend and Children Just Miles Away

Twenty years and three freeways separated them.

Separated from his girlfriend and children during the fall of Saigon, Ronald Yohe always wondered where in the world they were.

On Wednesday he discovered they were 30 miles away.

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 own 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 aircraft repair contractor from California, continued to hopscotch the globe, landing in Iran and Thailand and Honolulu before moving to Westminster two years ago. He lives there in an efficiency apartment covered with pictures of military aircraft and pinups of Vietnamese models.

On Wednesday, the American Red Cross called to say that Pham--who had never married--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 them, 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.

“It’s been 20 years,” the snow-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, referring to 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 was 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 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 relationship with Pham and she followed him as he traveled throughout the country fixing aircraft.

In the end, he left her with the television, the refrigerator, the children 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.

Yohe later divorced, and while he was still working overseas, his siblings and parents did what they could to try to find his Vietnamese family, even contacting Camp Pendleton for 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 similar request earlier in the year through the Red Cross chapter in the 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.

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On Wednesday 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.”

Yohe, sipping on a beer and shaking at the revelation that had occurred only hours ago, didn’t know what to say.

“Who do I look like, Daddy?” Binh Pham asked.

“You look like your mommy and me,” he said with a smile.