Episode two of One Million Neighbors brings us to the chaotic final days of Saigon in April 1975, as ten-year-old Simon Hoa-Phan watches his world unravel. From the terror of nighttime bombings to the desperate crush of families fleeing toward evacuation helicopters, Simon’s story captures the fear, uncertainty, and life-altering decisions faced by thousands as South Vietnam fell. His family’s escape—narrow, chaotic, and uncertain—becomes a window into a much larger phenomenon: the mass displacement of millions across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, where war, political upheaval, and U.S. intervention forced entire populations to flee under harrowing conditions.
At the same time, across the world in St. Paul, Minnesota, Kathleen Vellenga witnesses these events from a hospital bed and feels a call to act. Her personal turning point reflects a broader movement among American faith communities, who would go on to play a central role in resettling more than a million Southeast Asian refugees. This episode traces the historical roots of that movement—from Cold War politics and moral responsibility to deeply held religious convictions—and introduces the ordinary people who made extraordinary choices to welcome strangers as neighbors.
Dr. Melissa Borja is Associate Professor of American Culture and Director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan. Trained at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Columbia, she is a historian of migration, religion, race, and politics and author of Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change (Harvard University Press), which won the the Thomas Wilson Memorial Prize, the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History, and the Outstanding Achievement Award in History from the Association for Asian American Studies. Dr. Borja has advised Princeton's Religion and Forced Migration Initiative as well as the Bridging Divides Initiative, which tracks and mitigates political violence in the United States. An expert on anti-Asian racism during the Covid-19 pandemic, she leads the Virulent Hate Project and has contributed research to Stop AAPI Hate. In honor of her research and advocacy about Asian Americans, USA Today honored her as one of its 2022 Women of the Year.
This podcast is part of AAPI Stories of Faith & Life, an Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) project funded by Lilly Endowment Incorporated.
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Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi
Producer: Andrew Gill
Original Music, Composition, and Mixing: Scott Okamoto
Production Assistance: Kari Onishi
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Simon Hoa Phan was only a child, but he knew something important was happening.
It was April 1975, and he lived in South Vietnam at the airbase near Saigon.
So everybody was afraid, and so school was closed.
We stopped going to church.
There was something in the air.
You know, I was only 10 years old, but I could feel there's something coming, and it's coming to an end.
Simon was born during the war.
Though growing up in Saigon, he didn't really experience the war firsthand.
He went to school, he went to church, and he played with his friends.
But his father was an officer in the South Vietnam Air Force.
And in the spring of 1975, everything changed as North Vietnamese forces closed in on the city.
Simon's family began to prepare for the worst.
I remember my father called us together.
He gave each one of us a bag.
And in each bag, there was some food, our paper, some money, and some clothing.
And he was ready to say, if anything happened, this is each one of you will have each bag to carry.
He recalled how later that night, he and his little sister hunkered down in their house and heard the sounds of fighting and bombing.
We took shelter under our beds, and that was one of the scariest moments in my childhood just to hear the shell traveling the air, make that whistle noise, and then the explosion.
So the whole house shook and the cross on the wall fell down.
We were screaming.
My little sister, who was only eight years old, was just screaming like mad.
And it continued on all night, all night.
And the next morning it stopped.
So we started to venture outside of the house.
And about two doors down, one house got hit.
And I could see the rebels and my neighbors with bloody arms and bloody A torso, and my father decided then that we need to leave the Air Force Base.
So we took our bags and we left.
As they left the base, Simon and his family found a city in chaos.
We walked outside the gate and into the city.
And it was, that time was chaos.
It was people running all over, smokes on the horizon.
And we took refuge in the American Embassy where my father worked.
Simon's father knew that he and the family were in danger, given his ties to the South Vietnamese military.
And they wanted to escape.
But whether they'd be able to escape was uncertain.
My father learned that they were evacuating people off the rooftop by helicopter.
So we decided then to leave because he wasn't an officer in the Air Force.
So there was a good chance that he would get arrested by the communist government.
And so we went up on the rooftop.
We fought our way through the crowd.
It was just a crowd.
And then there's the Helicopter pad.
I remember we were making a line going up the stairs and into the balcony and rooftop.
My sister and I got kind of pushed behind, so we were fighting this crowd, and everybody was on the helicopter except my sister and I.
So my father had to go back and fought the crowd and pulled us out of the crowd and onto the helicopter, and it was just chaos.
It was just Panic.
There was a lot of fear.
He recalled taking a final look at Saigon.
We took off and I looked down, and there was fire and smoke all over the city.
That was the last image of Vietnam, of my childhood.
On the other side of the world, Kathleen Valenga, a mother of three young children, was watching the evening news like millions of other Americans.
And she saw the same image of a Saigon on fire and of helicopters evacuating Vietnamese families.
She lived in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Not only a world away from Vietnam, but a place as different as anywhere on earth.
Despite the thousands of miles between them, much of her life had been like Simon's before Saigon fell.
She went to church, she spent time with her family, she contributed to her community, she was happy.
But the spring of 1975 found her in a dark place, personally.
A health problem forced her to have a major surgery, and she found herself spending a month recuperating in the hospital.
Her full active life had come to a standstill, and she was frightened and frustrated that her world had been reduced to a recovery bed, a hospital room, and a television.
And then, on a screen in the quiet of her room, she saw it the fall of Saigon.
I'm watching the TV in my room, and here are these people, you know, scrambling under the helicopters.
It shifted her perspective and gave her an idea.
I'm thinking there, I have people.
Coming in, changing my sheets, bringing me a drink of water, medicine, whatever I wanted, you know, I got totally out of my slight pity party and just said, when I get well, we're going to find a way that someone can stay here.
Even though she didn't know it at the time, that idea would make Kathleen Valenka part of the largest refugee resettlement in American history.
This is One Million Neighbors.
I'm Dr. Melissa Borja.
This limited series is about a shining example of American faith communities who mobilized to do the impossible, resettling over a million Southeast Asian refugees in the face of deep and widespread hostility towards migrants.
Fleeing Vietnam's Violence00:15:01
This is Episode Two War.
What happened next, whether Simon and his family found a new home, and whether Kathleen found a way to help refugees come to the United States, is something we'll get to in a minute.
But first, we need to understand the events that preceded the spring of 1975.
Specifically, we need to know about the brutal wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, how the United States was deeply involved in each of these wars, and why Americans like Kathleen cared so much about refugees.
Like Simon.
Henry Cavett Lodge is returning as ambassador to Vietnam.
He resigned a year ago to take part in the Republican Convention Stop Goldwater Drive and is now returning to Saigon as U.S. efforts are stepped up in the drive on the Viet Cong communist rebels.
Vietnam was a colony of France until 1945, when Vietnam, led by the nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, declared independence.
A war followed, and in 1954, when the Vietnamese defeated the French, Vietnam split into two.
North Vietnam was communist, and South Vietnam was not communist and backed by the United States.
These events unfolded during the Cold War, a time when the United States wanted to prevent the spread of communism all around the world.
Anti communism justified all kinds of interventions in countries far from American shores.
In this case, the United States sent military advisors to support South Vietnam.
The situation escalated in 1964.
When the U.S. Navy reported that its ships had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.
In response, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Congress for permission to increase U.S. military forces in Southeast Asia.
The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Vietnam will be redoubled by this outrage.
Yet our response for the present.
Will be limited and fitting.
We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risk of spreading conflict.
We still seek no wider war.
That's not exactly what happened.
Despite Johnson's promise that the American response would be limited, the long and brutal war in Vietnam killed millions of people and uprooted millions more.
And the U.S. played a central role in all of that.
Many Vietnamese lost their homes and were forced to migrate during the war in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The violence and destruction of war displaced around 6 million people in South Vietnam by 1971.
Another group of refugees fled Vietnam after the war, when Saigon fell to the communists in 1975.
Some of these refugees were like Simon and were evacuated by air by American military forces.
Others fled on their own and were later taken into protective custody by the United States.
And later, in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese escaped by sea.
These refugees were known as boat people.
Some of these refugees were formerly political, military, and cultural leaders in South Vietnam.
Others were persecuted ethnic minorities.
They were all fleeing violence and persecution in Vietnam, but they still weren't safe.
Their passage was incredibly dangerous.
They had long journeys to China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan.
They traveled on boats that were barely seaworthy.
And they face disease, storms, starvation, and pirates.
An Bui is a Vietnamese man who experienced this perilous journey.
Yep, so my dad got out of prison in '84, and he looked at us and was like, Yeah, because my dad is well educated, and he looked at us, Yeah, there's no life here, there's no education.
So he said, You know, maybe some of you should seek a better life.
So, yeah.
He sent half of us away.
In the 80s, we would call it the boat people in the 80s.
So we would escape Vietnam, from Vietnam to Malaysia.
And it took us seven days and seven nights from Vietnam to Malaysia.
And on our way to Malaysia, the boat died.
On our third day, the boat just died.
We just float.
The engine died.
It's a small boat.
56 of us, I believe, on the boat, and just at night the boat was floating, and just the sea was so calm, and you can see the stars so close to the water.
He's like, Oh my god, yeah, we're doomed.
Around 25 to 50% of these refugees died during their journeys.
If they reached land, they were sometimes forced back to sea by governments that refused to accept them.
And if they were lucky enough to make it safely ashore, they were forced to live in crowded refugee camps that housed tens of thousands of refugees.
The United States was also involved in the civil war in Laos, again, in the name of anti communism.
After Laos gained independence from France in 1954, a civil war erupted between communists and their anti communist opponents.
The United States recruited, trained, and supplied these anti communist allies in what is commonly called the secret war.
By 1969, these US backed allies included 40,000 Hmong soldiers led by General Vang Pao, and they were supported.
By the CIA and the Green Berets.
These Hmong soldiers were the frontline defense responsible for warding off the communist advance.
The human toll of the secret war was staggering.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees were displaced in Laos by 1971.
An estimated one in four Hmong soldiers died, and one in six Hmong civilians were killed or wounded.
Over nine years, from 1964 To 1973, the United States dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs here in Laos, more than we dropped on Germany and Japan combined during all of World War II.
President Barack Obama discussed the bombing when he visited Laos in 2016.
It made Laos per person the most heavily bombed country in history.
As one Laotian said, the bombs fell like rain.
The United States eventually pulled out its military advisors from Laos in 1973.
Thousands of Hmong soldiers were left behind.
And their situation became even more dangerous in 1975 when communist forces seized control of Laos.
Tuo Vang remembers the difficult decisions he and other Hmong people faced at this moment.
His father had served under General Vang Pao, and in 1975, they feared for their lives.
So when the communists took over, the Hmong had a decision either stay, either surrender, To the communists, or resist the communists, or with the third option, leave.
Knowing that if they surrender, they'll be killed because they are the enemy.
If they resist the communists, knowing the United States is not going to be there for them, they will run out of supply and they cannot resist.
So they'll just be slaughtered as well.
So the best option is to leave.
The United States airlifted some Hmong military personnel and their families.
But thousands of Hmong people who had allied with the United States were stuck in Laos, including Tuavang's family.
They were among those that could not catch the airlift in 1975, and they were in immediate danger.
Then the communists seek out for my father for his services to the United States.
So my father had to flee to the jungle, take my mother and I.
I was just a couple months old, and we hide in the jungle for nearly two years before we escape to Thailand.
Many other Hmong families made the same decision to journey westward.
Entire families traveled by foot, carrying their possessions on their back and trekking through the jungle at night to avoid capture by the communists.
By 1979, nearly 30,000 Hmong refugees attempted to cross the Mekong River into Thailand each month.
One of those families was two of Angs.
We had to swim across the Mekong River.
There was no boat waiting to take us over to Thailand.
And the parents were concerned that as soon as they touched the water, the cold water, the children were going to cry and they will alert the communist troops who were stationed along the river.
And so they had to dope their children with opium to put them to sleep so that they can cross the river.
I was, I must say that my mother loves me.
She didn't give me enough opium to put me to sleep.
So as we crossed the river, we swam across the river into Thailand.
Right when we arrived on the Thailand side, I woke up and started crying.
And I alerted the Thai locals.
Even in Thailand, they were not safe.
When we got to Thailand, they welcomed us to Thailand, told the men to surrender their weapons, and then took us to the side of the road and robbed us, took everything that we had, and left us there.
Cambodia was another site of war between communists and US aligned anti communist forces.
A communist group led by Pol Pot was gaining power.
In 1970, American and South Vietnamese military forces invaded to go after communists along the Cambodia Vietnam border.
And in 1973, the United States began to bomb Cambodia.
But in the spring of 1975, Cambodia also fell to the communists.
Pol Pot controlled Cambodia for three and a half years.
During this time, they tried to radically transform Cambodian society into a classless, agrarian society.
In the process, they starved the population, split up families, created forced labor brigades, and brutally tortured and eliminated political opponents.
Between 1.5 and 3 million people, around a quarter of the Cambodian population, died of violence, disease, and famine.
Han Hin and his family were among those devastated by the Cambodian genocide.
Most of my family died, you know.
My parents, my brother, they all died, you know.
Eventually, the Vietnamese invaded, and Pol Pot and his regime fell from power in 1979.
That year, half a million Cambodian survivors sought refuge in neighboring Thailand.
Over 100,000 Cambodian refugees joined them in the early 1980s.
Han Hin was among those who fled.
They have to do whatever necessary to continue our journey.
I cannot go back, you know, since I joined another group in the border camp, fight against them, you know.
If I went back, I would be in big trouble, I'm going to be killed or jailed.
So you cannot do nothing.
They have to move.
And that's why I decided to go into.
To the camp in Thailand.
Even though they were thousands of miles away, Americans like Kathleen Valanga witnessed these events unfold.
Television news and newspapers carried arresting images of refugees fleeing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and crowding in refugee camps.
The news coverage aroused widespread public sympathy.
Here's Kathleen again So, I saw these pictures and I said, they can't stay where they belong.
They have to leave.
She hoped that these refugees would be able to leave and make a home here in the United States.
But achieving that goal required the support of both the American government and the American people.
And given the long history of public opposition to refugees, including to Jews during the Second World War, that was a tall order.
But Kathleen wasn't alone.
There were people who agreed with her for all kinds of reasons.
Over time, these voices coalesced into a movement of refugee advocates.
Here's how they argued that the United States should accept Southeast Asian refugees for resettlement.
First, there was the idea that America is a safe harbor for people seeking freedom.
According to a 1975 survey, this was the leading reason for admitting Southeast Asian refugees the idea that the United States has a tradition of being a sanctuary for people fleeing oppression and persecution in their homelands.
There were also geopolitical reasons.
A Movement of Advocates00:09:45
In the context of the Cold War, anti communist fervor meant That Americans felt a special sense of obligation to aid freedom loving people who faced retribution and persecution at the hands of communists.
A 1986 poll found that a majority of respondents believed that the United States should accept political refugees who were specifically fleeing communist countries.
Finally, there were personal relationships and loyalties.
The fact that refugees were fleeing a region where the United States had been directly involved in years of brutal warfare, half a million bombing runs over Laos, gave some Americans a sense of obligation to help.
Americans who had fought or worked in Vietnam or Laos were particularly committed to helping Southeast Asian refugees who had worked closely with the United States military.
Americans who had worked in the military or diplomatic corps refused to abandon. their southeast Asian colleagues.
But a key group of people emerged as refugee advocates, people of faith.
At the national level, they were at the center of a broad coalition of groups pressing the federal government to admit more Southeast Asian refugees.
At the state and local level, they were vocal supporters of refugees.
They wrote letters to the editor and held community events.
And at the congregation level, they urged church members to get involved in overseas relief efforts and local resettlement projects.
They gave explicitly Religious reasons for why they cared about refugees so much.
Some argued that accepting refugees for resettlement was a chance to be peacemakers and to do penance for America's sins in Southeast Asia.
Take, for example, Joanne Carvinin, a Lutheran woman who led her church's refugee resettlement committee in St. Paul, Minnesota.
She wanted to help Vietnamese refugees because the United States had caused so much of their suffering in the first place.
We had all been.
Or at least I was horrified at the Vietnam War and the effect that that had on that country.
And so getting involved with the refugee program here was one little thing that I could do.
After so many years of feeling helpless about stopping the war, she appreciated how she could do tangible and direct work to fulfill America's moral responsibility.
I think a lot of people felt that this was something they could do in response to the horrors of the Vietnamese War.
And it was a very concrete thing that they could do.
You know, here was a woman with these dependent children, and she had no means of support, and she didn't speak English.
And, you know, it was just so obvious that she needed help.
And it was also so obvious that her plight was a result of something that our country had.
Placed on her poor country.
It was a chance to live out Christian teachings, to be a good Samaritan, and to love your neighbors.
This is what motivated Dorothy Knight, another church volunteer in St. Paul.
Well, it's biblical love thy neighbor.
And who is my neighbor?
Well, look around.
Refugee advocates also frequently reference the Bible passage of Matthew chapter 25.
Catholic parishes often called their refugee groups Matthew 25 committees.
And Mary Mergenthal, who attended the same Lutheran church as Joanne, also talked about how this passage inspired her work.
I was reading more and more about the general need of refugees in this country, and here there were going to be some on our doorstep.
And again, I was following that you know, as I do the least of these, you do it unto me.
And it seemed to be no question in my mind, but what we should help.
For many others, refugee resettlement was an extension of their missionary work.
Throughout history, Christians of all denominations have prioritized teaching people about Jesus and their Christian faith.
Missionary work has meant different things to different types of Christians, but some groups, evangelicals especially, have taken the biblical call to make disciples of all nations very seriously.
For them, the work of sharing the gospel and saving souls was their highest responsibility.
Could they save the souls of these Asian refugees?
One woman I interviewed had always wanted to be a missionary.
For privacy's sake, she asked me not to use her real name, so let's call her Pearl Jones.
Pearl was working as a secretary at her Southern Baptist church in the Twin Cities area when her church's pastor received a surprise phone call.
A Hmong man, a refugee, was calling to ask if the church could help him bring his cousin and her two daughters to the United States.
Pearl saw the phone call as an act of God.
I said, let's go for it.
Because they were going to live in St. Paul, because that's where God had always said, that's where I want you to work.
She believed that God was commanding her to do missions with refugees, not overseas, but right there in Minnesota.
And I never thought that God would pick up a whole people and move them to our country so we could do missions with them.
In some instances, church volunteers were interested in resettling Southeast Asian refugees because they actually knew these refugees.
They had met them during overseas missions in Asia.
Malcolm and Helen Sawyer, for example, had done a mission in Laos and Thailand through their denomination, the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
They later lived in Wheaton, Illinois, where they aided Hmong refugees resettled in the area.
Helen recalled one Hmong refugee man who later served as a pastor in Wheaton.
We taught him four years in Bible school.
It's kind of mind boggling to realize he lives right down the street from us here in Wheaton, you know.
Malcolm emphasized these international missionary connections when appealing to others to support Southeast Asian refugee resettlement.
These appeals to help refugees worked.
In 1975, President Gerald Ford gave the green light to admit or parole in 200,000 Vietnamese refugees.
Simon Hoa Phan, the Vietnamese boy who escaped Saigon by helicopter in the beginning of this episode, was one of these refugees.
He and his family ended up coming to the United States, where the Catholic Diocese in Denver had offered to help them make a new life in America.
Finally, my father decided that he wanted to go to Denver, Colorado.
The Bishop, George Evans, and the diocese there want to sponsor the Vietnamese refugees.
So he went to Denver, got them on an airplane, landed at Denver Airport around 8 o'clock at night.
It was August, August night.
So it was pretty dark.
From the airport, we got on two or three cars.
I remember the bishop was there with us, but some parishioners from the nearby church volunteered to drive.
And so I remember getting on in the car and drove to the apartment near central Denver.
When he walked into the apartment, he couldn't believe it.
They say, This is your house now.
And we Ran around and explored the apartment, you know, two stories, three rooms, one only one bedroom.
So, and I say, This is our house now, and to my parents, and my parents, yes, I didn't speak English then.
And then they show us the refrigerator, and I remember opening the refrigerator and it was packed full of food.
And I say, Is this ours too?
The next morning, he was excited to explore his new home.
So, in the morning, I ran down and opened the door and I explored the surrounding.
And the first thing I noticed was Grass, green grass, and sidewalk.
Yeah, just beautiful green grass and sidewalk.
It's so clean.
Big buildings, apartment buildings.
So that was my first memory of the United States.
For her part, Kathleen Valanga did make it out of the hospital.
And when she did, she called the International Institute, a voluntary agency that resettled refugees.
She learned about opportunities for her church to help refugees coming to Minnesota.
But she had to wage her own advocacy campaign.
The people at her church were a little wary at first.
I went to my church.
I said, We're a little mission church.
We can't take on someone from some other country.
You're crazy.
Others said, Yeah, but how are you going to do it?
And I said, Well, we'll get another church.
Eventually, she assembled a team of volunteers from three different congregations in the city, and they began to prepare.
And so we had a place for the family to stay.
It was a townhouse.
We furnished it basically with donations.
Things were going well.
Finding a New Home00:01:28
Except some big questions remained unanswered.
So we not only didn't know who they were, which was the most important thing, we didn't even know when they were arriving.
And then, one cold winter morning, Kathleen got a phone call from the International Institute.
It was 6 30 a.m.
We're here already.
So we grabbed all these coats.
After years of war and displacement and refugee camp life, these refugees now faced a daunting new adventure making a new home in America.
How would they do it?
And how would people like Kathleen actually?
Turn these grand ideals of welcoming the stranger into a reality.
That's next time on One Million Neighbors.
That's it for this episode of One Million Neighbors.
Thank you so much for listening.
I'm Dr. Melissa Borja.
One Million Neighbors was produced by Andrew Gill and Bradley Onishi.
Original music and audio engineering were by Scott Okamoto.
Carrie Onishi provided production assistance.
One Million Neighbors was made possible in partnership with Apari through generous funding from the Lilly Foundation.
Until next time, remember radical hospitality isn't just for radicals.