VIETNAM, 1975

The Vietnam War era produced an exodus from Southeast Asia that brought parole to about 340,000 people.

Kim-Trang Dang was a 25-yearold law student working as a teacher when she left Saigon with her then-husband, two siblings and five other family members. Her father and two sisters had left days earlier.

It was April 1975, just before the capital of South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese communist forces.

They drove a half-hour in the middle of the night to a river port where a boat was waiting.

There were bombs, and fire in the streets, but they were told a U.S. military ship was going to pick them up at sea.

They went to Subic Bay, the Philippines, and then Guam, before being transferred to a camp at Fort Chaffee, a military installation in western Arkansas where they stayed for about a month waiting for a sponsor who could take them out to live in the U.S.

The sponsor offered them his house in Tampa, Florida. Kim-Trang got a job at a shrimp factory, where she spent eight hours a day pulling off shrimp skin and had English classes at night. She moved to San Diego in the 1980s and got a job as a social worker at a Catholic organization, where she retired after 23 years.

Kim-Trang, 73, has three U.S.born children and five grandchildren.

“I’m happy that I have a freedom here, and I don’t live under the communism,” she said. “When I met them, the Americans were really nice ... They opened their arms to us. If they don’t open their arms, we don’t know where to go.”

She had her own business taking care of the elderly.

Now, she volunteers as president of a Vietnamese service organization. She became a U.S. citizen in 1980.

ASSOCIATED PRESS 1975 Refugees crowd a naval vessel docked at a coastal town near Saigon on April 9, 1975. U.S. parole was created under a 1952 law, allowing the president to admit people “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons.”

Kim-Trang Dang