On April 30, 1975, the last US military helicopter flew away from Saigon just before Viet Cong forces stormed the US embassy and retook the Capitol, ending two decades of war.
No event of the 1960s had a greater impact on American culture, politics and discourse than the US entrance into the Vietnam War. Nearly 60,000 US soldiers didn’t return and hundreds of thousands who did dealt with physical or emotional scars while social unrest made them the target of scorn.
The Vietnamese suffered greatest.
By the end of April 1975, 2 million refugees evacuated the Southeast country by land, air and sea as Saigon fell. The 20-year struggle took the lives of as many as 3 million Vietnamese men, women and children. An estimated 130,000 refugees landed in the US as part of either Operation New Freedom or Operation New Arrivals following the fall of Saigon. Those who made it found meager, temporary shelter in US military forts on either coast or in the Midwest while they sought sponsorship. Thousands more refugees from Laos and Cambodia would follow in the ensuing decade.
As of 2023, about 2.3 million Viet people live in the US. New Mexico is home to about 6,500 Vietnamese residents. In Santa Fe, about 1,600 Asian people reside in Santa Fe, according to the 2023 US Census.
With the impending anniversary in mind, SFR spent the last six weeks interviewing local Viets to get a snapshot of Santa Fe’s Vietnamese community and ask one question: What is the legacy of the Vietnam War to you personally?
On a breezy Sunday afternoon in mid-April, about 30 local residents of Vietnamese heritage gathered at the home of chef Hue-Chan Karels and her husband John. The mood was as bright as the mid-afternoon sun, and as delicious as the array of traditional Vietnamese dishes on the patio. The patio in the hills provoked no shortage of conversation, but one name echoed through them all: Terry Ngo.
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Terry is a teacher, artist, wife and mother of two. She’s also a daughter and a sister. She and her husband, Nick Stofocik, moved to Santa Fe as newlyweds in 2012. They both work at local schools and produce plays and short films, but they also provide their mixed-heritage daughters with a full perspective on their cultural identities through playdates, productions and monthly picnics at Ragle Park. Terry produces a weekly newsletter for Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians around northern New Mexico.
“None of this happens without Terry,” local author Christina Vo says. “She is amazing.”
Kim Nguyen, a Santa Fe general practitioner who grew up in the Bay Area and wore a gorgeous traditional Vietnamese wedding dress to the gathering, agreed.
“Terry keeps us all up to date with her newsletter,” she said. “She has done an amazing job bringing us together.”
“Terry is so sweet,” says Jennifer Busche, who came to Santa Fe in 2017 after growing up near the heart of Little Saigon in Philadelphia. “Sometimes it’s just nice to hang out with people who look like you and enjoy the same food as you.”
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Wartime veterans Jim Cobb and Romeo Carranza were also in attendance, adding a contrasting point of view but no less praise for Terry.
After Ngo guided Cobb, who walks with a cane, onto the patio he commented, “I’m just so honored to be able to attend an event like this. Vietnam had a devastating impact on me and my family, but when I see a nice group of people like this and I know each and every one of them, their families, all have stories—tragic stories. They’re all here, they seem happy. I don’t know— it’s just something, isn’t it?”
Ngo has helped organize a community that already includes three pho restaurants, and, yes, fabulous nail salons, along with doctors, artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Like Ngo, people who are ready to raise their voices as the 50-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon nears. On Saturday, April 26, and again on May 10, The Santa Fe Public Library hosts an open mic event called “Remembering Saigon: The 50th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.” Then on April 30, the New Mexico Military Museum hosts an opening reception at 5 p.m., followed by a speaker series exploring the diverse impacts of the war.
For this week’s edition, SFR examines the resilient Vietnamese diaspora’s reach into the high desert. We start with Ngo’s mother, Phuong Vu, who has become a surrogate ba, or grandmother, to many in the local Vietnamese community.
Adam Ferguson
The Grandmother of Them All
Seated between her granddaughters as they sing the Vietnamese alphabet, Phuong Vu’s forefingers conduct along from her lap while she carefully listens for corrections. When the song ends, the concentration previously on Phuong’s wizened face softens into a broad smile. No corrections.
Living the past eleven years in the high desert has given the 80-year-old grandmother plenty to smile about. Phuong moved to Santa Fe in 2014 at the request of her daughter, Terry Ngo, and son-in-law, Nick Stofocik, who moved to Santa Fe in 2012. They were expecting their first child when they beckoned for Phuong. She arrived shortly before the birth of Eleanor in June of 2013 and proved to be such a good grandmother she stuck around for the birth of granddaughter No. 2, Theodora, in 2017.
Phuong tells SFR she was drawn to Santa Fe first because of grandchildren but stayed because it’s a smaller community with plenty of benefits for retirees. Phuong says she likes that transportation for senior citizens is readily available when she has medical appointments or needs to go to the market.
Today, Phuong lives a quiet life in a square adobe home, surrounded by reminders of the country she fled half a century ago. In late March, fledgling potted fruit trees lined up along the sliding glass door, awaiting warm weather enough to allow them to join the garden in Phuong’s backyard. The backyard where, as Phuong’s granddaughters are happy to tell, she has on occasion engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a rogue squirrel.
“She’s not supposed to raise the rake up over her head,” Thea, 8, tells SFR.
The fire behind Phuong’s rake-raising against rodents burns from the same furnace behind Phuong’s escape from Saigon in April of 1975.
She was almost five months pregnant then and already a mother of two in April 1975. Living conditions grew increasingly chaotic in Saigon. The last week of the month, hostilities intensified, and a general feeling persisted that the end was near.
Courtesy Terry Ngo
Phuong and her husband, Hung Ngo, were so concerned about safety, they took their five-year-old son, Hien, to stay with his grandparents and kept 7-year-old Hai at their side. On April 29, all hell broke loose as US ships started evacuating refugees to the Sixth Fleet. The next day, the president of Vietnam resigned at 10 am. When heavy bombing in Saigon followed, it was clear to Phuong and Hung, who fought for the South Vietnamese Army, it was time to flee. They scooped up young Hai, who was “forced to grow up fast,” and climbed aboard a small, overcrowded commercial fishing vessel that set sail for the open sea. To Phuong’s heartbreak, bombing activity kept them from recovering little Hien, who would stay with his grandparents in Vietnam for nearly another five years.
Courtesy Terry Ngo
The overcrowded boat Phuong and Hung boarded eventually was picked up by a Dutch ship that took them to Hong Kong. They spent six months in Hong Kong, which is where their first daughter, Ha, was born. The growing family was next flown to Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. The family spent 45 days in the resettlement camp where more than 20,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees waited to be processed for sponsorship.
Sponsorship eventually came from Buffalo, N.Y. They arrived two days after Christmas in 1975. Eight months after their harrowing journey began, Phuong and Hung’s family found a modicum of peace. As much peace as a mother could have knowing one of her children was still in harm’s way. But by the time Hien made it home in 1980, he had a new little brother, Thomas, who was two. Then, in 1982, Phuong gave birth to her second daughter, Theresa. Phuong and Hung spent the next 30 years living and raising a family in upstate New York. The family lost Hien at the age of 37 after a sudden and tragic bout with seizures. Hung Ngo passed away in 2020. After her husband passed, Phuong left Buffalo for California and lived there until Santa Fe beckoned.
Sitting on her couch recounting the tale, Phuong’s face can’t hide the undercurrent of pain. Listening to her granddaughters sing the Vietnamese alphabet is respite. Shortly after the recitation, Phuong fetches a couple of overstuffed photo albums and plops them on a large wooden coffee table. Thea and Ellie immediately seize upon them, rifling through a myriad of faded photos.
“Is that Uncle Hai?” Thea asks her mother.
“Yes,” Terry says. “And that’s Ba when she was much younger.”
“Reallly!?!”
As her granddaughters dive deeper into their family history, the pride is evident in Phuong’s eyes. She smiles from across the room for a moment before shuffling towards the kitchen to heat up some pho she’s prepared as an after-school snack for the girls, passing a Vietnamese family altar and a detailed map of Vietnam along the way.
Terry Ngo tells SFR her mother is a de facto matriarch among local Viets.
“Many Vietnamese community members see her as a second mother,” she says. “We are blessed to have my mother live in the same city as us. She helps us with cooking, watching the children and raising them in a multicultural family.”
Catalyst for Community
Before becoming pregnant, Terry Ngo hadn’t thought too much about Santa Fe’s Vietnamese contingent. This month, it’s practically the only thing on her mind.
She just crossed a very special gathering off her to-do list and next up is the monthly picnic she organizes on April 27, but the day before is an ambitious open-mic event at the Santa Fe Public Library. The exploration of the Vietnam War's enduring impact will include a reading by local Viet author Christina Vo (My Vietnam, Your Vietnam), poetry readings, personal narratives, songs, and performances. The first event is Saturday (April 26) with another set for May 10 as part of National Asian American Month.
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Before motherhood, Terry was “a starving actor” in New York who did some teaching on the side. The Buffalo native finished her Theater Arts Degree at Emerson College in Boston in 2002, then worked her way through New York City as an actor and hospitality pro at City Bakery for the next decade. Working at a bakery ultimately led Terry to her husband. She met Nick Stofocik for the first time at his birthday party. A co-worker garnered the invite, and they brought him leftover pastries as a gift.
“I guess he found that attractive,” Ngo tells SFR.
They married in 2011 and soon after visited his brother and his wife living in Santa Fe.
“We fell in love with it,” Terry Ngo says. “We just couldn’t imagine bringing up a family, working and being able to afford rent in New York.”
Terry had taught a toddlers’ class in Manhattan at the Goddard School before moving and used the experience to land a job at Temple Beth Shalom Preschool. She was there for six years. During that time three major events occurred: the birth of her two daughters and the COVID-19 global pandemic. Luckily, her mother was already in Santa Fe when the pandemic arrived. Ba first came to help out with Eleanor, but quickly fell in love with Santa Fe, too, and ended up staying for the birth of Thea.
Motherhood was the catalyst for a deep dive into Terry Ngo’s cultural identity with an assist from forced isolation.
“It was during the pandemic,” Ngo tells SFR. “We were all cooped up, and I was just looking for some other Asian kids for my kids to play with. Even before that, when we would go to the store, they (her daughters) would get all excited if they even saw another Asian person. ‘Look, mom, an Asian person, an Asian person!’”
Courtesy Terry Ngo
Ngo started hunting for play dates with some of the Asian families she found. She even found some granny-playdates for her mother. Then Ngo got interested in connecting with Asian adults and families, which led to potluck picnics for Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians. In May of 2023, she hosted her first picnic. The group included only a few families. Today, the monthly invites to Ragle Park go out to more than 250 people.
“It started out with me wanting to expose the girls to their culture,” she tells SFR. “But pretty soon it was clear there was a real appetite among the local Asian community to get to know each other.”
Ngo, who studied acting at Emerson, is also a filmmaker, writer and director, and inevitably added traditional music and dance to the occasions.
Last August, she began a new job at Santa Fe School for the Arts & Sciences, teaching theater to grades 3-8. She teaches seventh and eighth graders how to make movies, whether for the big screen or TikTok. Teaching the kids helps motivate Terry to be dogged about her own work. Work that includes Granny Boot Camp, which won Best Comedy at the Madrid Film Festival, Santa Fe Resident, and Santa Fe Resident Too. Santa Fe Resident, starring her mother Phuong Vu, won second prize at the Film Fronteras-Micro Film Festival.
Terry’s pride in her Vietnamese culture and embrace of being a second-generation refugee is evident in her community-building and the way she raises her daughters. She includes them in short films and performances shining light on the Vietnamese diaspora, including a short video they made to promote the upcoming commemorations.
In the video, Terry stands behind her mother, who is flanked by Thea and Ellie. First to speak is Ellie, who says, “We’re so glad Ba survived the fall of Saigon.”
Terry follows with: “Because if she didn’t, there wouldn’t be me.”
“Or me,” Ellie retorts, patting her chest.
Thea adds an “Or me” before Terry closes: “And we wouldn’t know what a Vietnamese sniff-kiss is.”
Then she and her daughters smother Phuong Vu with nose-first kisses about the head and face. Seated in her kitchen and surrounded by love, Phuong Vu fires back with wild kisses for each of them.
Bringing it Home
Gathered around a long, wooden outdoor dining table at the home of chef Hue-Chan Karels, local author Christina Vo says, “The dirty little secret about Viets is the only reason we like to gather is for the food!”
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When Vo and Ngo discussed the need for a special potluck this April, they thought, “Who better to host it than the woman whose restaurant, Alkeme at Open Table, was shortlisted for Best New Restaurant in America by the James Beard Foundation in 2023? Who better than a woman who, like Phuong Vu, left Vietnam 50 years ago this month?”
April’s potluck at Karels’ home was specifically for the Vietnamese contingent of the Asian community. The menu included traditional foods like banh cuon (steamed rice crepes), banh hoi (sauteed vermicelli bundles), thit nuong (grilled pork skewers), and Goi Ngo Sen (lotus root salad) plus all the expected fresh herbs and vegetables for a typical Vietnamese celebration.
The gab, the garb and the good times were all in commemoration of a tragedy most of the attendees didn’t experience personally, but the host was among the exceptions. Hue-Chan Karels is a refugee survivor and success story. She and her family fled their home in Saigon on April 23, 1975. She described it in detail to SFR in a recent 3 Questions column, describing plans to return on April 23, 2025. Those plans include eating the same meal she had the day she left 50 years ago: banh cuon. The same banh cuon at the center of the smorgasbord of Vietnamese cuisine arranged on her patio.
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“I can only imagine the emotions that will surface,” she tells SFR. “It’s a homecoming journey and those are about reclaiming—reclaiming home, reclaiming your identity. Whether you were born in Vietnam, like myself, or born outside of Vietnam, like many others, the sense of being Vietnamese resonates.”
“That ties into the origin story of the Vietnamese people,” she continues. “Ironically, our country was born through the diaspora of two beings who loved each other but couldn’t live together—the Mountain Fairy and the Dragon from the Sea. Their love bore 100 eggs, but no matter how much they loved each other, and honored each other, there were too many differences between them so they couldn’t be together. So, they part ways. Each takes 50 eggs, the fairy takes hers into the mountains to the north, the others are taken south to the sea with the dragon father.
“So, the irony is through the separation, through diaspora, the Vietnamese people and Vietnam as a country originated. Now, thousands of years later, through many wars, but most recently the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese have populated the world. And yet they still have a thread to each other. This invisible thread that is always there. So, whether I meet somebody (Vietnamese) for the first time, in whatever country it is, there is a feeling of camaraderie. Sitting down and breaking bread or breaking rice, we are one.”
