A new book commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first Southeast Asian arrivals in America after the fall of Saigon spotlights Pacific County’s role in the refugee resettlement effort.
New Land: Southeast Asian refugees finding home in Washington was written by John C. Hughes and Edward Echtle Jr. Hughes, former editor and publisher of The Daily World, will retire in July after 17 years as chief historian for the Office of the Secretary of State. Echtle, who has wide experience documenting Northwest Asian history, is his teammate at Legacy Washington.
Washington’s refugee resettlement program was launched by Gov. Dan Evans in the spring of 1975, with strong support from President Gerald R. Ford. Evans had watched in “stunned disbelief” as the evening news broadcast desperate scenes from Saigon. CIA employees and South Vietnamese civilians affiliated with the Americans were clamoring to board U.S. helicopters as communist troops closed in on the capital. Fearing reprisals, 100,000 refugees fled Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the next few days, many in rickety vessels. Millions more would follow.
When California Gov. Jerry Brown balked at accepting refugees, saying unemployment there was too high, Evans was outraged. The three-term Republican told a news conference: “This whole country and virtually everyone in it, with the single exception of the American Indians, came here as refugees in the first place. Most people came because they were either dissatisfied with where they were or were forced out of the countries in which they once lived. For us now to say that it is time for us to close the door just behind us, I think, is the worst kind of hypocrisy.”
Evans opened Washington’s door, and thousands of sponsors from all walks of life — from South Bend to Spokane — answered the call. Washington’s refugee resettlement program became a model for the nation.
New Land, which is what most of the refugees called America, includes oral histories of first-generation refugees and their descendants. Among them are Singkham and Soumountha Manichanh, who arrived on Willapa Harbor in 1982 with their American-born toddler, David. They had fled Laos a year earlier, reluctantly leaving behind two daughters, Phammala, 9, Nantha, 7, and a 5-year-old son, Bounhieng. How the family came to be reunited in South Bend is one of the most compelling stories in the book. The cover of New Land features David and Bounhieng, arm in arm at SeaTac Airport in 1988 after meeting for the first time. They went on to graduate from South Bend High School.
Their sponsors were David Gauger, then editor and publisher of The Raymond Herald, and his wife, Mary, whose nickname was “Rick.” Gauger had flown risky missions as a naval officer during the war in Vietnam. In civilian life, he became a vocal opponent of America’s “self-serving hubris in Vietnam.”
In 1979 the Gaugers and other compassionate Pacific County residents befriended the first Cambodian refugee family to settle on Willapa Harbor. The most recent Census had enumerated only 58 “Orientals” among Pacific County’s 15,800 residents. “The jolt of diversity” was important to Pacific County in many ways, Gauger says today.
News that there were jobs, friendly people and a growing Lao-Cambodian community on Willapa Harbor spread quickly among refugees who had landed elsewhere. One of those was Khammai “Mike” Thammavongsa, whom Singkham Manichanh had helped flee to Thailand. Thammavongsa had seen heavy combat as a captain with a CIA-backed Special Guerrilla Unit in Laos. Manichanh, a heavy equipment operator on U.S.-funded projects, was also a marked man.
David Gauger helped Thammavongsa secure a job at the Weyerhaeuser lumber mill in Raymond, while Manichanh became one of the best oyster shuckers on Willapa Harbor.
By 1993, some 400 refugees, mostly Lao and Cambodian, had settled on Willapa Harbor. Asian students soon comprised 12% to 18% of the local schools. The Gaugers alone had sponsored 40 refugees — most of them Lao, and about half of them children. Many of the now-grown-up refugee kids fondly remember how they were welcomed and nurtured by their teachers and church groups.
Touk Praseuthsy and Bopha Chan arrived in America as refugee children — Bopha at 4 in 1979, Touk at 6 in 1981. They were honor roll students at Raymond High School in 1993 when they were interviewed for a Daily World article about the “Asian population explosion” on Willapa Harbor. The new “normal” here was complicated from the beginning, Touk and Bopha remember. Way more so when the girls became teenagers, resisting their parents’ traditional cultural expectations, and determined to attend college.
It’s an understatement to say they have succeeded. Touk received an MBA from the University of Chicago and is now a managing partner of AltraVue Capital, a nationally recognized investment adviser in Bellevue. Bopha, who received a University of Washington master’s degree in social work, is with the King County Department of Public Defense.
In the decades after the first wave of refugees, millions more fled oppression and violence in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
“Tens of thousands came to Washington, where they have worked hard, raised families, and started businesses, weaving their cultures into the fabric of the Evergreen State,” Hughes writes.
In his preface to the 342-page book, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs — the proud son of a Japanese immigrant — writes that “Generations not yet born need to know who paved the way” for the landmark resettlement effort.
New Land ($30) will be available on May 20 through the Secretary of State’s website at www2.sos.wa.gov/store/#/items?category=3
Bopha Chan, left, and Touk Praseuthsy at Raymond High School in 1993. (Kathy Quigg / The Daily World) Bopha and Touk in 2024. (John Hughes photo / For The Daily World) Bopha Chan, left, and Touk Praseuthsy at Raymond High School in 1993. (Kathy Quigg / The Daily World) Bopha and Touk in 2024. (John Hughes photo / For The Daily World)
