I don’t usually work weekends, but on Saturday I was assigned to write a story about a Lunar New Year celebration hosted by the Vietnamese American community in northern Virginia. This annual two-day event has grown into a major event over the past eight years. More than 20,000 people were expected. It looked like fun.
A few days before, I called Thinh Dinh, one of the event organizers, to sort out the logistics. Thinh was friendly on the phone and happy that we were covering the festival, a fundraiser for his Vietnamese Catholic religious community.
Saturday morning, I arrived and met Thinh at the Dulles Expo Center, where the celebration was being held. He greeted me with a warm smile and a pat on the back. We chatted for a few minutes and I mentioned that my parents were married in Vietnam in 1965. Thinh, 60, was interested and asked why they were there. I told him that my mother, Ginger, had been a U.S. State Department nurse assigned to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Saigon and that my father, Matt, worked for Catholic Relief Services.
Thinh’s eyes widened. “Really?” he said. “My father also worked for Catholic Relief Services in Saigon. » In the 60s, I asked? Yes, he told me. Wow.
I asked Thinh what his father’s name was to see if my father, who is 89 years old, knew him. He told me it was Bai Dinh or Dinh van Bai, but that his name was also Joseph Bai.
I texted my dad, who was home in Pennsylvania, to ask if he remembered the name. It seemed a bit long, but there was a chance. My father responded immediately. He did! They hadn’t worked together for a long time, but he remembered Joseph Bai. He told me he was “a very pleasant guy and always smiling.”
And a few minutes later, my dad texted me a photo. It was my parents’ wedding day and it showed my father with staff members from Catholic Relief Services who had come to the small ceremony and reception. “I think it’s Joseph, second from the right,” he wrote.
I showed the photo to Thinh and his face lit up. “It’s him!” he said. We were both stunned to look at a photo from almost 59 years ago and on the other side of the world with both of our fathers in it. I don’t know what the chances of such a thing are. But it was like magic.
The paths that brought Thinh and me together on Saturday could not have been more different. Thinh told me that he, his father, his mother, Mary Cuong Nguyen, and three siblings fled Vietnam in 1975, crammed into one of the last helicopters to leave the American embassy before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. Their three-month trip to the United States for resettlement took them to the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, and then to Chesapeake, Virginia, where the family settled and built a new life.
When he arrived in Chesapeake, Thinh said, his father found a job as a night watchman in a warehouse, making $2.30 an hour. A few days later, he landed a second job as a mechanic for a local yacht building company. He later became an inspector for a marine survey company, where he worked until his retirement. Thinh said education was very important to his father, and Thinh and his siblings all earned degrees in electrical engineering at Old Dominion University. Thinh eventually got a job at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he currently works.
My parents left Vietnam a few months after their marriage and moved to Morocco, Kenya, and Haiti before returning to the United States in 1976 with their five children and settling in the Philadelphia suburbs. My father, who worked for Catholic Relief Services for 15 years, became a real estate agent. My mother was a public health nurse. I earned an English degree from Villanova University and, after changing careers, landed at the Post in 1999.
Sadly, Thinh’s father died in 2014 following a routine surgery. And my mother, who would have loved this difficult to understand story and who would always have wanted to return to Vietnam, died last year. They are still very present among us. Thinh later told me that the family hadn’t been able to take many of their belongings from Vietnam, so they didn’t have many photos of her father as a young man. This one, he told me, is “priceless”.
On Monday, I emailed Thinh to ask him what he thought when he saw the photo of our fathers together.
“My first reaction was ‘WOW,’ what a coincidence, and then I realized there must be a greater purpose for God to have this unlikely encounter,” he replied. “You have indeed started a beautiful story that has made my entire extended family excited to see where it goes.”
We hope to reunite our families soon.
