Viet D. Dinh - Personal Life

Personal Life

His family was separated in 1975 when his father, Phong Dinh, was imprisoned as a war criminal after the fall of Saigon. His father was being held as a political prisoner in the family's war-ravaged homeland. He escaped in 1978, and remained a fugitive in Vietnam, when his mother, Nga Thu Nguyễn, and his older siblings got on a boat with 85 other people and set out. For 12 days Dinh was in a broken 15-foot-long boat with no food or water as they encountered a Thai fishing crew that gave them food and gas, and helped fix the boat and pointed them toward land. When they reached Malaysia they were met by gunshots from a patrol boat; the Malaysians didn't want them. Their boat docked but Dinh's mother realized that the port police would force them to leave the next morning, so she sneaked back out to the boat alone that night with an axe and damaged the boat so as not to be sent back on it. After six months as refugees in Malaysia, Dinh's family arrived at Oregon in November 1978. They picked strawberries for menial wages, sending money back to Dinh's father and a sibling hiding out in Vietnam. After Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, the crop damage forced his family to relocate to Fullerton.

Dinh was honored by his high school alma mater when he was added to Fullerton's wall of fame. He will share that wall with an ideological opposite, David Boies, former Vice President Al Gore's lawyer for the Florida recount.

Dinh was reunited with his father in 1983. In 1992, he was reunited with one of his sisters at a refugee camp in Hong Kong, a meeting filmed by the newsmagazine show Dateline NBC.