When Saigon fell in April 1975, Quan was three years old. The reunification of Vietnam under communist rule transformed the circumstances of many Vietnamese families, particularly those of Chinese ethnic background who were associated with commerce or with the South Vietnamese establishment. Over the following years, hundreds of thousands of people left Vietnam by sea, often in difficult and dangerous circumstances.
The Quan family’s departure followed that pattern. They paid for passage — Quan has described gold sheets being used, the hard currency of a family liquidating what it had — and they left by boat. The conditions on such crossings varied widely: some were brief and manageable, others were harrowing. Quan has spoken of his family’s journey in his own words, describing the refugee camp in Hong Kong where they spent about a year, without reconstructing the specific circumstances of the sea crossing itself. His mother, he has said, raised the children to believe in themselves and to believe that the impossible was possible. Whatever the crossing involved, they arrived in Hong Kong, were processed through the refugee system, and eventually received sponsorship from the United States government.
The family reached Los Angeles. They settled in Chinatown — a community that could absorb new arrivals from Southeast Asia, where the language was closer to familiar, where the networks of mutual aid and immigrant commerce provided some footing. They were among the hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees who arrived in California in the late 1970s, part of a generation that built new lives in circumstances that required resourcefulness and endurance before they required anything else.