Message in a bottle helps Viet refugees land in U.S.
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009As two Vietnamese brothers were floating in the Gulf of Siam in 1983 they found a bottle with a note in it. The message led to a friendship that helped the two and their families arrive in
the U.S. after two years in a Thailand refugee camp.
The touching story is featured on CNN as one of “5 amazing messages in bottles” - here.
The note in the champagne bottle was thrown by Dorothy and John Peckham overboard a cruise ship in 1979 during a trip to Hawaii. They asked anyone who found one of their bottles to write them back, and even went so far as to include a $1 bill to cover the postage.
Four years later, on March 4, 1983, John’s birthday, the couple received a letter from Hoa Van Nguyen.
Hoa, a former soldier in the South Vietnamese Army, said he and his younger brother had found one of the Peckhams’ bottles as the two men were floating in the Gulf of Siam.
Hoa and his brother were boat people escaping communist Vietnam. When Hoa and his brother saw the bottle, they felt as though a prayer had been answered, giving them the strength to carry on, they said.
They would land in Songkhla in Thailand. Songkhla was one of the largest refugee camps in Southeast Asia and was among the most dangerous to get to as Thai pirates crowded the Gulf of Siam, robbing, killing and raping Vietnamese refugees.
The statement (click 

this defendant’s brother, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Two weeks ago, several community groups in San Jose, Viet and non-Viet, protested the shooting and presented a petition with a thousand signatures calling for the D.A. to open grand jury proceedings. (In the picture are Daniel Pham’s mother, his older brother, and the brother’s ex-girlfriend.)
Trang Nguyen, 52, was in jail for two days before he was released early morning on Sunday on bond, Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s records show.
Assemblyman Van Tran, known for his fundraising prowess, pulled in a modest $91,809, according to his campaign disclosure 

