Familiar Faces

by Madelyn Rosenberg

An American Dream

At 23, she arrived on U.S. soil with little more than the clothes on her back. Today she’s a bank president.

GROWING UP IN South Vietnam, Sonia Nga Johnston wanted to learn English so she could communicate with the American soldiers she saw on the streets of Can Tho. It was her passion, she says.

One day, Johnston (whose name then was To Nga) noticed a soldier carrying a bag on his shoulder. “My Mamasan do laundry,” said the 14-year-old, attempting to make conversation by finding something in common. The soldier followed her home, assuming she meant that her mother did laundry for soldiers.

“My mother said, ‘I don’t know how to do American clothes!’ ” Johnston recalls. But she took his laundry anyway. The soldier kept coming by, and others, too.

“That’s how we started,” says Johnston, now regional president for John Marshall Bank in Arlington County. She still laughs at the misunderstanding. “We started doing a laundry business and I started learning English [from the customers]. When you learn a foreign language, you cannot be shy. You have to be willing and able to make mistakes.”

From then on, she was always armed with a Vietnamese-English dictionary. Little did she know English would become her ticket out of a country ripped apart by war.

During her teenage years, Johnston’s language skills earned her a job at the U.S. consulate in Can Tho, where she served as a translator and accountant, and assistant manager for the commissary.

When the outlook turned dire for the South Vietnamese—“there were bombs, people running, people dying in the streets,” she says—the consulate offered her a chance to leave the country. She had to decide quickly whether to take it.

“Go,” said her parents.

So it was that on April 30, 1975, Johnston found herself standing on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, waiting for a helicopter. She was 23.

“I was scared,” she says. “You have no idea where you are going. I never left home before.”

She carried a small handbag with a change of clothes, a nightgown, photographs and a personal directory of the family she was leaving behind. The pilot said he could take her or the handbag; not both.

She boarded the helicopter, and then a 747—her first time on a plane. Engine problems forced the plane to land near Con Son Island, home to a prison camp for North Vietnamese political prisoners known as the “tiger cages.” The plane’s passengers sat in the darkness, waiting for other transportation.

At last, a helicopter arrived, carrying Johnston to a U.S. Marine ship with an opening for planes to land—“a huge mouth, like a fish.” It was 11:45 p.m. when she boarded the Marine vessel and heard the radio announcing the fall of Saigon. “The communists had taken over our White House; our palace,” she says. “We lost our country and I would never be able to go home. It was the saddest day of my life.”

From the Marine ship, Johnston was transferred to a bigger American ship packed with thousands of refugees who would come to be known as “boat people.” Many were getting sick—from starvation, the heat, the rolling ocean waves and the food on board. Again, Johnston saw death. Again, she used her English.

She told the crew the food was part of the problem—that they were serving things Vietnamese people were not used to eating. The ship captain asked for ideas and Johnston had them. She asked if the ship’s galley stocked rice, chicken and vegetables. “I ran around and asked for women volunteers who could help me,” she says.

They gathered in the kitchen, cooked for 24 hours, and handed out cups of rice and chicken soup to passengers— not enough to ease their hunger, but enough to sustain them.

After a 10-day voyage, the ship arrived at Wake Island in the Pacific, more than 3,800 miles from Vietnam. Johnston again volunteered to translate, this time on behalf of American officials in the refugee settlement office. She asked a steady stream of asylumseekers: “Where do you go? Who do you know in America?” (Her own answer to that question: Her former supervisor from the consul’s office, Glenn Rounsevell, who lived in Falls Church.)

It was nearly the Fourth of July, 1975, when Johnston flew to California to start a new life. She was anxious to reach her family in Vietnam, but had been cautioned not to send letters directly, for fear that her parents and brothers would be killed if the communist government knew she’d escaped.

She wrote to a friend in France, who then mailed her letters to Can Tho. She didn’t know if her family was still alive. “Many did not make it,” she says of other South Vietnamese citizens who had tried to leave.

After six months stateside and still no response, Johnston visited a Baptist church. She’d been raised Buddhist, but she was feeling desperate and prayed to anyone who would listen.

“I said, ‘God, if you want me to believe…I want to find out if my immediate family is alive.’ I just cried for help.”

The next day, she received a letter from her father.

“I felt a miracle in my heart,” she says. She asked the pastor to save her and was baptized a few weeks later. But it would still be years before she saw her family again.

In 1976, Johnston moved to Northern Virginia, following her former boss from the consul’s office in search of career opportunities. Three more years would pass before the first 14 of her family members finally fled Vietnam on a fishing boat.

It was a tough voyage. They were raided by Thai pirates, who stole everything. They finally made it to a refugee camp in Malaysia, only to be turned away because it was already flooded with people.

Then, while being towed to another camp, the rope holding their fishing boat was cut, leaving them stranded at sea until a fisherman helped them to a small island off Indonesia. They stayed there for almost a year, building a shelter and eating fish.

A letter—with no stamp—finally reached Johnston’s Fairfax home in December of 1979. In it, her brother had drawn a map showing the island’s location.

Johnston had no idea how it had gotten to her without postage, but she took it to the American Red Cross in Arlington and asked for help tracking down her family. “They searched every island for six hours and finally found my family and brought them back to the refugee camp,” she says.

Over the next month, she lined up four Baptist Church sponsorships to bring her loved ones to the United States. Two of her sisters-in-law were pregnant. She was able to bring them all to Northern Virginia with the help of a refugee settlement program, and was personally waiting at the airport when they arrived. Today, her family in the United States numbers 50.

In 1992, she married Warren Johnston, an American soldier she had known in Vietnam. “The love of my life,” she says.

In America, Johnston’s career has been in banking. She started as a teller and worked her way up. She says she loves helping her community and connecting with peers. Even during Covid, she spends her days in the office. She misses her customers.

Johnston also serves on the boards of the American Red Cross (which helped locate her family so long ago), the Arlington Chamber of Commerce and the Arlington Community Foundation.

“It’s the American dream,” she says. “I am so grateful for everything this country gives to me.”

For years it was hard for Johnston to talk about the experience of leaving her homeland and the life she knew. Recently, her niece Mary—born just after the extended family reached America—began asking questions about their family history.

Mary, now living in San Diego, made a YouTube video about the family’s against-all-odds journey to the U.S.

“I asked her where she learned all of that,” Johnston laughs. “She said, ‘From you, Auntie.’” ■

Madelyn Rosenberg is the author of the children’s book Cyclops of Central Park and co-author, with Wendy Wan-Long Shang, of Not Your All-American Girl. She lives in Arlington with her family.