Phat Chiem talks about starting The518.com newsletter over Zoom with his wife, Karley Sullivan, who extended a vacation a few days in Mexico City while Chiem returned to Albany.

Phat Chiem, 51, who fled Vietnam among a wave of "boat people" at age 6 in 1979, sits behind his office desk in an upstairs bedroom of their Grand Street rowhouse in Albany's Mansion Hill neighborhood.

Phat Chiem in front of his 1874 brick row house on Grand Street in Albany’s South End. He relocated from Los Angeles and loves the city’s architecture and arts offerings and celebrates its cultural life in The518.com online newsletter.

ALBANY — Phat Chiem was 6 years old when his family fled Vietnam in 1979.

Four years after the fall of Saigon, Chiem’s family joined hundreds of thousands of other “boat people” who made a perilous escape by sea. They had sided with the United States military in fighting the North and faced persecution from the Communist regime after the U.S. withdrawal.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

An estimated two million Vietnamese risked their lives in crowded and often unseaworthy vessels. The mass exodus grew into a humanitarian crisis as tens of thousands of refugees died at sea from starvation, disease, storms and attacks from pirates.

Chiem, now 51, has almost no memory of the ordeal other than fleeing “under the cover of darkness” and “bobbing for days on the South China Sea.”
An only child, Chiem joined his mother, grandparents, aunts and uncle. They eventually made landfall and ended up at a refugee camp in Malaysia. They made their way to America and settled in Costa Mesa, Calif., in the “Little Saigon” area of Orange County. His mother found assembly work in factories.

That is where Chiem’s improbable journey — he did not speak any English when he arrived — through the ranks of American journalism began. Stints as a reporter and editor at the Fresno Bee, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune, followed by editing........

© Times Union