BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – America is a nation of 335 million immigrants, each of us with histories of ancestral relocation we may or may not have learned. Those migrations may have involved Ellis Island, work visas, a gap in a border fence, or an ancient ice bridge. Few stories, if any, surpass that of Huong Le in terms of harrowing encounters with danger. The soft-spoken timepiece repairman overcame war, conquest, oppression, starvation, sharks, pirates and turbulent, at times violent seas to escape the communist takeover as a member of one of the most storied migrations in world history -- that of the Vietnamese boat people. He and his son Raymond run a modest little watch repair and used-clock business right at the split of eastbound 23rd and westbound 24th streets in downtown Bakersfield. In 1975, Huong, a sailor in the South Vietnamese Navy, watched in anguish as the last Americans helicoptered out of the capital city of Saigon. For seven years he and his family lived under the yoke of communism, yearning for the simple freedoms of the past. Many of his countrymen yearned for that freedom as well, and starting almost immediately after the North’s victory, they started making their escape from communist Vietnam by way of the most feasible avenue available to them -- the sea. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, from 1975 to 1995, between 200,000 and 600,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea. During that time, 800,00 made it to relative safety. “A lot of people haven’t experienced it,” Raymond Le said. “Once you’re actually on there, it’s death.” The refugees used any vessel they could find -- fishing boats, trading boats, recreational boats, home-crafted boats, many of them absurdly small or ill-designed for the undertaking.  In 1982, Huong Le, a 32-year-old university mathematics professor, decided that he must try.  “We put together money, my friend and I … and built a boat again,” Huong said. “Because the boat (had) no engine that we built. We pay to buy a India engine. One cylinder…that’s all.” He built the boat, ostensibly, for his sister’s Mekong Delta farm, but it was not suited to the ocean with its flat bottom and that single-piston outboard. He stocked it with as much fresh water and dried grain as possible.  Even though it was just 8 meters long and less than 2 meters wide, he packed it with 26 people, including five family members, his 30-year-old wife Lan Pham; 9 year-old Khanh, who today goes by Raymond; 7-year-old Khang; 5-year-old Khuong; and his 18-month-old daughter, Vykha, pronounced Veeka. They set out from the provincial coastal capital of Bến Tre and headed southeast, flying the nautical flags Charlie and November, which separately signify yes and no but which, together, signify distress. Emptying the fields: Mass deportations, consequences in Kern County Some of the Vietnamese boat people never made it into the open sea. If they were not stopped and, on occasion, killed by military patrols, they were stranded on sandbars, where they often met an especially cruel fate. As the tide came in, so too did the sandbar sharks. Huong Le, pronounced Lay, was not a navigator in the Navy, but he knew enough to time his vessel's departure so as to avoid detection -- and consumption. They initially headed southeast to get some distance away from coastal patrols, using an old Army compass, careful to avoid not only Vietnamese military vessels but also the many islands of Vietnam’s southern periphery, where communist authorities might spot them. “Maybe they kill me,” Huong said. Huong captained the tiny, narrow vessel, standing at the stern, rudder in hand. His wife Lan held tightly to Vykha. In the quiet darkness of night, a cry from the infant within earshot of military patrols could be the end for all of them.  Off the coast of Thailand, they narrowly avoided pirates -- thieves and killers on small, fast boats who boarded slower moving refugee vessels in the Gulf of Siam. They raped women, stole valuables, seized meager provisions and then, not infrequently, murdered their victims. According to the United Nations, in 1981, 80 to 90 percent of the refugee boats reaching Thailand were attacked by pirates, many of them several times, but somehow Huong’s boat avoided them. They traveled south by southwest toward Malaysia, going four and-a-half days without seeing land, too weak and exhausted to fish, their minuscule rations dwindling, rainwater their only salvation. Huong remembers the day his one and only rationed mouthful of grain was blasted out of his hand by a gush of water before he could eat it; he went without that day. They saw huge tanker ships that might have rescued them, but all passed them by. Then one night they saw what appeared to be a flame on a distant horizon. Desperate, starving and taking on ocean water from a crack in the bow, they turned toward it.  “One more day,” Huong said, “I know the boat will sink.” By dawn it had come into view -- an offshore oil rig platform that had been flaring off excess natural gas. They asked to come aboard the Conoco rig but the American supervisor said he was banned from allowing such boardings.  Despite that rejection, in desperation, 23 of the refugees clambered onto the platform, huddling on an empty lower deck, out of sight of the rig hands, while Huong and two others set out on their small boat to find help. They found it -- a small cargo vessel that agreed to take them aboard, and then transferred them to a larger cargo ship. It brought them to Ku Ku Island, a refugee camp in the Indonesian Anambas Islands, east of Malaysia. It was a harsh place that held Vietnamese arrivals in military tents prior to their refugee-screening interviews and subsequent transfer to other camps.  In Huong’s case, that was to Galang Island, in the Riau Islands of Indonesia. A quarter of a million refugees passed through Galang during the height of the exodus. It was here that U.S. officials checked Huong’s papers and, seeing that he had served in the South Vietnamese Navy, authorized his family’s immigration to the United States. Their arrival at Los Angeles International Airport in May 1983 was a wondrous day. The family moved around over the next 20 years – Springfield, Oregon; San Antonio, Texas; and several Northern California cities. It was at a Sears store in Oregon that the mathematics professor opened his first watch repair shop.  Three years ago Huong and most of his family moved to Bakersfield to be near their family’s youngest, Vykha, the baby they had managed to keep silent at critical times along their journey. Vee Maldonado, as she’s known today, is married and working as a social worker for a veteran’s services office. Huong opened his watch repair business in 2021, replacing and restoring the inner workings of timepieces large and small -- new, old, and ancient.  Providence gifted him and his young family a great blessing -- time together, spent living in peace -- almost a half-century ago. Now he restores time for his Bakersfield customers, many of whom have no idea what it took for him to get to this place of relative peace and tranquility.