Her maternal grandparents—once wealthy landowners in North Vietnam—fled south after the French defeat in 1954 and establishment of Ho Chi Minh’s communist regime. Like her older brother Quang and younger sister Thuy, Van saw her father only a handful of times before he disappeared in a battle that also took their mother’s Life.  

Orphan by war, Van and her siblings were shuttled among a variety of custodians whose guardianship ranged from her grandmother’s stoic love to open abuse by other relatives. Later, her Aunt Thu married an older American who adopted the orphaned children: beginning a decade-long flight from the war and a narrow escape from massacre during a brief stay in the Philippines. Back in Vietnam, Van’s hope for a new life were crushed by a near-fatal collision on the eve of Saigon’s collapse.

Relocating with her adoptive parents to a small Texas town, Van worked two part-time jobs and graduated high school with honors, winning a Pell Grant to Oklahoma State University. Eventually she married her high-school sweetheart, Ronnie Choat—a U.S. Army paratrooper. Over the next few years, she gave him two sons before Ronnie died of cancer in the VA’s bureaucratic “hospital hell.”