On April 30, 1975, Ty Banh’s family was on the tarmac of Tan Son Nhut airfield in Saigon, waiting to board a flight to a new life and a new world.
They weren’t leaving on their own accord. They were fleeing. The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong were descending on the city. For days, they heard artillery volleys outside the city, growing louder and closer as the hours passed. By the end of April, the bombing was within 20 miles of the South Vietnamese capital.
Vy’s father, Chau Cao, had to leave − quickly. He was a member of the Vietnamese Air Force, working with the Americans as a navigator on AC-119G Shadow gunships, known as the Flying Boxcar, used mostly to disrupt supply lines on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Vy Banh’s mother Anh-Thu CaoI, right, and her father Chau Cao before he was sent off to learn how to fly in Vietnam.
If he had been captured by the North Vietnamese, it would have been imprisonment at best and a death sentence at worst.
His wife, Anh-Thu, had followed her father into the restaurant business – the family owned 13 restaurants in Saigon, known, kind of, as the McDonald’s of Saigon, Vy said. The restaurants, called Pho Tau Bay, were renowned for their pho, a noodle soup in a savory broth that is a Vietnamese staple. The name translates to “airplane soup,” an homage to her father’s service.
Aunt, Nga Buu, right, would later save the family from hotel price gouging in Houston and offered them to come to Lancaster where they stayed for nine months getting on their feet. The photo was taken around 1970-71 in Vietnam.
They had 16 extended family members ready to board a flight in the hold of a C-130 cargo plane. They crowded into the hold of the plane – there were no seats – and took off, landing at Clark Air Base in the Philippines.
They left everything behind.
They had $13.
Eventually, the family would settle in America. They would have to start over.
Little did they know that they would have to start over, yet again, after finding a home in the United States.
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Rice & Noodles Vietnamese Eatery is housing in a small building that once housed a Chinese restaurant on the Lititz Pike in Lancaster, Pennsylvania just over a bridge from the Amtrak station north of the city.
Entering the restaurant, the smell of savory broth strikes you first. It smells homey, like a grandmother’s kitchen, if your grandmother had cooked Vietnamese food in a tradition that has stretched back several generations. Banh’s brother-in-law, Bernard Troung, mans the kitchen, overseeing the simmering of the broth that serves as the basis of the restaurant’s signature pho.
It’s a cozy place, by design, Banh said. It is a family-run place, the key word being family. At all times, Banh said, a member of the family is on premises.
Tradition is important. The pho recipe and the method for making the broth – simmered in a large open pot, its perfume wafting through the building – had been handed down over the generations.
The business germinated in Vietnam, and when Banh’s family fled Vietnam during Saigon’s chaotic fall 50 years ago, the family wound up in New Orleans, where they founded and operated a small chain of restaurants.
That’s where they were living in 2005, when they had to flee their home once again, this time because of a natural, not man-made, disaster.
Vietnamese Chicken Pho soup at Rice & Noodles Vietnamese Eatery in Lancaster, PA. The recipe and how it’s prepared date back from the restaurants in Vietnam that were closed during the war.
“You cannot live with the communists.”
It seems the family was always fleeing something.
Banh’s family has a record of escaping disaster. In 1954, nine years after Ho Chi Minh and the communist Viet Minh forces seized power in North Vietnam, her family fled for the south. Her mother once said, “You cannot live with the communists.” The family fled to the south, settling in Hanoi, the capital of South Vietnam.
Her mother started a restaurant, which grew into a chain of 13 restaurants. She was an entrepreneur; she had three restaurants at the age of 19. As the Vietnamese civil war escalated, her father joined the air force, training as a navigator at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Returning to Vietnam, Banh said, he served in the nation’s air force, working beside American aviators flying missions to support the war effort.
Vy Banh, left, and her mother Anh-Thu CaoI when they left the refugee camp in Arkansas and flew to JFK airport in April 1975.
The war, of course, did not go well, and when Saigon was being overrun, Banh’s family boarded a cargo plane, crowded in the hold of the massive aircraft with other refugees. The passengers were doused with sanitizer as they packed into the back of the plane. Banh was six months old at the time. She took her first airplane ride cradled in her mother’s arms.
They were only allowed to bring so much with them – a couple of suitcases packed with important papers and family photos. Everything – their homes, their businesses, their lives – they left behind. “My family was very well off,” Banh said, “but they left it all behind.”
It was a matter of survival.
The flight was supposed to deliver them to California, she said. Instead, they were taken to Fort Chaffee, an Army base near in western Arkansas, by the Oklahoma border.
Banh’s mother had a sister who had married an American G.I. in Vietnam and the couple settled in Peekskill, New York, in the Hudson Valley in north of the Bronx in Westchester County.
They sponsored the new refugees and put up the family – all 18 members – in their small house. Banh’s parents had heard from another aunt that the RCA plant in Lancaster was hiring, and they moved there, setting up house in the aunt’s house and working in the plant on New Holland Pike.
The jobs weren’t very secure. The plant manufactured picture tubes for televisions, which were giving way to newer technologies and overseas competition, and the couple was laid off in 1981, Banh said.
Exclusive book: How Katrina changed all of us
Vy Banh describes the first day after Katrina hit when they were hit with price gouging at a hotel in Houston where a $100 room became $1,000 overnight. It led the family to move and stay with an aunt in Lancaster, Pa.
When Katrina came
Chau and Anh-Thu decided to move south. They wanted to get back into the restaurant business, and the Gulf Coast, specifically New Orleans, seemed like the place to do it. The region has a large and vibrant Vietnamese community, working mostly in the fishing industry, a built-in market for the cuisine they specialized in.
They started out in Picayune, about 50 miles north of New Orleans, selling pho at a stand at a flea market in Algiers. By 1982, they moved to the city and opened their first restaurant in the states, Pho Tau Bay, in a cinderblock building in Metairie, just outside New Orleans, near the airport. They had an immediate customer base from the nearby Air Force Base.
By 2005, Banh said, the family had four restaurants, the original in Metairie, two in New Orleans and another in Gretna on the west banks of the Mississippi, all run by family members who adhered to the recipes that had escaped Vietnam with them.
By 2005, the family had lived by the Gulf long enough to know that when a hurricane was bearing down on the city, they had to evacuate. They had evacuated several times before 2005. “It was nothing new,” Banh said.
In late August 2005, as Katrina crawled its way through the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans, they prepared as they had previously. They closed the restaurants and told their employees to get out of Dodge. Banh and her family went to Houston, booking a couple of rooms in the Omni. “At first,” she said, “it was like a vacation, a family get-away.”
The early reports weren’t bad, she said. They had maybe a foot of water in their restaurant in the city. It appeared that once the storm passed, they would be OK.
Then, the worst happened.
They heard on the news that the levees that protected New Orleans broke, releasing a torrent of water on the city, the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard’s Parish. “We didn’t know what was going on,” Banh said.
The devastation was beyond words. Their restaurants had been flooded. One had been reduced to rubble. Everything they had worked for was gone.
Outside the family’s destroyed restaurant on Carrollton Avenue location in New Orleans that was destroyed by Katrina.
The family didn’t know what to do. They wanted to stay in the region, but that was made impossible by price gouging. Overnight, Banh said, the price of a room at the Omni in Houston jumped from $100 a night to $1,000 a night. Gasoline prices increased tenfold, she said.
They looked into renting an apartment in Houston until they would return home to New Orleans, Banh said, but even if they were available, the prices were exorbitant. The 22 members of the family, including one of Banh’s sisters who was eight months pregnant, needed a place to live.
Starting over – again – in Pennsylvania
Her mother’s sister offered them a place to stay. She lived in Lancaster, nearly 1,200 miles away. She was a widow and had a three-bedroom house with a half-finished basement and told Banh’s family they could stay there as long as they needed.
The family drove to Lancaster – paying premium gas prices in the South, another instance of price gouging – and settled in. Banh remembers they had to string curtains to partition rooms to house family members with some semblance of privacy.
She remembered her mother telling the family, “We may have lost material things, but we were all safe and we were all together.”
They believed they would be able to return. “We were on top of the world there,” Banh said. “We were making good money. We were expecting to go back and open up.”
It soon became apparent that returning to New Orleans would not be possible. The restaurants were gone. Insurance was inadequate.
“I had to deal with the insurance side of things,” Banh said. “We had no income. We still had mortgages and bills to pay. There was no reprieve. The insurance companies were so aggressive. We knew we had to start over, whether it was here or in New Orleans.”
A street in New Orleans after Katrina.
In October 2005, Banh and her husband drove back to New Orleans. They had to pass through checkpoints set up to keep people who didn’t belong in the city out. It was like something out of a dystopian movie. She never expected to encounter something like that in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Once they entered the city, she said, the smell struck her. “I’ll never forget it,” she said. “Rancid. I didn’t know what death smelled like until we drove into the city. It was horrific.”
The city looked like a war zone. “There were some places I didn’t even recognize,” she said.
They had been considering returning to New Orleans, she said, but after seeing the city, they decided against it. “We got whatever we could out of the restaurant and went back to Lancaster,” she said. “We were going to start over in Lancaster.”
“We’re all together and safe.”
In July 2006, she said, they found the building on the Lititz Pike, a turnkey operation that had formerly housed a Chinese restaurant. The building needed some renovations, and the family took it on, from tiling the floors to painting and repairing the structure. “We did all the work ourselves,” Banh said. “We couldn’t hire a contractor. We didn’t have the money.”
Rice & Noodles Vietnamese Eatery at 1238 Lititz Pike in Lancaster, Pa. on May 13, 2025.
The restaurant, through the family’s hard work, was successful. Ten years later, Banh said, they looked to open a second restaurant. At first, she said, they had hoped to start a stand in Lancaster’s Central Market in the heart of downtown. The market rejected them as being “too modern,” Banh said.
Instead, they found another building, on the corner of Prince and Orange streets downtown, and there opened a second one, called Sprout.
Sprout Vietnamese Eatery at 58 N. Prince St. in Lancaster on May 13, 2025.
Now, 50 years after fleeing Vietnam, and 20 years after fleeing New Orleans, the family has set down roots. “We’re sitting pretty here,” Banh said. “We feel really blessed to be in Lancaster.”
There are no hurricanes and no war in Lancaster.
“I consider us lucky,” Banh, who just turned 50, said. “We’re all together and safe. We were able to start over.”
More than once.
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Family fled Vietnam and then had to flee NOLA after Katrina