THESE ARE DAD'S OLD ARTWORK FROM THE 1980s THAT USED IN THE FILM:
July 19, 1981: While living with a foster family for the summer in Kearney, Nebraska, Dad, an eighth grader, painted this "April 1979" watercolor on paper, based on memory of "Akuna," the ship that saved him and 67 other people on his boat twenty-one months earlier, in April, 1979, from the Thai pirates in the South China Sea.READ MORE ABOUT THIS PAINTING ON FACEBOOK
November 21, 2009: Thirty years after being rescued by a ship in the South China Sea, at our home in California, Dad found a photograph of "Akuna" for the first time on the Internet. He was amazed with how incredibly close his 1981 watercolor painting of Akuna is resembled to the real vessel.
LINK TO FACEBOOK POST
Late Summer 1981: Dad painted this watercolor, "The Boat," from memory of his own boat that he used to escape from Vietnam with his cousins in April, 1979. This painting was given to Mrs. Joan Fortune, Dad's former junior high school art teacher from Kearney, Nebraska, while Dad was an 8th grader in her art class. At the time, Dad stayed temporarily with Mrs. Fortune at her one bedroom apartment in Kearney, Nebraska, while his social worker was searching for a new foster home. Mrs. Fortune later requested Dad to call her "Mom" because she was acting as his guardian, while he was in transitions between foster homes and teen shelters in Nebraska.
March 2010: Dad traveled from Sacramento (Calif.) to Denver (Colo.) to visit Mrs. Joan Fortune. He brought along old greeting cards and letters that Mrs. Joan Fortune wrote to him in 1980-81 to let her see and read them again. He also get to see his favorite watercolor painting, "The Boat," almost three decades later.
LINK TO "ANGEL" VIDEO
ABOUT DAD'S 2010 DENVER TRIP
TO VISIT HIS FORMER
JUNIOR HIGH ART TEACHER
ON YOUTUBE OR ON FACEBOOK
1988: Dad created this block print "April 13, 1979" for one of his art classes at Kearney State College (University Of Nebraska, Kearney) in the summer of 1988. This picture depicts the night his boat faced violent sea storms at the Gulf Of Thailand, in the South China Sea, immediately following deadly Thai pirate attacks.
READ "APRIL 13, 1979" – A SHORT NEWSPAPER ARTICLE DAD WROTE IN 1999 FOR THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BOAT JOURNEY, ON FACEBOOK
Feb. 9, 1992: Dad created this cutaway diagram to show how him and 67 other people were hidden in the secret compartment in the bottom of the boat. The graphic was published in The Orange County Register with a front-page story about his boat journey. While working as a news-graphic artist for this newspaper in Santa Ana, California, Dad returned to Vietnam for the first time -- almost 13 years after his escape -- to visit his family in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City.) The Register sent reporter Melissa Balmain Weiner and photographer Ana Venegas to Vietnam along with Dad to help him document his return trip.
VISIT "RETURN TO VIETNAM 1992" SPECIAL COVERAGE BY THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
