Without luck and fate, restaurateur Evan Vang would have never ended up in Norfolk.
“My dad came from Laos,” Vang says. “They had come here from the refugee camps in Thailand.” The Hmong people, Vang explains, had fought alongside Americans during the secret wars in Southeast Asia, and when the U.S. withdrew, they were largely left to fend for themselves by making a perilous journey across the Mekong River in search of a new life.
In the late 1970s, a Virginia Beach woman named Mary Lee changed that for the Vang family…