Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the July/August issue of LDS Living magazine. The theme for the issue was Finding Peace in which we explored the incredible reality that when our hearts are in tune with the Savior, personal peace is possible.
Phong Bounmixay knew it wasn’t true. There was no way the Soviet Union had weapons strong enough to destroy the sun and the moon. But he also knew not to challenge his teacher. So he sat quietly.
In 24 short hours, 14-year-old Phong’s life had become a nightmare. It was 1975, and communists had taken over Laos. One day, Phong and his family were relatively wealthy; the next, too poor to afford enough food. Any TV or music not sponsored by the government became illegal. Phong’s schoolteachers were suddenly replaced by officials preaching total loyalty to the new government. For the hour of physical education per day, each child was given a shovel and told to dig a six-by-eight foot square 10 feet deep. Why? To create a lake that would supply the government with fish.
Cheerful neighborhood gatherings filled with everyone’s favorite foods stopped. Strict curfews started. Phong’s daily freedom and future opportunities were stripped away. For the next three years, he was forced to watch executions for the smallest sign of resistance (like challenging a schoolteacher’s outrageous claims). Even innocent, powerless children were shown no mercy. Phong knew he couldn’t keep living like this, horrified and disturbed day after day.
So he decided to risk escape.
Phong would swim three miles through an alligator-infested river patrolled by military vessels to freedom in Thailand, an agonizingly risky plan to undertake.
But that risk paid off beyond anything young Phong would’ve let himself imagine. The day he slipped around trip wires down to the riverbank, he’d never heard of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The 17-year-old who learned to cook to survive a refugee camp never envisioned he’d minister through egg rolls and chicken satay as an elders quorum president.
Most importantly of all, Phong didn’t yet know he had a Savior who could heal him from the painful memories of his youth. But in a few short years, he found Him. Despite everything, Phong found peace. His story may help you believe that you can too—that Jesus Christ, the one pure source of peace, can heal you from even the deepest hurts of this life.
“Nothing can do what Jesus can,” Phong says today. “All we have to do is trust in and follow Jesus Christ, [then] everything’s possible.”
The Escape
On the day of his escape, Phong told his mother one thing, while his heart screamed another.
Phong loved his parents very much; they were peaceful Buddhists who raised their 15 children to live good lives. Each evening, the children were to be home by 6:30 p.m., so they would not risk being outside after the government’s 7 p.m. curfew.
At 5 p.m. Phong told his mother he was going running with friends.
“She told me, ‘Make sure to come before 6:30.’ I said ‘OK,’ but in my mind I said to her, ‘This will be the last time I see you, Mom,” Phong remembers.
Then he and four friends carefully dodged the guards patrolling the river. For 45 minutes, they slowly crawled down the bank, warning each other when they saw tripwires. Then the boys slipped into the water and began to swim.
After an hour and a half of quietly swimming beneath the surface, carefully coming up only briefly for air, one of Phong’s friends yelled out, “We’ve been caught!” Phong turned to see a military boat coming toward them. But the boat passed by, not noticing the boys. Soon after, the friends could feel vibrations in the water as the boat opened fire down the river on someone else. Knowing the military was distracted, the boys began swimming hard. Then one of Phong’s friends yelled out that his legs were cramping.
“I told him to hang on my left arm and I tried swimming with my right. But a couple of minutes later he slipped away from me, and I lost him,” Phong says.
After three hours of swimming, three exhausted teenagers stumbled into a refugee camp in Thailand in 1978.
‘I’m On My Way’
The camp was crowded. The boys wandered around looking for a place to stay until an older gentleman handed them a machete and told them to cut bamboo and build their own shelter.
“Life was not easy,” Phong says of the camp. “But it was better than Laos because we had freedom.”
Food was scarce, so they learned to catch and eat anything that moved: rats, snakes, grasshoppers. About once a month the three of them were given a raw chicken and three pounds of rice. None of them knew the first thing about cooking, so Phong took it upon himself to learn. He started a fire, and on his first attempt, he burned all of the food. He resolved in that moment he would learn how to cook.
After two years, a sponsor made it possible for Phong and his friends to immigrate to America. Phong landed in Maryland, not far from where his father had trained to be a doctor. He was “so happy” to have a job as a dishwasher and his own apartment, but America wasn’t the ideal dream he’d expected. He knew only three words in English (yes, no, and OK); the food, cold weather, and traditions were different; and he frequently had to physically defend himself at train stations and bus stops where people tried to rob him.
“I was fighting physically and emotionally,” he remembers. After he had been living in the US for almost a year, an opportunity arose to go to someplace out West called Pocatello, Idaho. Phong’s only question was how many people lived there. When he learned the population was quite small compared with Maryland, he said, “I’m on my way.” And he caught the next Greyhound bus available.
Life would be much better for Phong in Idaho—and not just because there were fewer people.
A Spirit on the Mountain
Upon arriving, Phong soon met an unexpected friend: a white man who could speak Thai.
“I was shocked that a white man like Rod could speak Thai and ate Thai food,” Phong says, noting that his grandmother was from Thailand, so he knew the language. “We instantly became best friends. I just loved him because he speaks similarly and eats the same food.”
Rod Johnson had recently returned from a Latter-day Saint mission in Thailand, and he soon invited his new friend to come to a young single adult camping activity at a place called Scout Mountain.
“That was the first time I met really, really nice people [in the US],” Phong remembers. “I didn’t have to look out for myself anymore. I felt something that I couldn’t describe: something different, something good.”
Phong told Rod about what he’d felt on the campout, and Rod invited him to meet with missionaries.
“The first time the elders told me that Heavenly Father sent His Son to die for me, I said to them, ‘How do I know? That is too good to be true,’” Phong recalls with great emotion as if the moment were yesterday. The missionaries encouraged Phong to read the Book of Mormon and pray sincerely to receive an answer to his question.
“I fasted for three days, and I prayed—and I felt it. I knew it was true,” Phong says. He was soon baptized, in 1981. “How lucky I am not just to escape from home to regain my freedom, but ultimately to join the Church and take the fruit of the tree. The fruit of the gospel is so amazing; it heals. I feel love, I feel peace. I really believe that Jesus Christ brought me here. . . . I could not believe what He did, His sacrifice, His Atonement. There is nothing that can heal me but Him.”
Finding His Parents
Since arriving in America, Phong had tried to write his parents but had heard nothing back. Three weeks after his baptism, he was shocked and delighted to receive a letter from them. A few years later, after the communists left Laos, Phong eagerly invited his parents to come and visit him.
Because of government restrictions in Laos, his parents had to visit separately. His mother came first, and when Phong picked her up from the Salt Lake City airport, she knew something was different about him.
“On the way home she asked me, ‘Son, are you still practicing Buddhism?’ I said, ‘No, Mother, I don’t believe in Buddhism anymore; I believe in Jesus Christ,’” Phong told her. The more he explained his experiences and beliefs, the more at ease with his choice his mother became. But she warned him that when his father came to visit, it wouldn’t be good.
“When I [later] picked him up, the first word from my father was, ‘You disrespect me. I know you don’t practice Buddhism anymore,’” Phong says. Phong assured his father he loved him and tried to explain his decision, but his father was too angry to listen. After a few tense weeks in Pocatello, Phong’s father decided to leave and go visit his brother who was living in Rhode Island. Before he left, Phong gave him a Book of Mormon.
“If you want to know your son, read this book,” Phong told him. “He took it but didn’t promise to read it.”
Three months later—to Phong’s total shock—a missionary called and said he had just baptized Phong’s father. Two elders had knocked on the door where Phong’s father was staying. His uncle had chased them off with a gun, but the elders felt inspired to go back. Again, they were told to leave. But one of the elders felt strongly they had to go back one more time. This time, Phong’s father saw them, recognized who they were, and invited them in, saying, “I want to know my son.”
After receiving the news of his father’s baptism, Phong immediately called him.
“I said, ‘Hello, Brother Bounmixay!’ And he said, “Hello, Brother Bounmixay!’” Phong fondly remembers. “He came back to stay with me, and it was just joyful. I couldn’t believe it.”
Brother Bounmixay’s Egg Rolls
Phong is a beloved member of the Pocatello community and his Latter-day Saint stake. He has served in many capacities in the Church over the years, most recently as elders quorum president.
“He gets the gospel. He knows that it’s all about love,” says Adam Bradford, Phong’s longtime neighbor and friend. “Brother Bounmixay is always there with sticky rice and egg rolls. He will absolutely serve in every capacity, and as a result, he really knows everyone in the ward. He exemplifies service to a degree that I just don’t think a whole lot of people really do.”
Just like his family had in Laos before the communists arrived, Phong organizes gatherings with all his favorite dishes for his neighbors. He will make hundreds of his famous egg rolls to help with youth fundraisers, he’s cooked the ward Christmas dinner several years in a row, and his Fourth of July breakfast draws a crowd of over 150 people.
“I think people go just to see him,” Phong’s friend Karen Murphy says. “Everybody is so busy, but they go because they want to see him. … We didn’t even know him when we first moved in, and then all of a sudden, he was like our guardian angel. …You can just see that he loves his Savior without question.”
Phong married his wife, Roni, in 1999 in the Idaho Falls Temple. They have six children—a miracle to Phong, who in his youth “never thought I would have my own family.” Over the years Roni has seen how practicing gratitude for all the beauties in life has helped Phong maintain a sense of peace.
“He’s really thankful. You cannot sit through a prayer where he does not thank Heavenly Father for the freedom to worship. That’s top on his list,” Roni says. “And so I think … that’s how he maintains peacefulness is just being able to say, ‘I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful for that.’ Even looking back on memories that are tough, there’s still gratitude—he will still find every story he possibly can to share about all the good things that happened, even when it was tough.”
Phong seems to not take a single day—or blessing—for granted.
“I feel it was just yesterday [I came to America],” he says. “I know that we are children of Heavenly Father and He loves each and every one of us, and He wants us to return home to him. He has a plan for every one of us. He provided a way by sending His son Jesus Christ to die for us, to atone for us, and to make it possible for us to return. Because of Him, anything is possible.”
Find more stories of faith in the links below.
▶ A father separated from his family was broken by addiction. His story of conversion is nothing but miraculous
▶ A new film about missionaries’ daring WWII escape is coming—read 3 miracles behind the movie
▶ What I’ll never forget about my grandparents’ loving reaction when I chose to join the Church
▶Berklee grad’s story of returning to the Church is as inspiring as his new music
Read more in the LDS Living July/August magazine
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