Remembering Thuy Trang

Thuy Trang (Vietnamese: Thùy Trang, December 14, 1973 - September 3, 2001) was a Vietnamese American actress. She was best known for her role as Trini Kwan, the first Yellow Ranger of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise.

Early life

Trang's father was a soldier in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and was defending the capital Saigon from the Communist Vietnam People's Army during the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Communist forces overcame his battalion, which was low on ammunition and air support, during a fierce battle. He decided to return home to retrieve his family, but the route was blocked by the North Vietnamese Army. Fearing for his life, he fled South Vietnam and was given political asylum by the United States. He vowed to bring his family to the United States and contact U.S. government officials to politically pressure the Communist government of the unified Vietnam.

In 1975 the rest of the family (Thuy, her mother, two brothers and a sister) were forced to flee Saigon and in 1979 they secretly boarded a cargo ship along with hundreds of other persecuted Southern Vietnamese traveling to Hong Kong, with the ultimate aim of reaching the United States. Trang herself was very ill at the time and almost did not survive.

Upon arrival in Hong Kong, Trang's father petitioned the U.S. government for political asylum for his family. After some time living in a Hong Kong detention camp, Trang and her family were reunited in Little Saigon, California in 1980. The reunion would be short lived, however, as her father would die of cancer in 1982. Trang began to study kung fu around the age of nine.

Trang graduated from Banning High School and earned a scholarship to study civil engineering at the University of California, Irvine, planning to follow her father and older siblings into engineering. However, around 1992 she was approached by a talent scout, sparking an interest in acting.
[edit] Acting career

During 1984, Trang played a small role in an advertisement for Scientology, though she herself was a Buddhist.[1]

Through the talent scout she got small roles in a couple of TV commercials/advertisements before getting her first major role in 1993 when she landed the role of Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger, on the original cast of the TV series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Trang was on the show for about one and a half seasons. She left the show along with Austin St. John and Walter Emanuel Jones, with whom she became very good friends, and was replaced by Karan Ashley. She went on to play Kali, one of the lead villains in the 1996 movie The Crow: City of Angels.

Earlier the same year, she also appeared in Spy Hard as a manicurist. However, she was incorrectly credited as a masseuse, her credit being somehow switched with Tara Leon, who played a masseuse in the same short scene.

She was set to appear in Cyberstrike, which never entered production. Trang also appeared in a video documentary called the The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts in 1995 as an interviewee.
[edit] Death

Trang died in a car accident at the age of 27 on September 3, 2001 near San Francisco, California. She and former actress/model Angela Rockwood-Nguyen (Dustin Nguyen's wife), to whom Trang was to be a bridesmaid later that year, were passengers in a car traveling on Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. They were returning from visiting Rockwood-Nguyen's planned maid of honour when the driver (another of the bridesmaids) of the vehicle she was riding in lost control. The car swerved violently across the road before hitting the roadside rock face and flipping several times before hitting the safety rail and plunging over the bank. [2]

Rockwood-Nguyen, who has claimed both that she was[3] and was not[4] wearing a seat belt in different interviews, survived despite being thrown out of the vehicle through a window before its final impact; she is now quadriplegic. Trang, who was believed not to have worn a seat belt, died from the injuries she sustained. The driver did not suffer any lasting injuries.

Her Power Rangers co-stars Amy Jo Johnson and David Yost attended the funeral and memorial service.[5]

Trang was cremated a week later on September 10; her ashes are interred at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California.

The episode "Circuit Unsure" of Power Rangers: Time Force was dedicated to her memory.