When people run into Holly Nguyen in her northern Saskatchewan town, they can often tell she hasn’t always lived there.
When they ask where she’s from and the 31-year-old responds “California,” it triggers a question she’s heard many times: “What the hell are you doing up here?”
“As a Californian who’s come up to the North, there’s something about the boreal forest, these northern communities, the Tri community specifically, that just kind of enamors you and it works its way into your bones and your blood,” she said.
But much deeper than her connection to the place is the person who drew her to La Ronge, Sask. — her spouse, Kitten Chrispen.
The pair met online in 2007 when they were about 13.
Kitten Chrispen met Holly Nguyen (shown on screen) online, sometime around the age of 13. The pair spent years talking as friends. (Submitted photo)
As a queer autistic young person who’s struggled with mental health and suicidal ideation over the years, that connection was a lifeline, Chrispen said.
“When I met her and we started talking, things just clicked. I was like, ‘I want to be her friend.’”
That connection deepened into a crush, but at that age, she hadn’t given too much thought to her sexuality, or that she might be attracted to women as well as men, Nguyen said.
When Chrispen came to visit her in Anaheim just before Nguyen left for college, their relationship began to shift into a romantic one.
“When it comes to relationships, I’m a pretty slow burner,” Nguyen said.
“I have to process everything and whatnot. So it wasn’t until the second summer [of her visiting] that I made my move in the dorkiest way.”
Over the years of their friendship and relationship, Holly Nguyen, left, and Kitten Chrispen spent thousands of dollars on travel, ping-ponging between California and Saskatchewan to visit each other. (Submitted photo)
Nguyen recalled blurting out to her pen pal, ‘OK, do you want to do the dating thing for real?’
“She said yes. I don’t know why.”
It was everything Chrispen had spent years pining for, without knowing if it would happen.
“The magical time for me was right after we started dating,” she recalled.
That set off six years of ping-ponging back and forth, with Nguyen coming to visit Chrispen in La Ronge, and Chrispen visiting Nguyen in her then-home of San Francisco.
Holly Nguyen, left, found that visiting her partner, Kitten Chrispen, over the years gave her a love of the north and the boreal forest that surrounds them. (Submitted photo)
“I worked a lot and pretty much all of my money I sunk into like this long-distance relationship,” said Nguyen.
The couple discussed moving together to California, but there were some strikes against the idea.
“I watched Trump get elected into office in 2016 with my college class,” said Nguyen, adding that she could see the writing on the wall for more political turbulence ahead.
She’s since fielded many questions from other members of the LGBTQ community about how they too could move to Canada, she said.
Most of those inquiries tend to go nowhere, she noted. Data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada showing that the number of U.S. citizens applying for permanent residency in Canada has not fluctuated drastically in the last five years, and actually dropped in 2025.
For this couple, the deciding factor in choosing which country to call home came down to health care.
“Kit’s disabled … it did not feel responsible to bring her to America,” Nguyen said. Chrispen added that she needs access to her doctors and medications.
Nguyen proposed to Chrispen in the middle of La Ronge’s frozen lake on New Year’s Eve, 2018. They got married in 2022.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022, Kitten Chrispen and Holly Nguyen got married in Saskatchewan, which enabled Nguyen to move to Canada. (Submitted photo)
Moving to Canada since then has given Nguyen a different perspective from which to see her home country, an experience she described as “jarring.”
“It’s a little embarrassing, which is why I don’t come flying out of the gate telling people that I’m American,” she said, adding, however, that northerners have embraced her despite her roots.
“I’m always very humbled by how hospitable the northerners are to having somebody so far removed from the community … they’re very welcoming here.”
As a result of having Nguyen close by, Chrispen said she’s found she can breathe in a new way. While she still struggles with mental health and thoughts of self-harm, she’s found a new sense of home in her partner.
Kitten Chrispen, left, and Holly Nguyen say they revel in daily domestic life, having spent so much time apart during their long-distance relationship. (Submitted photo)
“I want to be here with her and I want to take care of her wife — who is me,” Chrispen said.
“I love that every day I get to go to bed and every night I wake up and she’s here.”
Having spent thousands of dollars and logged thousands of kilometres back and forth to see one another, they are reveling in the joy of being together every day in a domestic life in Saskatchewan’s north, insulated from the politics and clashes of the outside world.
“It’s something that if I wanted to replicate the dynamic that we have, I would have to be friends with somebody, slow burn with them for seven years and then cautiously just kind of feel my way out through it,” Nguyen said.
“It just makes me incredibly grateful for what we have. It’s not something at all that I’ll ever be able to find again if I were to ever lose it.”