List of people including non-restrictive appositive

Edwin's suggestion is good, but it needs the serial comma to be clearly parsed as four: "Viroj, his wife Pranom, Joan, and I ..."

The "spousal appositive" commas can be safely dropped (regardless of any additional wives). Garner offers flexibility:

“This is not a hard-and-fast rule, and many publications ignore commas with a name as a short appositive of relationship, for two reasons. The first is stylistic: the written comma <my husband, Bob> does not reflect any audible pause in the spoken sentence <“my husband Bob”>. The second is practical: enforcing the rule would require finding out how many brothers the subject has before deciding between his brother Blair or his brother, Blair, and that can be a lot of effort for a small payoff.”

Excerpt From: Garner, Bryan. “Garner's Modern English Usage.” Oxford University Press, 2017-09-09. Apple Books.

In this specific case, the reason would be clarity of meaning, which supersedes all else.

CMS says to use semi-colons in complex lists with other punctuation so I think it's technically correct if not ideal. I believed I needed to set off 'his wife' from Pranom as it is merely adding extra information and is non-essential to the understanding of the sentence.

I have now discovered that non-restrictive appositives can also be set off with dashes or parentheses so @Jason Bassford's advice is good. I take his point about the ordering of her name and her description but this book is a product of its time and wives are very much accessories in it!

@Marcellothearcane and @BillJ are also correct according to CMS: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas/faq0031.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas/faq0034.html

Although: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas/faq0085.html