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Since the first boat people came to Canada in the 1970s, noodle houses have become as
synonymous with Calgary cuisine as steak houses. We started out wanting to explore
the cultural impact of a hot bowl of pho, then discovered that the most meaningful
stories behind this city’s Vietnamese restaurants don’t appear on a menu.
by Jeremy Klaszus
Much More Inside:5IF4LJOOZPO8JEF-FHHFE+FBOT 3PZBM8FEEJOH,JUTDI 8IZ*BO5ZTPO4IPVME-FBEUIF4UBNQFEF1BSBEF
photographed by Randy Gibson
photo illustrations by Courtney Lawson
Since the first boat people came to Canada in the 1970s, noodle houses
have become as synonymous with Calgary cuisine as steak houses.
We started out wanting to explore the cultural impact of a hot bowl
of pho, then discovered that the most meaningful stories behind this
city’s Vietnamese restaurants don’t appear on a menu.
by Jeremy Klaszus
S
usan Nguyen remembers every detail. The boat. Its faltering engine. The changing colour of the sea. The dolphins. An impossible circumstance that still has her saying in wonder, almost 30
years later: somebody was watching over me.
Nguyen, a slight 53-year-old who wears her hair pulled into a
girlish ponytail, spends her days at Saigon Y2K on Crowchild Trail,
across from McMahon Stadium. She and her husband Philip Le, 51,
bought the popular Vietnamese restaurant in 2007 (it’s not connected
to other Saigon Y2K spots in the city, and got its name thanks to previous owners, who opened the restaurant during the Y2K bug scare).
Nguyen is responsible for the culinary side of the operation, overseeing the bowls upon bowls of satay beef noodle soup and rice vermicelli
that are hurried from kitchen to table. “We serve the food very fast,”
she says. “Some people even comment that it’s like fast food.” Le, 51,
handles the business end, swiping credit cards and jotting down takeout orders at the bar.
Each day, anywhere from 300 to 600 people eat at Saigon Y2K.
Thousands more eat at the many similar Vietnamese restaurants that
dot Calgary’s cityscape, evidence that Vietnamese has quietly become
the default cuisine in a city traditionally known more for its steak
houses than noodle houses. While it’s easy to get a hot bowl of pho,
it’s also easy to forget—or never learn—the incredible tale behind the
Vietnamese who call Calgary home. Time passes and arrival stories
are forgotten. But not for Nguyen. “I have my past,” she says. “I can
never forget it. And there are a lot of people like me.”
Looking at Nguyen, who confidently tells her story with animated
hands, it’s hard to imagine her clinging to a flimsy, overcrowded fishing
boat in the middle of the South China Sea, preparing to die at 25.
But that’s what happened.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
It was 1983. Susan Nguyen stood on a corner outside her home city
of Hue in central Vietnam listening for a car horn—specifically, four
consecutive honks. That was the signal. When she heard four honks,
she was to jump in and ride the few kilometres to the coast. The driver,
whom Susan had never met, would be her ticket out.
It had all been prearranged. A mechanic came into town to buy
engine parts earlier that day and spread the word that there was one
spot left on a boat. Whoever could pay with gold would get the spot—
but the lucky person would have to leave that night. Susan’s family,
descended from royalty and relatively well-off, paid up and got the
spot. More than a million Vietnamese had already fled the country on
rickety boats, risking encounters with Thai pirates and typhoons in an
effort to reach packed refugee camps in Malaysia, Thailand, Singa-
58&/5:4&7&/
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
pore, the Philippines and Hong Kong. From there, many ultimately
settled in countries including the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Then it came: beep-beep-beep-beep. Four honks.
Australia and Canada.
The mechanic took Susan to his home in the coastal village, where
Like those who had fled Vietnam before her, when she looked around they would spend the night. This was the risky part of the operation.
her homeland Susan saw a country without freedom or hope. Communist She could be easily identified in the village as an outsider. “If anybody
revolutionaries had seized power in 1975, taking control of Saigon, and spotted me, they could put me in prison,” she says. That night, she hid
while the dramatic fall of South Vietnam’s capital city signalled the end under the bed.
of the Vietnam War and the exodus of U.S. troops allied with the South
Usually, people fleeing on boats do so under cover of night. But
Vietnam government, it didn’t mean the end of Vietnamese suffering. this time an unusual escape plan had been devised to throw off the
Quite the opposite. Those connected with the defeated government lived soldiers that patrolled the coast. Somebody in the village started a
inconstant fear of persecution and saw their rights stripped away by the rumour that a few boats would try and escape at night. “So all the
new regime. Entrepreneurial families like Susan’s—her mother ran a soldiers waited on the coastline all night long,” Susan says. “And they
pharmacy, gas station and convenience store—were derided as capitalists felt cold and tired.” In the morning, a man in the village prepared
and had their property confiscated. The regime set up so-called “reedu- a big meal and invited the weary soldiers into his home. Thanks to
cation camps” in the jungle, where those affiliated with the former gov- the distraction of the man’s feast, the escapees—including the cook’s
ernment were subjected to hard labour, malnutrition and
daughter-in-law and grandson—were able to sneak
communist indoctrination.
out undetected by the soldiers.
At least Susan had
Susan’s father, who had been part of the South
The departure didn’t go unnoticed by other villaVietnam army, was exactly the kind of person that
gers,
however. The boat was built for 20 people. The
survived her failed
the communists held in the dreaded camps. He likely
owner planned to take 30. As the boat took off, many
attempts. Hundreds
would have been in one had he been alive. But he was
onlookers tried to clamber on board. The boat crashkilled in a 1968 massacre at Hue, along with thouers tried to blend in with those who had arranged pasof thousands of
sands of people connected to the South Vietnam
sage, and the boat’s owner and a few other men started
Vietnamese died
government. Susan was 10 when her father died. Her
throwing people back into the water, forcing them to
mother, not yet 40, was left to raise 10 children alone.
swim back to shore. “They knew these people were
trying to flee their
The youngest wasn’t even a year old.
not related to the operation,” says Susan. In the end,
homeland on boats.
“She promised in front of my father’s grave, ‘I will
52 people, including Susan, remained on board as the
bring up all our children to have university educaboat sputtered away. The vessel sat perilously deep in
tion,’” says Susan, the fifth child.
the water, its brim rising mere inches above the surface.
In high school, Susan studied English through an American-VietThere were two ways to reach Hong Kong. The boat could set
namese association. She continued her English studies at university, out toward Hainan Island, hugging its northern coast and continuing
but only for half a year. “They cut off my education,” Susan says of west along mainland China’s southern coast, following it all the way to
the new government. The same thing happened to many others with Hong Kong. That was the long but safe way. Or the boat could cut dirparents who had ties to the old regime. “We saw no future there.”
ectly toward Hong Kong, more than 900 kilometres away, passing east
Susan had already tried to escape twice—the first time with a young- of Hainan Island. “But we needed a good compass and a good sailor,”
er brother and sister. They had made it to the tiny escape boat without Susan says. They had neither, yet that was the direction they went.
getting caught. That boat was to meet a larger boat offshore that would
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
take them out to sea. But when the would-be refugees moved onto the
big boat, people started screaming. The police lay in wait. There was The boat was three days at sea when the refugees encountered hope in
no getting away. Susan and her siblings were put in prison. Her little the form of a giant oil tanker.
brother was quickly released, but Susan and her sister remained jailed
They pulled up to the ship to ask for help. In response, the workers
for three months before her mother got them out through bribery.
on the tanker sprayed water hoses at the refugees to chase them away.
Susan’s second escape attempt was initially successful. She had gone In retrospect, Susan can understand why—“maybe they couldn’t
with another brother and his wife, and this time, the boat made it out of jeopardize their jobs”—but at the time she couldn’t believe what she
territorial waters. Suddenly, her brother and two other men got violently was witnessing. “In my naive, simple mind, I thought, ‘If I go out there
ill with heavy diarrhea. “I said, ‘I can’t go on like that. If I get to free- and see a ship, they will rescue us,’” she says. “I felt so sad. Because
dom and my brother dies, then… no, I cannot do it.’” So they turned they were human, and we were human.”
back to Vietnam, returning a different way to avoid detection.
The dry humans on the tanker and the wet humans on the fishing
At least she had survived her failed attempts. Many others weren’t so boat parted ways.
fortunate. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died trying to flee their
A storm hit and blew the refugees even further off whatever was
homeland on boats. Still, to Susan, the possibility of escape was worth the left of their course. The men tried to drop the anchor but it didn’t
risk. This is why she stood by the side of the road, listening for the signal. reach the bottom.
58&/5:&*()5
They had no idea where they were. The engine was failing. The
ocean was no longer green, but purple. “When it turns to purple,
there’s no way back, no way in, no way out,” Susan says.
There was no point in going anywhere. The boat was almost out
of gas and the refugees were out of water. The best option was to
stay put and hope for a miracle rescue rather than guessing at Hong
Kong’s direction.
The boat people prepared for death. A young mother took a rope
and tied her three children around herself, so that when they died,
they would be close together.
Susan felt calm, grateful she had no little siblings to worry about on
this journey. This is the end, she thought.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
It is 2011, and Susan Nguyen is sitting at a table in her busy restaurant in a
plain strip mall in snowy Calgary, far from the green and purple of the South
China Sea. “I’m not boasting,” she says. “If I hadn’t been on that boat, everybody would have died.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
The boat had been sitting idly for about half an hour when a school of
dolphins suddenly appeared, playfully surrounding the boat.
After flipping around for five minutes, the dolphins lined up on
each side of the boat, all facing in the same direction.
“And people said, ‘Follow the dolphins,’” Susan remembers.
The boat travelled with the dolphins for maybe an hour. Then,
just as suddenly as they had appeared, the dolphins were gone. Once
again there was nowhere to go.
Within minutes a fishing trawler came into view. The boat made
circles around the refugees, sizing up the situation before dropping a
container of food and gasoline into the sea.
The aid drop presented a dilemma. The refugees could pick up the
goods and hope there was enough food and water in the container to
survive until they reached land. But they would still be lost, with no
idea as to where Hong Kong was. As well, if they picked up the drop,
the people on the trawler would likely assume the Vietnamese could
manage on their own and leave.
Hungry, thirsty and desperate, the refugees held back, letting the
container bob around on the water.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
The trawler returned. Its gifts remained in the water, untouched.
Nobody on the refugee boat could speak Chinese, but Susan could
speak some English. This is why she would say, almost three decades
later, that she saved the lives of the people on her boat.
She yelled at the trawler for help. Those on board couldn’t hear
what she was saying but came closer and then invited her on board.
Susan took a man with her and went on board, where there were
eight people. The owner, a fisherman, had two daughters—one was
Susan’s age—and they both spoke some English. Through the girls,
Susan was able to lay out her plight to the father, explaining how if
they took the aid drop, it would only delay their death at sea, as they
were completely lost and the engine was ready to give out.
The fisherman was only a few days into a trip that was supposed
to last for two weeks. He explained that if the refugees had taken the
container of goods, he would have left and continued his work with a
clear conscience. With that option gone, he told Susan that he would
not leave the refugees to die, even though he’d likely get trouble from
the Hong Kong authorities if he brought the boat people with him
into port. He asked how many people were on the little boat.
Fifty-two, said Susan.
I can’t allow 52 people on this boat, he replied. However, he agreed
to let the women and children on board. The men would have to stay
on the little boat and be towed behind.
When Susan returned and delivered the news, the men tried to
push aboard the trawler along with the women. Susan held them off.
“I said, ‘You don’t come. If you rush up, they will speed away.’”
About 20 women and children boarded the trawler. The fisherman
gave Susan rice and fish so she could cook for everyone. She passed
meals down to the men on the boat—but there was a problem. The
tiny boat was being violently tossed in the big trawler’s wake, making
its passengers extremely seasick.
That night, they called to Susan. You have to let us go up there, they
said. Susan went to the fisherman and pleaded on the men’s behalf.
He agreed to let them board—but they would have to stay outside on
the deck. Only Susan and a woman who was helping her with meals
would be allowed inside. Susan had to promise that her companions
would agree to those rules.
“I had to beg people, ‘Please behave. Don’t do anything bad, because I am the one who’s responsible for everything.’”
One of the women, the young mother who had tied her children
to herself, was so deeply moved by the fisherman’s generosity that she
offered him her gold jewelry as a small thank you.
He refused the gift, saying that what he was doing was from his heart.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
It took three days for the trawler to reach Hong Kong. At port, immi-
58&/5:/*/&
gration officials interrogated the refugees. Eventually they were convinced that no, they hadn’t paid the fisherman anything to smuggle
them in, and yes, they had been legitimately rescued.
By this time, more than 100,000 Vietnamese refugees had poured
into Hong Kong. To deal with the flood of newcomers, Hong Kong’s
prison department had set up closed refugee camps, including one on
Lantau Island. Chimawan Camp, surrounded by a 25-foot-high fence,
was essentially a prison for refugees. That’s where Susan and her companions were told they were going.
At the dock, before leaving for the island, an American TV news
crew interviewed her.
Do you know they’re putting you in a closed camp?
We know, Susan replied.
Then why did you come? To be put in prison?
My country is even worse than a prison, because you have no right to
do anything, said Susan. You work hard, but aren’t allowed a reward.
What are you hoping for?
To go to school and work with my two hands, she said.
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
There were two ways of escaping Vietnam: leaving by boat, or travelling overland through communist Cambodia to refugee camps on the
Thai border.
Philip Le, Susan’s future husband, took the latter route. He had
gone to medical school in Hue after the communist takeover, but like
Susan’s education, his was cut short. He was drafted to fight for the
Vietnamese army in 1978 when Vietnam invaded its western neighbour, Cambodia—a country Vietnam historically sought to dominate—in response to border skirmishes initiated by Cambodian Khmer
Rouge forces. Vietnam swiftly captured the capital city, Phnom Penh,
effectively ending Cambodia’s genocidal Pol Pot regime. Philip spent
four years in Cambodia and remembers making grisly discoveries
under spots of tall, green grass. “We’d step on it, and suddenly we’d
sink into it and it smelled so bad,” he says, explaining that a hand or
limb might become visible. “We would cover it again and tell the local
government.” Not all the evidence of genocide was hidden underground. “You could walk in the field and see the bones scattered all
over,” he says.
After his military service ended in 1982, Philip faced a choice. He
could return to medical school in Vietnam, where his family was on
the brink of starvation. (His mother and father had been teachers before 1975, but were fired when the communists took power.) His other
option was to try and sneak into a Thai refugee camp. If he could do
that and ultimately fly to Canada, Philip reasoned, he could bring
his family over to join him. He wanted to go to Canada in particular,
because his medical school had been built by a Canadian aid agency
and Canada had also sent a small number of peacekeeping troops to
Vietnam during the war. “I had a good impression,” he says.
Philip decided not to return home after being discharged from the
army. Instead, he walked about 200 kilometres into Thailand, a clandestine journey on difficult terrain littered with landmines. He moved
only by night to avoid being caught.
He safely made it into Thailand, then was put in a Thai prison for
a few months before being transferred to a refugee camp. There, he
contacted the Canadian authorities and asked to go to Canada. The
answer was yes.
“I am so lucky,” says Philip, a reflective man, “because half of my
friends perished on the border, and the other half were killed by boat, perished on the sea. Even now, we still don’t know what happened to them.”
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
It’s hard to imagine now, but before 1975, Canada’s Vietnamese
population would fit inside the Jack Singer Concert Hall. The Canadian government took in only a small number of “boat people,” as
the Southeast Asian refugees came to be known, in 1976. But with
each passing year, Canada pledged to take thousands more: in 1978,
the goal was 8,000. In 1979, Joe Clark’s minority Conservative government opened Canada’s doors wider, allowing private groups to
sponsor refugees, which put Canada’s total at 50,000 refugees, most
of whom had lived through experiences very similar to Susan’s and
Philip’s. After learning of the desperate circumstances of the boat
people, many Canadians opened their wallets and even their homes to
refugees, giving what they could to help them resettle in a new land.
“In the long run, I don’t think these people are going to have serious
difficulties,” said 22-year-old federal immigration officer Scott Mullin
at the time. “All the refugee movements that we’ve had in Canada—
be they the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Ugandan Asians, whoever it
happens to have been—have in the long run done well. And we have
to look upon it, I think, for ourselves as an investment in the future.”
Not all Canadians were keen on this policy. Some called talk- radio
5)*35:
programs and wrote letters to newspapers complaining that they bloomed—Susan in Edmonton, Philip in Calgary. “We didn’t even know
didn’t want those people here, that they wouldn’t be able to adapt and each other,” he laughs. “We fell in love only talking over the phone.” It
Canada shouldn’t be responsible for solving the world’s humanitarian was enough: the two newcomers decided to marry in 1985 and had
problems, et cetera. CBC TV took flak from some viewers for broad- a daughter and a son, now in their 20s. They also sponsored Philip’s
casting a three-hour benefit program “for Canada’s newest arrivals, family to come to Canada (Susan’s family chose to remain in Vietnam).
Susan enrolled in an electrician employment program at SAIT,
the boat people.” The National Citizens Coalition bought newspaper
ads warning that 50,000 refugees would likely become 750,000 as the ultimately working as an inspector for GE. Philip also went to SAIT,
earning a diploma in medical laboratory technology and going on to
refugees sponsored their families.
Ron Atkey, the immigration minister of the day, openly slammed the work at the old Calgary General Hospital and Calgary Laboratory
National Citizens Coalition’s campaign as fearmongering, noting that Services. They quit those jobs when they bought Saigon Y2K, trading
many of the refugees’ relatives had already died at sea. “In that sense, successful careers for the physically taxing but spiritually rewarding
this ratio is a cruel hoax on the Canadian people,” he told CBC Radio, job of running the restaurant. “People enjoy my country’s food,” Sucalling the 750,000 stat “a total fabrication.” The Clark government san says. “I’m proud of it.”
The transformation into small-business owners was also influenced
didn’t back down, and when the Liberals retook power in 1980, they
quickly announced that Canada would take 10,000 more boat people, by their son, a hemophiliac. The gene for the blood-clotting disorder
runs in Susan’s family, and one of her nephews in Vietnam, just a
bringing the total to 60,000.
Atkey was right. At the time of the 2006 census, there were boy, died after he hit his head and didn’t receive proper care. In April
2007, after returning from a trip to Vietnam to deliver
180,130 Canadians of Vietnamese origin in the
blood products to doctors, they said to each other, we
country—not even a quarter of what the National
“I
came
here
with
will need more money if we want to keep doing this. So Philip
Citizens Coalition predicted.
asked around and discovered that the original owners
two
empty
hands.
I
• • • • • • • • • • • • •
of Saigon Y2K wanted to sell. “But I didn’t know it
It was 1984. Susan was on Lantau Island in Chimawan don’t say I’m rich but was so hard,” he says. At first the couple worked 12 to
Camp in Hong Kong, where she spent her nights in a I have a house, I have 14 hours, seven days a week. They have since trimmed
it down to 10 hours six days a week.
building crammed with hundreds of other refugees.
a car... I can have
Today, Susan and Philip rarely talk about how they
She had told the American TV reporter that she wantcame
to Canada. Asian culture, Philip explains, puts
ed to work, and in the refugee camp, that wish was
anything as long as I
country first, then the family, then the individual—pretty
partly granted, thanks to her knowledge of English.
work hard. ”
much the opposite of Western culture. “A lot of people
Susan worked in the camp’s welfare office as a translasuffered way more than us,” he says. “We are one of the
tor, earning a bit of money. The job had additional
perks: when a pregnant refugee was ready to give birth, Susan accom- few lucky ones.” When the couple does open up about the past, they repanied her to the hospital in Hong Kong to help translate. “I felt useful veal a surprisingly strong belief in the goodness of humanity. Susan tells
a story to illustrate why this is so. Soon after moving to Calgary, she
in those times,” she says, describing her life in the camp as “okay.”
Her living situation was crude but better than that of many Viet- became pregnant. She was working at a fabric store, under a supernamese refugees who were trying to find new homes in the late ’70s visor who made sure she wasn’t burdened with any strenuous work
and early ’80s. Many of those who survived impossible sea voyages like that could be done instead by other employees. After Susan’s daughter
Susan’s received no welcome when they finally reached land. Some was born, the supervisor came and visited her at home. These were
countries like Malaysia and Singapore decided they had already ac- simple gestures—but they left a lasting impression. “I still remember
cepted enough refugees, and started towing boatloads of people back her kindness and understanding,” Susan says. “People here are full of
out to sea, where many died. At one point there was even talk of kindness. There are some bad people but don’t think everybody’s like
that. You read a newspaper, you see ‘Vietnamese gang’—don’t think
shooting on sight boat people who tried to land in Malaysia.
After about a year in Chimawan Camp, Susan was told that a all Vietnamese people are like that. Don’t ever think that.”
Conditions in Vietnam have improved since Susan and Philip left.
Canadian had written a letter to the camp’s superintendent wondering if she wanted to come live in Canada, in Edmonton. Apparently Human rights abuses have lessened and the government has moved
the writer had seen her being interviewed on the news and, moved to toward more of a market economy (though it still restricts freedom of
expression). “We saw no future there, but now it’s better,” Susan says.
compassion, wanted to help.
A few months later Susan was on a flight over the Pacific. In Edmon- Still, in Canada, she found the future she was looking for when she
ton, she lived at the home of her sponsor, Jack Masson, a political sci- trusted her life to the sea. “Here I feel more human. I feel like I have
entist at the University of Alberta who had arranged through a church my rights. If I want to exercise my rights, I can do that. I feel like I get
to bring her to Canada. Susan enrolled at the university, continuing her rewarded with my hard working, my studying, whatever.”
She pauses and her voice goes soft. “A country like this is paradise.
study of English and working as an assistant in the library.
She met Philip through friends, and a long-distance romance That’s what I think.” 3
5)*35:0/&