The Dramatic Story of My Parents’ Escape from War-Torn Vietnam

As I get older, my parents begin to show me glimpses of their secret dreams. “Dad wants to move back to Vietnam when we retire,” Mum tells me. “We can live like kings and queens over there!” Dad hollers in the background.

My mother hasn’t returned since 1978. For one, she couldn’t travel without a passport, and she didn’t get her Canadian citizenship until after she turned fifty-five and was no longer required to take the citizenship test. Second, she’s in no rush to go back to a land still soaked in blood and mired in misery.

But then she surprises me one day. “I think I want to go back home,” she admits.

“You do?”

“Yes, your dad showed me on YouTube.”

“But I thought you said it’ll look too different?”

“Yes, everything change now. But I think I want to go back home.”

When she repeats it, I’m suddenly struck by her use of the word “home.” When did my mother stop seeing Canada as her home? Or did she ever feel at home here? I don’t ask her, of course. Instead, I just say, “When do you want to go?”

My husband, Michael, and I plan and book the trip. We’re going to travel across Vietnam with my parents and sister for four weeks.

After a two-day layover in Seoul, where my parents pick apart the cold, snowy weather and the unfamiliar food, we land in warm, vibrant Hà Nội. Suddenly, they come to life. All around them, people speak a language they understand. Mum and Dad are in their element. This is where they belong.

My whole life, Dad has told us stories about his life and the war, but I didn’t have the ears to listen. In Vietnam, I pay attention.

Before World War II metastasized across the world, it has its unofficial start in Asia in 1937, when the Japanese invade China. What would transpire between then and 1945 would one day be described as “the Asian Holocaust” because of the sheer scale and heinousness of Imperial Japan’s war crimes against Chinese civilians. This is when the Rape of Nanjing occurs, which sees more than 300,000 murdered, 80,000 women raped, and 40,000 executed. And that was just one event. Although precise figures are challenging to determine, some sources estimate around 10 to 20 million Chinese are massacred and countless tortured in one of the bloodiest world conflicts in history.

The Japanese decide the land is not ours. We have to leave. My grandparents flee to neighbouring Vietnam not long after the invasion.

Not even two decades later, a civil war breaks out in Vietnam between the North and the South. In 1955, the Americans get involved. They do this to save South Vietnam from falling to communist North Vietnam. They fear that if one country falls to communism, the surrounding countries will too. Thus begins the so-called Vietnam War—or, as it’s known in Vietnam, the Resistance War against America.

My dad, Poon Hy, is born three years later, in 1958. My mother, Hoang Thieu Tran, is born three years after him, in 1961.

To go to school, Dad sometimes has to walk for two hours through the mountains and rice paddy fields. He loves learning. But when he’s in the middle of third grade, the war forces him out of his safe haven. He and his siblings are evacuated to the mountains.

They hide there for five years. Dad passes the time by making money. He walks through the mountains to Hải Phòng to pick up cookies, sugared peanut candies, cigarettes, and grenadine. It sometimes takes a full day of walking. Then, he returns to the mountains to set up a little tent on the side of the road to sell his goods to the men in the army.

He is young and so are the North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. And they’re just as broke and hungry as everyone else. For their bravery, Dad says, they’re paid the equivalent of $5 a month. When Dad tries to sell peanut snacks, smokes, and grenadine to make sugary drinks to the young soldiers, he’s disheartened to discover they don’t have any money. But he’s already stubborn as an ox. A compromise is struck. The soldiers will give Dad an AK-47 for three days and just ten bullets in exchange for one cigarette. Dad agrees, thinking the gun will help him hunt for food to feed his starving siblings. This is what my dad is doing at twelve years old.

By the time he returns to Hải Phòng in 1973, Dad is too old to resume school. The opportunity to receive the education he so desperately wanted has been taken from him. His childhood has been lost, stolen. Did he ever even have one?

The soldiers will give Dad an AK-47 for three days and just ten bullets in exchange for one cigarette.

As a major port city and industrial powerhouse, Hải Phòng is aggressively targeted by the Americans, whose aerial bombing campaigns during the war are some of the most intensive and destructive in history. The United States wants to disrupt North Vietnam’s supply lines, infrastructure, and industrial capabilities, including their weapons and ammunition factories, to weaken the communist forces.

In 1965, when Dad is seven and Mum is four, the Americans launch a three-year campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. Targeting various locations in North Vietnam, including Hải Phòng, it is one of the most significant bombing campaigns of the Vietnam War, killing an estimated tens of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

A few years later, a B-52 bombing of Hải Phòng on April 16, 1972, kills thousands of people in one night. In the same year, the Americans launch two large-scale bombing campaigns: Operation Linebacker I, which lasts for six months, and Operation Linebacker II, which lasts less than two weeks. Known to many as “the Christmas bombings” or “the 11-Day War,” Operation Linebacker II has Americans dropping more than 20,000 tons of ordnance in both Hà Nội and Hải Phòng and killing at least 1,600 civilians. In total, the Americans and their allies drop more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam during the war.

When my dad isn’t in the mountains, he has a front-row seat to these horrors. Once, a bomber hits the entrance of a large bunker, not far from Dad’s house, with 300 people inside. When it’s over, Dad sees the bodies. He remembers how plastic some of those looked. Others, like Jell-O.

In 1975, Dad tries to enlist in the army at the age of seventeen. He wants to serve his country. He’s seen what the Americans have done to his neighbours, to women and children, and wants to fight back. He’s denied, because he’s Chinese. It will not be the last time his being Chinese is seen as a problem, as a reason to deny him full acceptance as a Vietnamese citizen.

Unable to join the military, Dad picks up odd jobs. One is working a large cart with a friend. They’d find and transport dirt to fill bomb holes around town. Some of the bomb holes, Dad says, were so big that he swam in them when it rained. He does that for two years, his feet hitting the hot tar road every day. The only shoes they have are makeshift ones made from old bike tires. Another job has him carrying 220-pound bags of rice from boat to land in Hải Phòng’s port.

Dad tells us more about his jobs and the gruelling work, but my head swims with the details. He must sense I’m losing focus, so he sums it all up in a perfectly succinct, heartbreaking sentence. “Don’t forget, your daddy have very hard life.”

Mum’s memory is fragmented and comes to us in bits and pieces. Unlike Dad, who’s a natural storyteller and wants his stories to be known, Mum carefully guards her pain and trauma. She pushes it deep down, so deep she might forget.

This is what we know. Mum is the second youngest of six children, not including her dad’s family with his second wife. As the first girl, she’s expected to work hard from a young age: cleaning the house, washing clothes, taking care of her family, working at the store. It’s a primer for a lifetime of back-breaking manual labour. As she gets older, her responsibilities grow to include babysitting her eldest brother’s children every day. It’s a grind under any circumstance, but extra stressful during times of war.

“I always have to work hard,” she says to me and my sister Linh in Hà Nội. “And I still have to work hard.” The three of us start to cry, thinking about Mum as a young girl with all the responsibilities of a grown woman. She shrugs, wills her eyes to go dry, and says, “That’s my life.” It shears me in two.

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The American War in Vietnam officially ends in 1975, when the communist North captures Sài Gòn in the South. In the end, between 2 and 4 million people are killed. More than half are Vietnamese civilians. These were people just unlucky enough to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were people just trying to live. My parents could have easily been among the casualties.

After Sài Gòn falls in 1975, there are two major waves of refugees who flee Vietnam to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. They’re called “boat people” in reference to the often barely seaworthy vessels that hundreds of thousands take in the hopes of finding a better life.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, those fleeing are primarily people from South Vietnam who fear persecution under the new communist regime. In 1978, there is a second, much larger wave. This one is primarily made up of people who are of Chinese descent. Two of those people are my parents.

After the war, tensions between Vietnam and China escalate for several geopolitical and ideological reasons. One is Vietnam’s alignment with the Soviet Union, which helped fund and arm North Vietnam’s war efforts. This is met with disapproval by China, further straining the Vietnam–China relationship with its already long history of conflict, rivalry, and territorial disputes.

In the late 1970s, Vietnam implements several socialist economic reforms, including the collectivization and nationalization of industries. Those policies disproportionately affect the ethnic Chinese, many of whom are business owners or involved in commerce. People of Chinese descent living in Vietnam, also known as Hoa people, are a minority in the country but play significant roles in Vietnam’s economy, controlling much of the retail trade. They are capitalists in a country that is now firmly communist. The Hoa are marked as Chinese spies.

China invades Vietnam in 1979, and all hell breaks loose. The Vietnamese government decides it is time for the Hoa to get the hell out of their country. A strategic campaign to persecute and expel them from Vietnam during the late 1970s and the early 1980s is kicked into high gear.

One of the ways my dad’s family tries to hide is by changing our last name from the Chinese Poon to the Vietnamese equivalent, Phan. My mother’s family runs a successful business, making them the rich business owners who are so despised and mistrusted by the communist government.

My parents and their families flee to camps in China. It is at one of these camps that Hy Phan and Tran Hoang meet while they’re picking potatoes and peanuts for a paltry salary of $29.50 a month. Dad says, “She looked at me. I looked at her and I thought, ‘Ooh la la.’” They started talking and checking each other out. Mum says she thought Dad was cute. He made her smile. He made her happy. The physically demanding work of farming—my parents’ other duties included riding a water buffalo to till the land and spreading dung on the ground to fertilize it—is made bearable by stolen glances at each other and the thrill of secret touches.

My parents become two of the many people fleeing war-torn Vietnam who look to Hong Kong, which was then under British rule, as the promised land. More than 200,000 Vietnamese seek asylum in the city. Thousands die trying to make the journey. Dad’s buddies say this is his only chance. He has to take it.

“Me and your mum were already in love,” Dad says. “When I left for Hong Kong the first time, we cried all night and held each other and made love all night.” The next night, under the cover of darkness, Dad decides to take his chance and leaves with his friends. They wait until only the light of the moon hangs overhead to lower their chances of getting caught. They get painfully close to the Hong Kong border. Dad can almost taste freedom.

But freedom is taken away with a few shots of a policeman’s gun. Dad and his friends, traipsing stealthily in a field, are shot at by cops. They try their best to hide in the rice field, praying for mercy among the tall plants. They’re caught anyway.

Their greatest sin in Vietnam turns out to be the most welcome blessing in China. When the cops learn they’re Chinese, Dad and his friends are treated like old friends. “You’re Chinese? Welcome home!”

The cops boil water for them so they can take hot baths. They bring Dad and his friends out for dim sum. They send them back to the camp in a cab afterward with a friendly warning not to try again. They tell my Dad that hardly anyone makes it to Hong Kong alive.

Dad doesn’t listen. He can’t afford to. He tries a second time. He knows the chances are low, because once he gets close, he’ll have to swim. “If ten people got there, maybe one would survive, because there were lots of sharks,” Dad says. “And if you got there, police could send you back.”

The second time, the cops are less nice. They beat Dad with a wooden stick. Put him in the police station. Then they let him go and put him on a bus back to the village in China.

From there, the only course of action for Mum and Dad is to find any kind of vessel that will take them to Hong Kong. People will sell gold, jewellery, anything and everything they have, to secure passage on a small wooden boat. Most are old and falling apart. Dad has only one gold ring and a watch in his possession. It would grant him a spot, but not my mother, and by this point, he is unwilling to leave her. The people running the boats want more, sometimes up to ten rings. Mum and Dad start looking for passage on smaller, less reliable wooden boats that would be more dangerous but cheaper. “We’d have accepted anything that floated,” Dad says. “We knew there was a high chance we could die. But we took a chance. The boat could bring us somewhere we could have hope.”

While Mum and Dad desperately try to formulate a plan in China, they get word from her eldest brother that he’s secured a twenty-six-metre fishing boat to take to Hong Kong. All it took was selling everything he had. The journey is horrific. Dad estimates there were 100 people crammed on that boat. They sleep huddled together, holding each other.

“There were many small boats next to us, and the people, they call for help, but who’s going to help them?”

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 200,000 to 400,000 boat people perished at sea. Other organizations estimate that up to 70 percent of Vietnamese boat people died on the waters. The conditions are brutal. Women are raped or abducted, and boats are picked clean by pirates.

Mercifully, my parents’ boat journey is spared these horrific fates. But Dad still recalls the suffering he witnessed around him. “There were many small boats next to us, and the people, they call for help, but who’s going to help them? No one’s helping me. Children and women are crying for help—and we just kept going.”

The trip takes longer than expected because neither my uncle nor any of the other passengers are experienced sailors. Mum and Dad are on that overcrowded boat for one month. When they get to Hong Kong, they find themselves crammed yet again into detention camps in large warehouses. The government is overwhelmed with refugees they don’t want. They treat them like pond scum.

Because the camp has no facilities, a big ship with showers and toilets is brought in. Every morning at seven, everyone lines up to enjoy just five minutes to shower and shit. The police kick the door when your time is up to make you leave and make space for the next person.

Seen as parasites by the Hong Kong authorities, the refugees are beaten and monitored. At midnight, the police come through and count everyone to make sure no one has left. They can’t risk refugee vermin fleeing to the city and mixing with their citizens. Children are assaulted. People are harassed. Hong Kong decides their land will never be ours. We have to leave.

My ah yeh—my paternal grandfather—has a sister in Hong Kong who picks Dad up from the camp. At first, the guards don’t want to let him out, but they eventually relent. My parents are overjoyed to leave the miserable camp.

Dad finally sells his gold ring and buys new clothes and shoes. His uncle finds him a job making and selling parts for cargo ships. Since he’s responsible for watching over the store at night, he sleeps in a crawlspace there. It’s a job he desperately needs because he’s just found out he’s going to be a father at twenty years old. My seventeen-year-old mum is pregnant. She’s thrilled by the news. “I was young, but I just felt happy.”

Despite being refugees and not having a home, Dad remembers it as one of the best times of his life. He’s in love. There’s no war. He’s going to have his own family. His boss loves him. When his boss discovers Mum is pregnant, he offers her an “easy job” being his live-in nanny, taking care of his kid and cleaning his house. “It was a great time in our lives,” Dad says. “We had money, we could go anywhere we wanted. We could hold hands and walk around. It was such a difference from the camp. It was like we hit the jackpot.”

Dad remembers it as one of the best times of his life. He’s in love. There’s no war. He’s going to have his own family.

When it’s time to explore their options, my parents consider Canada, the United States, and Australia. But the United States doesn’t want us, at least not yet. To qualify, my family would have to spend a mandatory six months in a camp in the Philippines to learn English. Dad says no because he heard the conditions in those camps are terrible. They can’t live through that again.

Our second choice beckons. Canada. It’s 1979 and Canada’s sponsorship program is up and running. Canadian immigration officials meet refugees and interview potential candidates for admittance to their country. My parents and Mum’s family, including my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, are accepted. A promising new life awaits.

In a world that has sought to destroy, take, and erase, we’re still standing.

Adapted and excerpted from Restaurant Kid: A Memoir of Family and Belonging by Rachel Phan, published by Douglas & McIntyre, 2025. All rights reserved.