Settlement Story

By Duong

My wife, my son, two teenage nephews, and I arrived in BC from Vietnam. We arrived in October when temperatures were colder than we could even imagine in our home country. We arrived with sandals on our feet and clothing suitable for a hot, humid climate. Fortunately, many people helped us get warm clothing, but we were always cold. At first we didn’t have a car, so we had to carry our food home. It was so difficult to understand what we could buy so that we could cook our traditional food. I was so happy to find “sticky rice.” One kind person gave us a chicken. It was small and wrapped in plastic and very hard. My wife was so frustrated when she tried to cut it up to cook it. Later, we learned that it was frozen! We had no experience with frozen food.

The first Sunday we were in Canada, I looked out the window and saw that the streets were empty. I felt very worried because at home the only times the streets were empty was when there was some disaster or something terrible had happened. Here, quiet streets on a Sunday morning is normal and it means everything is peaceful.

My wife and I got jobs. I had been a principal of a high school, but the only work I could find was in an auto wrecker yard. The work was very heavy and very cold. My wife, who had been a kindergarten teacher, got a job cleaning in the food court at the mall. The first night when she came home, she cried and cried. She said that when she was a child and didn’t want to study, her mother would say, “Do you want to clean toilets when you grow up?” She said that she had studied hard but here she was cleaning toilets. She felt so humiliated.

Slowly, slowly we adjusted. Sometimes we were very lonely for our family, especially when my father passed away. People we have met have become our family—people like our tutor. Moving to a new country is not easy, but it does get easier with time.

When we visited our tutor we watched how she cooked potatoes and mashed them with milk. Her children were healthy and strong, so we adopted this way of cooking potatoes for my family. We had Christmas celebrations with my tutor’s family, so we know how to celebrate Christmas in Canada. We keep many of our own traditions and adopt some Canadian traditions.