From Vietnam to Quebec: Zoonie Nguyen’s journey

Fleeing the Vietnam War to a refugee camp in Hong Kong in a boat that fits 500, as one of 4,000 people aboard at only eight years old. Montrealer Zoonie Nguyen has built a business coaching female entrepreneurs on how to express their talent and communicate their value.

She says, “I sacrificed a bit of my Vietnamese identity through that practicing that Quebecois French, but I made a lot of friends. I stopped being bullied.”

The women’s coach and filmmaker recalls, “On the morning of April 30th, I remember my mom yelling, everybody outside, everybody outside,” she was still in her pyjamas.

She continues, “On April 30th, 1975, we left Saigon. I was born in Saigon, my brothers and sisters. On the very last day that you could possibly leave, and there was one boat, Truong Xuan, that was the only boat. You get on that one, or you stay behind.”

About her early memories of life in Canada, she says, “The first winter, I remember walking bare feet outside and my mom would say, ‘That’s the stuff that you scratch in the freezer.’ We didn’t know what snow was.”

However, immersing herself in Quebec culture and French language came at a cost. She says, “In order for me to be able to speak Quebecois French, I had to really immerse myself, and that meant also not hanging out with the Vietnamese little friends in the schoolyard.

“When you do that day in, day out, and you start to belong, and you speak Quebecois. I get to a point during my teenage years; I didn’t know who I was anymore. At home I had to be Vietnamese. At school I had to be Canadian, Quebecois. So I suffered from that,” she explained.

“You get to a point, and I think also when the boat was drowning on April 30th, I left that little Zoonie because it was hell. It was a nightmare. I didn’t want to bring her with me. So you make these choices, and you don’t even know that you made these choices. But I felt like it was important for me to regain my identity. And that’s why I went back to Vietnam in 1995. I needed to find the little Vietnamese Zoonie that I left behind.”

Going to Vietnam with her daughter was a memorable experience. One that provided closure. Nguyen learnt, “At the same time, I could speak, I could understand Vietnamese, I can bargain in it at the market. And that for me is in a way getting that Vietnamese side of me back. So I came back, and my whole life changed for real. I really was proud to say that I’m Vietnamese Canadian from that point on.”

Nguyen uses her lived experience to coach women, some of whom are newcomers. She says, “I teach sales and entrepreneurship very often to immigrant women entrepreneurs or professional women. They always say, ‘Oh, if we start from scratch, we have to start from scratch from zero.’ And I laugh because I tell them, ‘No, you are here, and you bring so many rich things to Canada to Montreal.'”

Adding, “You have your cultural background, you have experience from your country, your language, everything. You’re not starting here. You’re starting here. You’re amazing. You just need now to combine that with the Quebecois culture, the Canadian culture. But do not forget who you are and where you’re from.”

There will be a screening of Nguyen’s film How She Dares on July 6th at 4 p.m. at District 3 Concordia, for Montrealers who haven’t seen the film. 

Details and tickets can be found on Eventbrite.