{"id":110,"date":"2017-11-01T08:18:22","date_gmt":"2017-11-01T12:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/?p=110"},"modified":"2017-11-01T08:18:22","modified_gmt":"2017-11-01T12:18:22","slug":"i-dont-know-much-about-patrick-swayze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/2017\/11\/01\/i-dont-know-much-about-patrick-swayze\/","title":{"rendered":"“I Don’t Know Much About Patrick Swayze”"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Allison Light<\/em><\/p>\n

When Tam Nguyen first arrived in Winnipeg in 1980, there weren\u2019t many other Vietnamese people yet \u2013 the city wasn\u2019t the diverse immigration destination it is now. He had left Central Vietnam after the army tried to conscript him to fight the Khmer Rouge, fleeing to Malaysia by boat at age 23. He knew his chances of resettlement were low in the United States \u2013 he had no connections to the US army. He was like \u201cgarbage\u201d to the US, he said. Instead, he set his sights on Canada.<\/p>\n

\tNow, Nguyen is a prominent community member, owning both a successful tailor shop that he started in the 80\u2019s and a Vietnamese Pho restaurant opened two years ago. He casually talks about tailoring clothes for movie stars like Brian Dennehy and Patrick Swayze. Canadians Helping Kids in Vietnam is a charity he\u2019s started to send aid back home. He told us that the Vietnamese community here has transferred some of the political conflict from back home. His peers are quick to accuse him, he said, of communist sympathies because his charity sends support back to a home country run by a communist government. \u201cYou put me in the middle,\u201d he told them. The charity gives $25 a month to sponsored families, as well as helping build schools and providing healthcare.<\/p>\n

\tI took away a few major ideas from our conversation with Nguyen. He raised the issue of political conflict within the Winnipegger Vietnamese, which got me interested in the idea of microcosms, and left me wondering how other expat communities here have retained and still reflect their home countries\u2019 divisions. Does this reflect in the geography of Winnipeg, the way the divide is north\/south in Vietnam? He also spoke about how he could not have built the life he did without the generosity and kindness of Winnipeggers who helped him upon arrival, and how that gratitude motivates him to give back to new refugees arriving now. When he mentioned the Congolese family that he helped, I wondered if there are chains of assistance across Winnipeg\u2019s immigrant communities \u2013 that is, refugees helping refugees who\u2019ve gone on to help refugees and so on, specifically across different backgrounds (as opposed to Vietnamese helping new Vietnamese, for example). He didn\u2019t have a specific example from his own experience, but it could be interesting to trace helping hands across the city.
\nFinally, on a lighter note, I loved the comment that he worked six days and on the seventh went to the Jets game, and I was really interested in his first reactions to hockey as a sport, as well as how memories surfaced of kicking leaves wrapped in a banana peel around in the Vietnam sand as a makeshift soccer ball. I feel like looking at refugees as hometown sports fans could tell an interesting story of assimilation and loyalty \u2013 we didn\u2019t ask him point blank if he \u201cfelt Canadian,\u201d but a newcomer\u2019s process of understanding and appreciating the local sport obsession certainly seems like a reflection or facet of their overall integration narrative. Maybe there\u2019s a story in that as well \u2013 is team loyalty a cause or effect of national loyalty? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Allison Light When Tam Nguyen first arrived in Winnipeg in 1980, there weren\u2019t many other Vietnamese people yet \u2013 the city wasn\u2019t the diverse immigration destination it is now. He had left Central Vietnam after the army tried to conscript him to fight the Khmer Rouge, fleeing to Malaysia by boat at age 23.<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":423,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/423"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/manitoba-migration\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}