SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Thirty-five years ago Bac Ai Duong's life was in peril as he and his young family sat in a crowded and sinking wooden boat in the South China Sea, escaping the lawless leftovers of post-war South Vietnam.

Bac Ai Duong, one of Yellowknife's few boat people from Vietnam, retired as a senior engineer with the GNWT last week. Duong was celebrated with about 50 co-workers and friends at Hot Shots, Dec. 22. Here he signs a banner from the Department of Public Works and Services which holds the signatures of past retirees. - Simon Whitehouse/NNSL photo

Today, Duong is hanging up his hat with the territorial government and celebrating with his wife and three children a career that elevated him from an overnight custodian to a chief operating officer overseeing the function of the most important government buildings in the North Slave.

Duong retired from his post with the Department of Public Works and Services last month after 30 years. During a retirement party at Hot Shots Pub and Grub Dec. 22, he shared how he made his career climb from nothing.

About 80 supporters including NWT Commissioner George Tuccaro, department deputy ministers and school principals gathered to mark the occasion.

Duong was born in 1956 in Sa Dec, South Vietnam, about 150 km from Saigon. After the American military ended its occupation in April 1975 and the country united under Communist rule, he was retrained in socialist ideology every year for five years to work as an educator for elementary school children.

It was a busy time as he married Huong Le in 1976, who had a daughter, Kim, the next year and son, Tino, in 1979.

The compensation for his work just wasn't enough, he said.

"After a day of work I would come home and I couldn't even afford to feed myself," said Duong. "I was essentially volunteering, otherwise I would have lost my job or been sent to jail."

Duong knew attempts to escape the country could be met with harsh punishment by the new regime, noting travelling a distance equivalent to driving to Dettah from Yellowknife required special government permission.

Despite limited access to the outside world, he said villagers had access to shortwave radios where he heard stories through BBC News of people getting away.

In early 1980, he made a major gamble by secretly escaping his village with Huong Le, Kim, then three, and Tino, then one, to Saigon where relatives provided money for a canoe and paddler to help get the family out of the country and to a waiting ship.

A three-day trip through the Mekong Delta to the vessel in the South China Sea meant having to hide the two children under coconut leaves. He recalled keeping the children silent - to not alert villagers along the route - by making them drowsy

with cough syrup.

Upon reaching a decrepit, wooden boat in pitch darkness, the family was initially rejected because it was overcrowded.

Duong forced his way into an engine room in the bottom of the boat after getting his wife and children aboard the craft that ended up having no compass and no sense of direction. He said there were only supposed to be 15 people on the boat but the count, including his family, now numbered 58. The vessel was little more than 20 feet in length.

Then things turned for the worse.

"After about two or three hours after it pulled away, the engine broke down," Duong said. "Luckily, the wind blew away from the shore and we drifted for five days. No food, no milk, no water."

During the trip, Tino was bleeding from the nose and lips due to dehydration and Huong Le constantly wiped him with water she had stored in a glass Pepsi bottle.

The boat was blown southwest toward Malaysia and by the time passengers saw the lights on the horizon, the leaky boat had taken on water and was sinking. There were no life jackets on board. As the vessel went down, Duong and his wife grabbed onto an empty plastic container and swam for their lives. Other passengers helped his children.

In the chaos, a large international ship owned by Esso came to the rescue and scooped the people up in in a cargo net.

"It was horrible, man," he said, recalling the intense heat, high waves and fear of Thai pirates who were known to rob, kill or rape vulnerable refugees in international waters.

"Eventually I got to look in the (Esso) cabin and saw my wife and kids had already been taken care of. Even if I won $100 million I wouldn't have been happier than then."

The family was then taken to a United Nations refugee camp on the Malaysian island of Pulau Bidong where he waited among 20,000 people between May and September 1980 for immigration officials from Western countries.

After that, he flew with 100 families in a Boeing 747 to Montreal where he was placed in military barracks with others for processing and settlement for four days.

And then, it was on to Yellowknife.

Early thoughts were not positive, he admitted. His wife was not keen on going either, believing Northerners had to carry heaters around with them on their backs and that one's urine froze before hitting the ground.

The young family arrived "anxious and scared" at the Yellowknife Airport in a propeller plane on Oct. 1, 1980. They were greeted by four inches of snow and private sponsors from the Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

Bishop Chris Williams, then a reverend at the church, was among those core sponsors.

"They hardly spoke a word of English and had to communicate in French," Williams recalled of Duong, who learned the language during his training in Vietnam.

"We had no idea what we would get or who we would get until they arrived. A family of four arrived and the kids were very young and we had to equip them all for winter with clothing and find a job for them. I have nothing but admiration for the way they made their home

in Yellowknife."

The family was taken to an apartment on Sissons Court, equipped with a fridge and stove filled with food. Other items soon came pouring in.

"The people in Yellowknife heard about refugees coming and just piled the place with donations until there wasn't any room left," he said laughing. "It was incredible."

The group also provided him $100 a week for groceries, trips to the doctor and the dentist and tours around town to get acquainted with locals, he said.

Eventually Duong got a day job at the former Red Rooster gas station and a night job cleaning buildings around town. Within a year, this led to a custodial position at Mildred Hall School where he was encouraged by a co-worker to study power engineering through mail-in studies from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. At the same time, he taught himself English, which he said was hard work.

This got him work as a third class power engineer working in Fort Simpson for the GNWT in 1986 before returning to Yellowknife in 1993 to continue with the government. Over the years he improved to become the only second class power engineer, overseeing 10 operating engineers for the Department of Public Works and Services. He was the top authority of maintenance and repair for all mechanical systems in major government buildings in the North Slave region.

The pride of Duong's life was having raised his now adult children to prominent jobs. He said this was due to being strict, that they work hard in school - a philosophy he followed himself working and studying through the years. Kim is a corporate lawyer, Tino holds a master's degree in computer engineering and Lyndon, the youngest, is a master's student in medicine. All were present at the retirement party.

"I was mean and ruthless to them but I told them every day that in Vietnam I worked so hard and I taught with no salary and no pay," he said, adding anything lower than 80s or 90s were not tolerated in the household.

"I told them here you have everything. You need to study, so therefore failure is unacceptable."

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