Buuvan Nguyen
Pilgrim, guide, family man, servant. Born on March 15, 1947, in Phuoc Yen, Vietnam; died on May 19, 2016, in Toronto, of pancreatic cancer, aged 69.
Nguyen Van Buu began life in a small rice-farming village in central Vietnam. His family was large and poor, but Buu's quick intelligence allowed him to be the first of eight siblings to attend college. He soon put his diploma to extraordinary use: In the throes of a war that was dividing his country, town, and very family, Buu gave the certificate to his older brother, changing his own name and birth date to save his sibling from being drafted to the front lines.
The fall of Saigon in 1975 ended the war but compounded the hardships of those who spoke openly of political and religious freedom. Buu's identity as a teacher and aspiring judge was suddenly dangerous; the new regime forcibly "re-educated" him and thousands of others who did not conform to communist ideology. In this dehumanizing environment, Buu's courage sparked love; his resistance to the system and protection of vulnerable colleagues caught the notice of a fellow teacher. Despite the state's stranglehold on everyday life, Buu and Kim Huynh married and started a family in the former Saigon.
The risks and restrictions of life in Vietnam soon grew unacceptable. On the night of July 1, 1980, the young couple, carrying their two-year old daughter, Chieu Hien, crept out of a mangrove swamp and clambered onto an 11-metre fishing boat, which soon lost power in the rolling sea. For three days, the 100-plus people aboard drifted in limbo. Chieu Hien was near death from dysentery when a British merchant ship finally drew alongside; Buu remembered her limp body under his arm as he climbed the ship's ladder to safety.
After 100 days in a Philippine refugee camp, the family arrived in Toronto on Thanksgiving weekend. With only a $13 daily resettlement allowance, Buuvan Nguyen, as he would now become known, took to following streetcar tracks across the city in search of basics the family could afford. But English classes were free, and Buu and Kim soon took turns earning technology diplomas (he in computer repair, she in programming), attending college while working at any available job. Kim waitressed and sewed piecework; Buu spent days in factories and nights in fields, picking bait worms by headlamp.
By the mid-1980s, both had stable employment and they were able to afford a small home off Queen Street East (which quickly filled with a new baby, Peter, and the arrival of five sponsored relatives), followed by a bigger house in Scarborough. Theirs is one of countless Canadian success stories.
Like many immigrants, Buu inhabited a dimension imperceptible at the surface level of daily commutes and suburban routines. His jobs, which came and went with the vagaries of the tech hardware economy, were always secondary to his devotion to family, community, and his Catholic faith (he and Kim led a marriage enrichment program that now counts more than 1,000 members). Buu was also active in the Vietnamese Association of Toronto; when the feelings of those who had left the Communist regime were still raw and conflicted, his personal tact helped to chart a political course for the group.
Buu died at home in the company of family members whose lives spread over three continents, from Vietnam to France to California. To his last day, he was giving and receiving the love that guided his life's journey – a pilgrimage of happenstance, hope, and selfless service.
Simon Owen is Buu's son-in-law.