Phuong Ly, Kim
Over 130 interviews with Chinese Canadian women were conducted for the book Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women. Produced in 1992 by the Women’s Book Committee of the Chinese Canadian National Council, Jin Guo was intended to fill the gap in historical accounts of Chinese Canadian women’s history. Researchers traveled across Canada to interview Chinese Canadian women of various ages and backgrounds. The book’s authors, Amy Go, Winnie Ng, Dora Nipp, Julia Tao, Terry Woo and May Yee, organized the book around themes and patterns that emerged across multiple interviews – feelings of isolation and culture shock upon arrival in Canada, memories of parent-child relationships, the importance of education, the working lives of women, discrimination, cultural identity, marriage and dating, family life, perspectives on aging and retirement, and examples community activism. The interviews conducted for this project are stored at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario’s archives. This collections database includes a large cross-section of interviews conducted for Jin Guo – in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.
In this interview, Kim Phuong Ly discusses her life in Saigon before and after the Vietnam war, and her immigration to Canada.
Kim Phuong Ly was born in 1954. She is a third generation Chinese immigrant living in Saigon, Vietnam. Her father worked in manufacturing to support a large family. She went to a Chinese school where she was also taught English and French. She recalls great political and ethnic tension leading up to the Vietnam War.
Her family suffered financial instability during and after the war. The government placed restrictions on big businesses and imposed heavy taxes to encourage government work on nation building initiatives. The family’s supply of electricity and water was limited. One by one, Kim’s siblings began to leave Vietnam.
She and her mother ‘donated’ their property to the government as a way of assuring their way out of Vietnam without difficulty. In 1983, they arrived in Montréal, Quebec, where one of her sisters had already settled. At the time of the interview, Kim was waiting for her application to the United States to be approved. She believes life will be easier and looks forward to joining her husband who is already there.
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