Kim Tran slipped out of Saigon under cover of night. She was 15 in 1981. Her entire life, every second of it, had been spent inside the chaotic world of that city. When she was nine it was renamed after the communist Viet Cong leader, Ho Chi Minh. The fall, or liberation, of Saigon in 1975 – how you viewed it signalled which side you were on – set the world on a different course. Those born in the south, like Tran, clung to the dream of freedom. When the last Americans escaped the country the Viet Cong extinguished those dreams. Democracy had died with all the fallen U.S. soldiers. But not for Tran and thousands like her. Her mother had owned a large grocery store in the local marketplace. When the government took all their financial assets and the family business, Tran says, “Mom had a nervous breakdown” which she never fully recovered from. “My mom had to raise many of us, a dozen of us, so she always tried to save for us … You cannot have your own business. Everything has to be government owned,” Tran explains. Her father, a police officer before the government fell, tried to make ends meet with odd jobs – but the kids were forced to work as well. Tran and her sister would sell homemade food on the street after school. The situation for the South Vietnamese grew more dire every day. She lived in poverty with her family under communist rule. After six years, with the help of relatives and friends, she and two siblings blended into the darkness and crossed the city’s fortified border. She had been disguised as a rural peasant. They hid in farm houses as the Viet Cong, known by then as “the Front”, patrolled the countryside. They made it to the water and were put on a wooden riverboat. They began to float toward their destiny on their path to a new world. On the way to the coastal city of Ba Ria, they hid from authorities who arrested others trying to escape. Tran slipped past. Her brother, in a futile bid for his freedom, had not been so lucky. Two years earlier, Kyanh Do stepped on to a boat clutching a bag of clothes and some rice. The 17-year-old had memorized a Chinese name – Cao Hot Thanh. Like money, for others, or the right connections, it became the key to his freedom. That simple three-part name will forever be seared in his memory. The ethnic Chinese, who had controlled much of the private sector, were not trusted by the communist government as it struggled for an economic footing. At the time, they were the only people allowed to leave peacefully. His mother arranged for him to flee, alone, after the encouragement of his imprisoned father, an engineer previously employed by the toppled government. “He said communism doesn’t work,” Do recounts, sitting inside his sprawling Mississauga estate. “He said if I died in the sea, he would be OK with that. He said it would be better for me that way.” Life for Do and Tran had been transformed overnight after the rocket attacks by the North Vietnamese eventually led to Saigon’s capture. The communists immediately upended the existing way of life, completely reorganizing every corner of South Vietnamese society. People were relocated, wealth and property were seized and redistributed. Students from the North flooded in to get an education in southern schools, as others were denied the opportunities they had grown up with. “We were treated very differently by the kids from the North,” Do remembers. “They got preferred treatment in many ways.” “Even to enter high school or to enter university, there is what they call a qualification [program]. If you (or your family) worked under the old government… [you] fail. You cannot get in,” Tran says. A portion of Do’s home was confiscated; his family was moved upstairs to make room for another family. While his father languished in captivity, life for many South Vietnamese became similarly imprisoning. Food, though still abundant, was increasingly scarce for them. Menial employment was all that was available. This was not the life Do had ever imagined he would live. His future had always held such promise. He knew what he had to do and his parents helped push him to run to the sea. Do didn’t have the stomach for the violent waters on his four-day journey before making landfall, covered in his own vomit. He slept sitting up. “You’re leaning against one another,” Do says, describing the desperate conditions on the boat. He points right next to his body and says: “You put your luggage here.” Tran interrupts: “You had luggage?” Tran and Do’s place of birth, is no longer their home. It fell to communism an eternity ago. Opportunity and prosperity had been replaced by starvation and despair.