Note: Since this narrative is mainly about Dinh Kim Nguyet’s activities in Canada, we will refer to her by the name she is known by in Canada, “Kim”.
Kim was born in Saigon. She still owns the home in which she was born, in what is now Ho Chi Minh City. Her parents came to Saigon in 1939 from Ninh Binh and Nam Dinh for economic reasons, and she still has many relatives in those provinces today.
Kim began working with foreigners in the 1990’s when Vietnam was opening up. She guided both businesspeople and tourists around Vietnam. She also began making trips to western European countries to promote Vietnam to potential foreign visitors.
That is how Kim got her start showing and explaining Vietnam to foreigners.
In 2005, Kim went to Canada and married a Canadian. They settled in Whitehorse, a small city in Canada's north.
In Canada she maintained her interest in explaining Vietnam to people. Her husband was newly retired and needed a project, so he joined her work by helping her make contacts, finding funding, and managing logistics for her projects.
Kim started out by doing projects that she and her husband could run by themselves. For her first project in Canada, she found a local organization that was running a fundraiser for poor children in Vietnam. She got some local people to come and model some of her ao dais at the event. She took the opportunity to meet people and talk about Vietnam.
Kim found that Canadians were very interested in Vietnam and Vietnamese culture and were eager to have her appear at their events. She was often invited to put on presentations about Vietnam.
As she made contacts in the local Vietnamese community, she discovered that no one was interested in appearing in public to show off their Vietnamese heritage. There was a great reluctance, even a fear, of publicly associating themselves with Vietnam. She nevertheless continued to organize small Vietnamese displays for the local multicultural events, and they were always well-received.
In 2008, a local group decided to organize a multicultural festival that was large enough to attract a lot more public attention. Kim became one of the organizers and made a greater effort to involve the local Vietnamese community. This is when she discovered that the reasons behind the community’s reluctance to get involved in public events was caused by political pressures.
The Vietnamese in Canada were being exploited by several political groups to serve their own political purposes. These groups purported to speak for all Vietnamese and they were taking measures to prevent the real Vietnamese in Canada from speaking for themselves. Kim and her husband believed that things like this are not supposed to happen in Canadian society, and they decided to try to solve the problem.
Early publicity for Kim's event attracted the attention of these political groups from as far away as the US. Letters began to appear in the local media criticizing the proposed event and Kim received threatening e-mails. Kim refused to allow the event to become a political statement for these groups and went ahead and organized the event her way, with no political content. Only one other member of the local Vietnamese community took part. Kim recruited other local people to wear Vietnamese traditional dress and participate in the event.
This act of defiance attracted international attention, and people travelled to Whitehorse from all over Canada and the US to protest in person at her event. The protesters made themselves visible outdoors, but they were unable to disrupt the event. The protestors reappeared in Whitehorse a couple of more times over the next years, but Kim eventually succeeded in making their politics unwelcome in Whitehorse.
The Vietnam Embassy in Canada heard about these episodes and called Kim to encourage her. It fell to the Vietnam embassy to do this because the Canadian government, who should have been helping, was actually part of the problem. The Vietnam Embassy was sending a message.
The local Vietnamese community started paying attention to Kim's events but did not yet participate. They were waiting to see if Kim could outlast the political opposition.
Kim started planning for another major cultural festival for the summer of 2009, and worked to make sure that Vietnam had a good showing. In the interval, Kim organized 5 smaller events, with no participation from the Vietnamese community.
In preparation for the major event, she managed to get two other members of the Vietnamese community to perform in the event, and well as many other locals, including several groups of children. She provided them all with Vietnamese traditional dress for the show. These activities were teaching local people more about Vietnamese culture than just watching a show. For the children in particular, Vietnamese dance became a year-round pursuit.
As a result of what had happened in 2008, the Vietnam Embassy, and the outsiders associated with the political groups were all watching closely. Nevertheless, the event went ahead without any interference. This clearly made an impression on all those watching.
In 2010 Kim began spending her winters in Vietnam and was frequently invited to meetings with the media to talk about her activities in Canada. The Vietnam governments, like many governments, maintains an interest in its diaspora and also frequently invited her to talk about her experiences. Kim also attended a lot of cultural events to look for ideas.
This did not constrain her activities in Canada because most of the public cultural activity there occurs in the summer. She now had 3 or 4 Vietnamese community members in Whitehorse supporting her, as well as the groups of children, and they gradually began operating independently.
In 2011 Kim started on another project. Since there had been a Vietnamese community in Canada from 1979, there were now many second and third generation families with children. Kim created a business to import Vietnamese language books for children. She sold the books at cost, because her interest was cultural awareness for the children, not profit. A VSL Books website was created for the enterprise.
Because of Kim’s travels, it was difficult to sustain the book operation as a business, so Kim turned it into a non-profit that distributed children’s books to public libraries and public institutions. For this she received funding from the Vietnam government.
In 2014 Kim started a charity to support school children in Vietnam. Kim had noticed that those in the Vietnamese community who felt pressured to avoid public cultural events were also pressured not to associate themselves with Vietnam the nation. Many maintained family contacts, but rarely went beyond that. Even though people may have felt that they would like to contribute in some way to the homeland, they were unable to do so. The charity gave people a way to quietly make small contributions. An AuCo Fund website was created for the enterprise.
In 2014, Kim left Whitehorse for Vancouver, where there is a much larger Vietnamese community and many more opportunities to put on public events for a much larger audience.
By 2016, Kim had established enough contacts in the Vancouver area to begin putting on public events.
By this time, Kim and her husband had a good understanding of the cause of people’s reluctance to get involved in public events and how to ease their fears. People were very receptive to this information and it spread through the community all over Canada.
In 2016 Vietnamese people all across the country joined to form the Canada-Vietnam Society. Kim became the founding director representing western Canada. The society began organizing cultural events in other Canadian cities.
The events that Kim organized in Vancouver generally had large institutional sponsors and so were well-funded and publicized. This meant much greater exposure for Vietnamese culture. The Vietnam Consul General in Vancouver regularly visited Kim’s events, as did the Vietnamese media.
The political protestors were always around watching, and often annoying event organizers, but failing to have any influence over the events. When they wanted to run a public protest, they had to bring people in from the US and eastern Canada, so they chose their times and places for protest carefully.
The Surrey Fusion Festival, the largest multicultural festival in Canada, was one time that the political groups chose to protest. A Vietnamese family from the north had been quietly operating a Vietnam booth there for some time, with active protests going on outside the gates of the festival. Surrey officials read the situation well and were giving special protection to the Vietnam booth.
In 2018 and 2019 Kim joined with the family to greatly expand the scope of the Vietnam booth. Kim recruited members of the Vietnamese Community, Vietnamese students studying in Vietnam, and others to support the booth. The Vietnamese students were particularly enthusiastic participants. The Mayor of Surrey and the Consul General of Vietnam attended to express their support, now with Vietnamese media in attendance. See our reports of the 2018 festival and the 2019 festival.
Kim and her husband were in Vietnam when COVID-19 shut everything down in early 2020. They decided to stay in Vietnam for the duration, and they are still there in early 2023.
When things started to open up in mid-2022, Kim worked with her contacts in Canada to ensure that Vietnamese participation was maintained in the major cultural events in the Vancouver area, and she continues to do so. She is working in Vietnam to reactivate the AuCo charity and continues to represent Canadian Vietnamese at events in Vietnam.
This narrative skims over some issues to keep it to a reasonable length. Kim fought to keep politics out of her cultural events, and we did the same here.
Those issues include: Who are the political groups that marginalized Canada's Vietnamese community? How did they do it any why were they allowed to succeed? What was the Canadian government's role in that? Why did the Vietnam Embassy get involved in something that, on the surface, appeared to be a domestic issue? The answers to these questions are immensely complicated and have origins that date back as far 1945. If you really want to seriously pursue them, we suggest you look at BoatPeople.ca.
Or, you can read a brief overview of the issues on our Culture and Politics page.