Niagara College mathematics professor Jolie Phuong Hoang’s inaugural effort as an author produced Anchorless, which won several literary awards. The book was written as a tribute to her father and family patriarch, Hoang Trong Phu, who along with his wife and ten children, attempted three separate escapes from the Communist regime that came to power in Vietnam in the 1970s. The first cost Hoang’s father his livelihood. The second successfully brought six of his children to safety in Canada. The third cost him his life.
Written from the perspective of her father, Anchorless described the family’s life in Vietnam, the onset of war, and the planned escape. Her father details, as a ghost, his own death, his bargain with God, and ultimate reunion with his family when his ashes were taken to California to be interred with those of his wife in 2015.
Hoang’s second book, Three Funerals for My Father: Love, Loss and Escape from Vietnam, is being released this month by Vancouver-based Tidewater Press, and offers a much expanded version of her family’s perilous journey as refugees from Vietnam to Canada, told in a dual-narrative style through the voices of the author and her father’s ghost. The book is listed with CBC Books and recommended as a non-fiction read for the fall of 2021.
Hoang was born in a small town in war-torn South Vietnam, where her father owned a prosperous construction business, based on contracts with the American military. Everything changed when the Communists took over in 1975. The years 1979 to 1989 were defined by images in the media of Vietnamese boat people fleeing the Communist regime by sea. Hoang and five of her siblings survived nine days adrift, finally arriving in Indonesia, where they lived in a refugee camp until settling in Canada in 1984. Sadly, her father and youngest sister perished in the South China Sea in their attempt to escape Vietnam in 1985.
Three Funerals For My Father is a testament to the collective experience of these “boat people” who escaped Vietnam, and a plea by Hoang on behalf of the millions of refugees currently seeking asylum across the globe.
Hoang remembers her father as selflessly devoted to his family. She clearly idolized the man, who taught her the importance of resilience, discipline, and responsibility.
“When my mind was in some imaginative clouds, others told me to be practical. But my father asked me what I saw in those clouds, because dream and vision are elements that quietly sustain realism,” she wrote in an online blog post. Every June, she keeps a memorial observance for her father and youngest sister. “In his physical absence, my father taught me that words have the power to heal,” wrote Hoang.
Hoang pays tribute in her book to not only her father and mother, but also John and Judy Smith, who were the driving force behind the Christian church-based charity The Mountain Fund to Help the Boat People. The program sponsored hundreds of Vietnamese refugees, including Hoang and her siblings, and relocated them to Hamilton.
The Hoang family has done well in their new lives in North America. They all went on to higher education, and have attained successful careers.
“We are a very close-knit family,” said Hoang, who graduated from McMaster, Brock, and Mohawk. Two of her daughters currently attend the University of Waterloo, while her eldest daughter, Helen, graduated from Brock and UBC, and now teaches part-time in Niagara College’s communication program. She also writes the occasional article for the Voice.
For many years, Hoang’s young daughters had asked how their grandfather died, which she was unable to explain due to the painful memories. She promised to give them the answers when they were older, and writing both Anchorless and Three Funerals For My Father achieved this goal. It also provided inner peace for Hoang, as she more deeply explored the spirituality she inherited from her parents, both devout Buddhists.
“I believe that when we die, beyond death, there's another life, a reincarnation. The body dies, but the soul lives on.”
She has been influenced not just by Buddhism, but also the Christian teachings she learned in the refugee camps of Indonesia.
“If you've been a real mean person in your present life, in the next life you may be in a more ugly situation where you have to repay the karma,” she said. “But if I passed away tomorrow, I wouldn’t want to leave this life. I want to see my children graduate from university. I want to attend their graduation and weddings.”
Hoang remembers the call in October 2020 from a director of Tidewater Press in Vancouver, Lynn Duncan.
“She had read Anchorless, and was very interested in my story, and wanted to offer me a contract,” said Jolie. “She said that the book spoke to her, and that she wanted the whole story and three times the length of Anchorless. I talked to my family that Thanksgiving weekend, and they were supportive and said I shouldn’t pass up this opportunity. So I sat down last November 1 and started writing.”
Hoang shared a story that underscored her belief in the spiritual realm.
“My house in Fonthill has always had a leaky roof. My mom once came here to visit, and the weather was perfect. But that night, she asked me, ‘Jolie, do you know that you have a leaky roof?’ She said she had a dream that my father carried a ladder from the garage to repair the roof.” When Hoang returned to Vietnam to visit her father’s second grave, she become lost in the cemetery until a strange woman appeared and told her where her father’s black marble headstone was located.
“Then she told me, ‘You live in Canada and your house is surrounded by trees, and water is leaking into your house,” said Hoang.
This year marks 25 years that Hoang has been teaching mathematics at Niagara College.
“In mathematics, you work with numbers, teaching the theory to solve the problem. It’s a straight, structured path, with formulas and theorems. I think teaching mathematics really helped me a lot going through life, keeping me focused whenever my mind was in chaos from tangling thoughts mixed with endless unanswered questions. But I have always expressed my hidden passion in writing. Even in my childhood, I loved literature. Words possess healing qualities.”
Hoang admits that, even today, her English is not perfect, and admitted to her dependence on Coles Notes in high school to make sense of Shakespeare. She experienced subtle racism while in school in Canada, recalling that her high school math teacher would not bestow a mathematics prize on her, despite the fact that she had the highest grades in the class.
“He just couldn't bring himself to give the award to an immigrant.”
Hoang is already at work on a new fictional narrative about three Vietnamese women who are connected through trauma of the past, as they struggle to rebuild their lives.
On Saturday, at 1 PM, Hoang will have a livestreamed conversation with former CBC foreign correspondent Hilary Brown, and Judy Smith, co-founder of the Mountain Fund to Help the Boat People. Details are available at her website, www.joliehoang.com.
The Pelham Public Library will hold a Zoom author event for Hoang on Tuesday, November 30, at 7 PM. Signed copies of her book will be available for purchase at the library.
