By Brock Weir
She stands barefoot, with a baby in her arms, on her pedestal at the corner of Preston and Somerset “in memory of those who have lost their lives in the quest for freedom.”
Now, a museum is planned to join this memorial in paying tribute to Ottawa’s Vietnamese community.
Ottawa’s Vietnamese Canadian Federation hopes to build the three-storey museum a short distance from the memorial to house an exhibit space, a performance venue, conference space, and a new home for the federation, says Can Le, leader of the museum project.
Now is an ideal time to celebrate what the Vietnamese boat people have brought to the city, says former Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar, who is leading the project with Le. The Vietnamese have stories to tell, but are getting older, she says. “We want to catch them before it’s too late.”
After fleeing from their homes in leaky boats to escape communist rule, thousands of Vietnamese refugees or boat people, as they were commonly called, settled in Ottawa in the late 1970s.
A museum could tell these stories, Le says. It would remind younger generations of “the hardships refugees went through, to let people know of the generosity and kindness of Canadians, and to show the achievements of the Vietnamese community in Canada.”
Can Le’s son, Washington, D.C.-based architect John Le, drew up the plans for the museum. As a first generation Canadian, Le says he wanted his design to reflect both their hardships and their achievements.
Le says his local Chinatown seems like an artificial “Disneyland-style” marketing tool to drum up tourism instead of providing a real cultural experience. In contrast, he says, he wants his design for the museum to connect people back to their roots.
“Unless you have gone through the experience of being ripped from your country and possibly knowing you’ll never go back again, there’s really nothing to connect you back home,” he says. “I have tried to straddle the two cultures because that’s what the current generation is trying to do.”
Le’s design incorporates retail and business space to help keep the museum self-sufficient, but it also includes Vietnamese symbols including a central tower, designed like a pagoda — a Buddhist tower — topped with a “V.”
“The V represents three things: Vietnam, victory for democracy and human rights, and it also represents a flock of migratory birds that represent the people flying from Vietnam to other places in the world,” says Can Le.
Although the museum project is still in its early stages, Le says he hopes to increase the city’s awareness of the initiative in the coming weeks. But, people who have heard the plans say the idea has great potential.
Vinh Nguyen, 19, whose parents were boat people, says he hopes the museum will remind Vietnamese-Canadians born here of the risks their parents faced to find a better life.
“The message will be passed onto future generations as we grow in this country and not Vietnam,” he says. “They will realize their parents went through a lot just to be here.”
Ganesh Nandram, 42, who lives near the proposed site, says he would like the museum to tell visitors of the Vietnamese journey, their contribution to the city, and how far they have come.
“The Somerset strip doesn’t have too many cultural institutions,” he says. “It will bring a focal point to the people.”
The federation will begin fundraising across the country for the museum project after the Vietnamese New Year, Tet, which comes on Jan. 29. Several Asian communities in the United States and Australia have also said they would like to raise money for the project, he says.
As mayor, Dewar spearheaded a project to have Ottawa citizens privately sponsor Vietnamese refugees to come to the city.
Their arrival, she says, remains a very important part of Ottawa’s history. It shows how individual municipalities can make a difference.
The proposed museum would be a tribute to the whole community’s success.
“Let’s celebrate our successes,” she says. “We have a great habit as Canadians to always look at what we did wrong, but I think we have to celebrate what we did right.”