Fleeing Vietnam just the start of a life of conquered challenge for Linh Huynh of Brooks
When the 20-year Vietnam war was finally over, communists took over the whole country, leaving many deciding it would be safer to risk all and leave for the unknown and an uncertain future.
Linh Huynh, speaking to an audience at Chinook Village on Monday evening, was too young to remember Vietnam and the boat they were on to reach Indonesia and a refugee camp. She would later question her parents about their decision and ask if they were afraid.
“Of course we were afraid. Sometimes the fear won’t go away, so you have to do it afraid,” her mother would say.
Huynh showed a photo of her family taken in the refugee camp. Of the eight children she was the second youngest. It is all they have of their life before coming to Canada. All their worldly possessions can be seen in this one photo.
A year later they heard they had been sponsored by a church in Brooks and would be coming to live in Canada.
She went to school in Brooks, then to university and began to travel before taking up running. CBC advertised a writing contest asking for essays about a “dream adventure.” Huynh won the competition, saying she wanted to run a marathon in Antarctica.
She ran that marathon in November 2011 — and it was just the beginning. There was another contest on extreme dream adventures and she was off to the north pole to run another marathon. There was still more.
“I conquered the cold and wanted to test myself in hot environments,” said Huynh.
She would run seven-day races of 250 km in the Sahara, the Gobi desert, in Chile and then back to Antarctica once more. These races required participants carry their own supplies with them on their back.
“Afraid? Of course I was afraid,” said Huynh.
The first four days of each desert race they’d run 42 km, but on the fifth day they had to run 80. Temperatures were sometimes more than 40 degrees during the day, dropping to freezing at night, and they were sleeping in tents.
Each time one of the marathons was over her mother would be relieved and then shocked that there was another planned. She would ask her daughter why.
“You taught me a life without challenges is meaningless,” Huynh told her. “Sometimes the fear won’t go away so you’ll have to do it afraid.”
Huynh is a school teacher and the family of 10 has grown to a family of 20.
Between 1975 and 1976, about 5,600 Vietnamese immigrants arrived in Canada. By 1985 there were tens of thousands more.