From refugee camp to Auckland mansion: A success story
Hard work and savings gave Jimmy and Kheng Yip their Kiwi dream, write Sandra Goodwin and Catherine Smith
They arrived in New Zealand with nothing and worked 20-hour days, seven days a week, to save enough money to buy their first home and open their own business. Now almost 40 years after Cambodian refugees Jimmy and Kheng Yip started their new lives in Auckland, they are selling a huge multimillion-dollar mansion.
The couple their baby daughter Sieumuoi found themselves in the Mangere Refugee Resettlement centre in March 1983 after spending two and half years in a Thai camp, one of millions of Cambodians displaced by Pol Pot’s regime.
Yip had never had the chance of an education, he says, and was barely able to read or write. He taught himself English from newspapers and watching television, eventually also learning Mandarin and Cantonese and a few other Chinese dialects besides.
“With the help of our sponsor, we rented our first flat – two bedrooms in Atkinson Ave, Otahuhu,” he says. “It cost us $50 dollars a week. I worked in a bakery in East Tamaki.”
Jimmy’s hospitalisation for a stomach ulcer didn’t stop the hardworking couple. He wasn’t well enough to continue in the bakery, so found work for a gold company, assaying and refining gold, while Kheng sewed garments at home. He had to learn new skills, fast.
“I didn’t go to school, so I couldn’t read, couldn’t count, I studied at home by myself with the newspaper.”
He and Kheng worked 20 hour days, seven day a week running a sewing business from home, saving furiously. By that stage they had a second child, and eventually had four children.
Their work paid off: by 1985 they’d bought their first house for $60,000 ( Jimmy can’t remember the address). A year later they’d saved enough to buy their own business, a bakery in Point Chev.
“I love my baking,” he says. “I was the first one for the Cambodian people baking in New Zealand, I train them the way we do for the Kiwi people.
“The pastry chef is not the same as the bread baking or the cake making, all different. So I train the person to do all three things.”
As they didn’t know where to get machinery, the Yips made everything by hand, and from scratch, with no pre-mix, and using a regular domestic oven. True to the French colonial influence of his home country, and his baker father, Yip still uses butter and makes everything from scratch.
But the business nearly came a cropper, as the couple knew nothing about council permits and licenses, and had been operating without one. By then locals so loved their
bakery – they were waiting at the door, Yip remembers, for goods coming fresh from the oven – that they rallied round.
Experts in the community helped sort out the paperwork to get the bakery back in business, the Yips renaming it the Angkor Bakery.
Yip reckons he and Kheng have trained and help to start some 10 to 20 Cambodian-run bakeries around the country, many of them regular winners of industry awards.
Always up for a new challenge, the Yips stretched themselves to a caf, opening the famous Ronnie’s in Matamata in 1998. With its coffee, baking and home cooking, it became a favourite pit stop for travelers for years (a second branch opened in downtown Auckland in 2004).
That’s when they finally bought their dream home, a huge six-bedroom house on the rise at 22 Drumquin Rise in Dannemora. Spreading over 1200 sq m of land, with views of the city and Sky Tower, the house features glittering chandeliers, ornate gates and a grand front entrance.
“I liked the style and it has excellent Feng Shui,” he says, of the house that was built by a Taiwanese builder as his own home.
The entertaining hub, filled with fine furniture from all around Asia, is important to the family, as Jimmy is still very active in the Cambodian community and the couple host many friends. The luxury kitchen, vast and granite-benched is a far cry from the couple’s first little flat in Otahuhu.
Daughter Sieumuoi Hancock calls the house the culmination of everything her parents worked for.
But with their four children now gone, one in New York and another in Canada, and Kheng having knee surgery, they’re ready to move to something smaller and slow down, with home, which has a CV of $2.425m, listed for sale on OneRoof.co.nz.
“We’re retired now, we both worked too hard,” Yip says. “The children have family, we want to travel more. I’m a Kiwi now, I’ve been a Kiwi for longer than my life in Cambodia.”