Chef Que Vinh Dang recalls fleeing Vietnam, finding his fine-dining feet, and going casual in Hong Kong

Land ahoy: I was born in Móng Cái, near the northern border of Vietnam and China. My mom is from the Vietnamese side, my father is from the Chinese side, though they speak the same accented Cantonese. I don’t remember my early childhood. In March 1979, we left Vietnam to go to Hong Kong because there were border wars between Vietnam and China. I was about two years old, my brother a year older.

We got on one of seven boats that my dad, a fisherman, had. Each boat held about 50 people. We set off together and had just enough rations to get to Hong Kong. The hope was to get housing in the refugee camp. It took several days to get there and when we got close, my dad said he could see the lights of Hong Kong. However, a typhoon was brewing and he decided to sail towards Lantau Island and parked the boat in a cove to ride out the storm. We set sail again the next day. It turned out six of the seven boats had capsized.

Strangers in a strange land: We stayed in refugee camps in Kai Tak and Sham Shui Po for a few months and then we were sponsored by a Mennonite church from Virginia, in the United States, to go there in November 1979. My family were not religious at all. My parents didn’t know any English or anything about Western culture. There was nothing but farms and open fields. We stayed with pastor Eugene and Alice Souder of the Mount Vernon Mennonite Church. We still visit them every year.

When we first got there, my mom cried every day. The food was very foreign, like mashed potatoes with gravy, corn on the cob, bread and butter. But it was food. We stayed in Virginia for a year to learn English. My dad did odd jobs, like carpentry and painting people’s houses. In 1980, we went to the Bronx, in New York, a melting pot of immigrants from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Mexicans and blacks. My parents had some cousins who lived there and we all lived in one apartment, 11 people.

Finding solutions: My dad got a job as a stock manager at a store and my mom went to a factory to take work, like putting bows on hair clips, home and get paid by the piece. I remember she picked up a big bag of black cubes and a whole row of stickers. We were making Rubik’s Cubes. We saw them in commercials and my brother and I would mix them up but we couldn’t put all the same colours back together and my mom got angry so we had to peel the stickers off and then put them back on again.