Pham Eric Phong was 15 when he and his family left Vietnam in a government-sanctioned boat, part of the government’s policy at the time to encourage the ethnic Chinese to leave the country by sea. The family was sponsored by a church group in 1979 to the town of Coaldale, Alberta, where they lived for a year in a house surrounded by wheat fields.
Note to Researchers
A consent form was signed by each of the interviewees whose videos are posted here on the website. They have each consented to making the video available to the public and they have consented to the use of the contents of their videos by the Hearts of Freedom project researchers. Consent is not available to external researchers to quote or publish from it. Researchers interested in the subject have the opportunity to view a documentary film, Passage to Freedom which has been completed and is available through a distributor https://www.mcintyre.ca/ Researchers from the project are in the process of completing a full length book based on the interviews. Once this book is available researchers will have the opportunity to review it and to refer to it for research purposes.