Hiep Nguyen nearly drowned in the storm. There were 75 of them crammed in a boat just 20 feet long. They had pooled their gold for a chance to escape Vietnam.
Six days, seven nights it took to reach the Philippines, except on one of those nights a howling gale almost put them under. No life-jackets, so they clung to bits of Styrofoam as waves swamped their open craft.
"Very much scary, almost died," Nguyen says.
He's sitting at a table in his Pho Vy Vietnamese Restaurant at 772 Fort St., tracing the thread that pulled him to Canada as a refugee a quarter century ago.
Next door at the Brothers Barbershop, at 770 Fort, Visar and Artor Gashi have their own refugee tale. Forcibly expelled from their native Kosovo during the war with Serbia in 1999, they built a life here after being plucked from a camp in Macedonia.
What are the odds: two refugee-run small businesses right next to each other in downtown Victoria.
Their owners have little else in common. Different ages, different languages, came here at different times from homelands half a world apart - but they share a profound sense of gratitude to their adoptive country.
As we approach Canada Day, nobody is prouder of Canada than Nguyen and the Gashi brothers. Others among us might take what we have for granted. Not them.
This is a nation of immigrants. One in five of us was born elsewhere. Even if you're native-born, odds are your grandparents have an accent from somewhere else.
But actual refugees - those driven here by warfare or persecution - make up a tiny slice of the immigrant pie.
Our history as a safe haven predates Canada itself. Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution migrated here in the late 18th century. So did Scots chased out by the Highland Clearances.
A quarter million refugees arrived after the Second World War. More than 37,000 Hungarians flooded in after the failed uprising of 1956 and 11,000 Czechs after the Prague Spring turned to winter in 1968. The 1970s saw post-Allende Chileans, Bengali Muslims uprooted by the war in Bangladesh and Ugandan Asians ousted by Idi Amin.
The most celebrated intake was when Canada embraced more than 60,000 Vietnamese boat people around 1980.
Nguyen arrived a few years after that wave. In 1987, he was 22 years old, working for the Vietnamese railway and going nowhere fast. He wanted to get ahead in life, but the authorities blunted his education and job opportunities, punishing his family for its past; Nguyen's father had been a dentist in the South Vietnamese army.
So bleak was his future that a risky escape to the Philippines and, he hoped, the U.S. seemed the best option. He left the coastal city of Nha Trang with the blessing of a family that included his new bride and a newborn son. "Eight years I don't see him," he says. "Very lonely. Very sad."
The boat slipped into the sea in darkness, at 3 a.m. No one had luggage. The passengers had abandoned their packs after the authorities, suspicious that something was afoot, began busting anyone found with baggage. That meant that although Nguyen survived the crossing, he had nothing but the clothes on his back during his two years in a Philippine refugee camp.
One day, when Nguyen was volunteering in the camp library, a Canadian government official borrowed a book, then asked if he would like to come here. Canada? Nguyen barely knew where it was on the map.
They sent him to Saskatchewan in 1989, but the minus-55 wind chill blew him to Victoria a few months later. He lived at the Buddhist temple here as he started the long, hard climb up the ladder typical of so many immigrants: $2.50-an-hour janitor, then restaurant dishwasher, then, after training at Camosun, chef. In 1995, he was finally reunited with his wife and son in Victoria.
Nguyen cooked at the Japanese Village for several years before opening his own place, Pho Vy, in 2003. It's open seven days a week. He rarely takes a day off. His wife and children (the couple have a Canadian-born daughter) work there, too.
Next door, the Gashi brothers opened their business just a few months ago. They're pretty proud of the place, having branched out on their own after working down the block at Jimmy's, another immigrant-owned barbershop, for most of their time here.
The brothers were already barbers when Artor, then 19, and Visar, then 21, arrived in Victoria in 1999, two of the 5,000 Kosovar refugees taken in by Canada during a dramatic emergency airlift that year.
Visar - you can call him Vic - had been the first to take up the trade, turning to hair-cutting after Albanian-speaking Kosovars saw their schools shut down in the unrest leading up to the war to break away from Yugoslavia. By the time full-on fighting broke out in 1998, Artor was a barber, too.
They cut hair while also volunteering for the Mother Teresa humanitarian organization in the capital, Pristina. After being forced from Kosovo by Slobodan Milosevic's regime, they cut hair in the refugee camp in Macedonia, too, (buzz cuts only, because of the lice).
It was in Macedonia that they got a positive impression of Canada. They liked the professional way Canada's peacekeepers - part of the NATO force that waded in after Milosevic's mass expulsions - handled themselves. "It was a well-educated army," Visar says. He wanted his kids to grow up in a country that produced soldiers like that.
By then, family was on Visar's mind. He had been walking around with an engagement ring for months, planning to propose to his girlfriend, Edita, once peace returned. But with no sign of the conflict abating, he finally popped the question as the war raged on. "I didn't want to die with the ring in my pocket," he says.
Today, Visar and Edita have three kids - 10, 11 and 15 - growing up in Canada, just like he wanted. Artor and his wife have two children of their own. They're all-Canadian families now, eager to be part of the community; on Sunday, Aug. 9, the brothers are opening the shop for a Cops for Cancer fundraiser.
Ask the brothers what stands out 16 years after being taken in by Canada, they say it's the welcome they got.
"We started feeling at home right away," Artor says.
"We didn't expect that much respect," says his big brother. "When we came here, they made us feel like special people."
Next door, their fellow refugee Hiep Nguyen is eager - really eager - to finally get the opportunity to express his gratitude. He says he remains overwhelmed by the kindness he has met.
"I want to say thank you to all Canadians for giving me a chance," he says, touching his heart.
The stoicism slips away. He chokes up. "I feel very, very lucky to stay in Canada."
Seventeen million refugees are adrift in the world today. On Fort Street, some of them know they won the lottery.
