New book a ‘mission’ in giving back, helping humanity
Lisha Van Nieuwenhove
“What is the difference between ambition and mission? Ambition means something you go after. Mission means something that goes after you. This book is a mission.”
The book Vi Tu Banh is talking about is the one that he has just published, and will officially launch on November 24. He’s been working on it, he says, for only 45 years. And he only wants to help one billion people while he’s alive. Only.
Vi Tu, who, when he’s not writing a book that he hopes will “bring peace back to society for the greater good of humanity,” is an optometrist in Uxbridge. He recently wrote “12 Elephants and a Dragon” with Marie Beswick Arthur, and he says he is finally ready to release his “memoir of survival and the kindness of strangers.”
Vi Tu, along with his six siblings and his parents, was one of the estimated 1.2 million people who fled South Vietnam after 1975. In 1979, when Vi Tu was 11 years old, his parents sold all their belongings to pay for passage on a boat to leave Vietnam and find a new life elsewhere – they were eight of the Vietnamese “boat people” whose plight caught the attention of the world in the late 70s and early 80s, including five people in Uxbridge. Barb and Ted Murphy, Lloyd and Mary Ball, and Doris Muckle, among many others, welcomed the Banh family, who had endured more than nine months in a refugee camp on Anambas Island, Indonesia.
“They taught us how to fish, so to speak,” says Vi Tu, recollecting how their first few months in Uxbridge went. “They taught us to become self-sustainable. Ted, who was an accountant, he said to me ‘I have $4 but I can’t give it to you, you need to work for it.’ I’m not crazy rich now, but I’m comfortable – that’s what he (Ted) taught me. He was a funny guy! He had eight kids to feed himself – he couldn’t give us the money, but he could show us how to do things.”
Vi Tu says anecdotes and teachings like this one fill the book he and Beswick Arthur have written. He explains that the book is about “transformation and how these generous people brought us here,” and says that all proceeds from the book will go to the new Uxbridge hospital.
“If you honour or serve the greater good, the universe will always move mountains for you,” says Vi Tu. “If it wasn’t for Uxbridge we would have starved to death or been sent home.”
On November 24, Vi Tu will officially launch “12 Elephants and a Dragon – A Memoir of Survival and the Kindness of Strangers” at an event at Wooden Sticks Golf Club. For those interested in attending the launch event, email vbanhoffice@gmail.com directly.