‘The wounds never go away’: Baby Y-Dang named after Cambodian refugee camp remembers Canadian arrival

40 years later UBC assistant professor Y-Dang Troeung advocates on behalf of new refugees to Canada

Y-Dang Troeung’s arrival in Canada, nearly four decades ago, came with the most official of welcomes.

Then-prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau shook her father’s hand as she - not yet a year old - bounced in her mother’s arms, eyes wide at the camera flashes.

They had just landed in Canada and had been shuttled immediately to Ottawa for the photo-op, to be the faces of a wave of refugees then arriving from Cambodia.

The little girl Y-Dang, in pink, was named after the Cambodian refugee camp, Khao I-Dang, where she was born in January 1980 as guerrilla warfare raged across her homeland. 

Follow the story at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/y-dang-troeung-cambodian-refugee-activism-1.5386073