Leaving his country in 1982, “without a bag, with just shorts and a t-shirt”, the most Vietnamese of Paimpolais closed his restaurant this Sunday, January 5, 2025. One very last time. “It’s over, I’ll stop,” smiles Van Dong Nguyen. Now it’s retirement, we’ve worked enough! » And the man knows what he’s talking about. With his wife, he ran the Van Long for thirty-five years.
His arrival in Paimpol was the subject of a long journey. “It was my mother who put me in the boat,” remembers the man who was only 18 years old at the time. “She had paid for the passage, we left Saigon, 35 of us in a small boat, for the Philippines…”. A destination that he will only reach with the help of a ship from Paimpolais! “We were spotted in the China Sea by a boat called Le Goëlo,” assures the restaurateur. A freighter from the Western Maritime Agency, in fact, converted into a hospital ship to collect “boat people” fleeing the communist regimes of former French Indochina.
Again and again Le Goëlo
Once disembarked, he eventually reached Paris, after six months in a Red Cross camp. “Some went to Munich, others elsewhere… For me, it was France. It was a French boat that picked me up. And Mitterrand said “yes”, I had refugee papers”. Créteil will follow, then Rennes, Morlaix, Quimper and again in Morlaix. “That’s where I met my wife – a Vietnamese refugee like him – and where I learned that there was no Vietnamese restaurant in Paimpol.” A visit later and the couple is installed in a small premises, rue Saint-Vincent, where they launch their business with the lady in the kitchen and the gentleman in the dining room. Before, in 1989, the purchase of the restaurant which was then rue du Général-Leclerc. “The roundabout did not exist, the street ran alongside the window. When they named it Le Goëlo, I said to myself that it was incredible, still Le Goëlo! “, he laughs.
“We were very, very well received here,” continues Van Dong. We were the only Vietnamese, we learned French very quickly. We had no one else to talk to.” His mother tongue was reserved at home, “so that the children (the couple have a girl and a boy) learn it too”.
« Allez, kenavo ! ,
To hear him say, the years have gone by “quickly”. “Normal, we worked, worked and worked again…” Open from Monday to Sunday, “because in the end, we only had that to do”, the couple has built up a nice clientele. “Many people from Paimpol, and also people passing through.” In a location that will have aroused a lot of desire, to hear it. “I’ve had more than one buyout offer,” he smiles again. Always brushed aside. “What would I have done? We were good here…” assures the man who bought a house 17 years ago, “not very far, to come on foot” and where he sees himself enjoying a peaceful retirement.
Have you seen the weather here? It’s cold, it’s raining, I wish her well, me, my mother!
“We will be able to travel, enjoy the four grandchildren…” adds the man who regularly goes to Vietnam, since 1993 and obtaining his French nationality, to visit his mother, now 94 years old. And that he did not bring him to France: “Have you seen the weather here? It’s cold, it’s raining, I wish her well, my mother,” he bursts out laughing, before giving the final words: “Come on, kenavo! “.
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