Montreal’s 40,000-member Vietnamese community celebrates Tết lunar new year

With roughly 40,000 members, Montreal is home to one of the largest Vietnamese communities in Canada.

Many of them braved the cold on Sunday to celebrate the Tết lunar new year in the Old Port.

Montreal Vietnamese Community vice president Yvonne Nguyen says there’s a deeper story to the community’s presence in the metropolis.

“In the beginning, it’s the generations of our parents who came here, and they start, from zero,” she said.

The arrival of Vietnamese nationals in Canada is fairly recent with waves of refugees immigrating after the 1975 fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

It is a piece of history that the community honours each lunar year (Tết).

“It’s about paying a tribute to ancestors,” said Nguyen. “There’s a generational gap that still exists in our community, so we have the involvement of three generations of the Vietnamese community coming together to celebrate this important event.”

This year, Tết falls on Feb. 17, which is also the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Montreal diaspora.

Youth leaders say it’s an opportunity to embrace the language.

“The first generation came here, and they spoke very little French and English,” said Montreal Vietnamese Youth Committee leader Marie-Therese Nguyen. “The second generation, because they wanted to thrive here, sometimes the Vietnamese language is like a second, in the background.”

She says that learning Vietnamese is the key to communicating with the older generations and that it can bring a better understanding of culture.

“Why, for example, do we have a yellow flag with three bands and three red bands?” she said. “It means yellow as unity. It was the emperor’s favourite colour that predates, like, centuries. It’s not a new thing, and the three red bands mean three different regions. The north, the middle, and, the south.”

From traditional food to lion dances, there was a plethora for all generations to look into and love.