‘Still Fresh in Minds’: Vietnamese Community Marks 50 Years Since Fall of Saigon

Tan Hoang stands outside his restaurant in Edmonton on April 16, 2025, holding a picture of the boat he built and used to escape Saigon after communists took over in 1975. The Canadian Press/Jason Franson

Seventy-year-old Tan Hoang vowed he would never return to Vietnam after fleeing the country with his family on a makeshift wooden boat.

Officers in Vietnam remind him of the communist soldiers who once stormed and captured Saigon, the former South Vietnam capital now called Ho Chi Minh City.