From Saigon to Sydney: hear An Ngo Lang’s story

“Fear, most assuredly, has a smell,” she recounted many years later. “But no one spoke, cried or even whimpered.”

More than 40 years later, An Ngo Lang would like to share with you her remarkable story – in person at the ‘Human Library’, commemorating Refugee Week on Saturday 22 June.

“We were waiting; expecting that at any second the helicopter would be blown to pieces.

“Large, black plumes of smoke, all around the city, from burning houses, cars, and buildings rose up into the night sky,” she recalls.

“Saigon, the beautiful city of my childhood, the place I believed to be peaceful and held all my earliest memories, had become total chaos; a place of panic, terror, confusion and war.”