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Những Cọng Rơm Làm Tổ (Straws That Built a Nest) is a collection of personal essays reflecting on the early Vietnamese refugee experience in Canada, remembered nearly half a century later through friendship, family life, and the small acts that helped a displaced community put down new roots.From five friends who quietly helped build the Vietnamese community in Ottawa, to a first Tết celebrated in the depths of a Winnipeg winter, and evenings when immigrant families gathered around Vietnamese music videos to recover the familiar sounds of home, these essays preserve the memories of a generation that had to begin again with very little.They could not bring their homeland with them, but each carried a small part of it: the language, a Tết tradition, an old song, a family meal, a helping hand.The author likens these humble contributions to straws carried home one by one by scattered birds building a nest. Many of those first birds have now grown old, and some have flown away. But the nest remains, sheltering new generations.Straws That Built a Nest is a quiet tribute to those who rebuilt fragments of home in a foreign land, so that those who came after them might still know where they came from.