01/20/2026
A Winter Heart
It was a summer noon in Saigon in the early 1980s, the kind of heat that presses down without mercy. A group of children were running laps during physical education. Among them was a sixth-grade girl—short hair, frail frame, struggling to keep pace. Halfway around the yard, her face drained of color. Her breathing turned frantic. Then she collapsed, unconscious, onto the concrete.
She was born on the first day of winter, and her heart had never fully learned how to be whole.
I would not meet her until years later, but this was where her story began.
She was born with Patent Ductus Arteriosus, a congenital heart defect in which a vessel meant to close shortly after birth remains open. Blood flows where it should not. The heart strains. Pressure builds in the lungs. In places with access to modern medicine, infants with this condition are usually operated on within weeks—sometimes days—of birth.
Her mother brought a doctor’s note to the school, asking that her daughter be excused from physical education. The principal refused. She dismissed the diagnosis as an excuse, accused the girl of being pampered, unwilling to exert herself. If she could not run, the principal said, she should not attend school at all.
And so she stopped going.
When she told me this years later, she said the illness itself was not what hurt most. What hurt was the loss of childhood—the long days at home, the quiet shame, the ache of watching classmates pass by with books in their arms.
As time went on, her condition worsened. Then help came from far away. Her uncle escaped Vietnam and settled in Canada. Through them, a woman named Barbara, along with a church community, stepped forward to sponsor her. On humanitarian grounds, the Canadian government approved her case with unusual speed.
She arrived in Canada in late December, into a world of snow and silence. In Toronto, she underwent open-heart surgery at the Hospital for Sick Children. The operation succeeded. She was young; her recovery was swift. But the scar remained—long, pale, running along the left side of her back—a private reminder she carried for years.
When I met her at university, she was no longer fragile. She had grown into a young woman of quiet strength and unmistakable beauty. Early on, she told me about her heart, almost as a warning—an invitation not to expect too much. Had she said nothing, I would never have known.
But the heart has its own reasons. Que sera, sera. I chose to stay.
A few years later, our two children were born—healthy, bright, alive. Cardiologists later called her case extraordinary. They could not explain how someone deemed “high-risk” had endured so much, or how she had become a mother at all. Still, because her surgery came late—at fifteen—the disease left traces that never fully disappeared.
Her winter heart may never have been ordinary, but it has always been generous.
In December 2023, we founded the Phong & Bao Duong Foundation to help children in Vietnam receive surgery for congenital heart disease—to offer them what she was given decades earlier: time, possibility, a future.
As for Barbara, after the surgery she moved to New Brunswick, on Canada’s eastern edge. Contact faded. She entered our lives when hope was nearly gone, and then, just as quietly, she disappeared.
Perhaps that is how miracles arrive—not loudly, not forever. They come when we are most vulnerable, stay just long enough to change a life, and leave behind something enduring: the knowledge that compassion, freely given, can alter fate.
