VICSEG student Lily Truong found true love with ‘the boy next door’ in Vietnam yet spent half a lifetime searching for a father she had never met, halfway around the globe in Australia.  

“I was born during the Vietnam War in 1969,” said Lily. 

“I had never met my father my whole life. When I was young, a child, I saw the other kids; they have a father, but I never have. I would say to myself, ‘I wished I had my father’. I only had a photo of him. He was an Australian soldier. It was a picture of my parents someone took for them”.  

It was around the age of twenty that Lily met her then boyfriend, now husband. He had returned to Vietnam to visit family after nine years of working and completing university studies in Australia when they met.  

Lily’s mother, meanwhile, had remained friends with one man, John, who had also served with foreign forces during the war. Lily wrote to John, and on learning her story, John was able to provide a first name. Patrick. That’s all he knew. But this information was a vital piece of the puzzle, and after working through a maze of connections, Lily was finally able to gather the surname she so desperately needed.  

Now back in Australia, her boyfriend was able to locate Patrick after combing the Australian electoral roll. He wrote a letter to Patrick on Lily’s behalf. There would be a long wait for a reply. 

Three years later, in 1994, Lily’s husband sponsored her migration to Australia on a fiancé visa. Lily once again recruited help from her husband to write to Patrick, expressing her wish to see him. At first, Patrick said yes. And then, he said no. ‘I don’t think we have a daughter from Vietnam,’ he had said.  

“Then I called. I said to him, ‘I really want to see you. I want to see who my father is. This one-time only. I need to see you face-to-face’. At this time, he’d just got married to a new wife. I was twenty-four years old”.  

“Ten years later. I left it there ten whole years. I never forgot. I picked up the phone and prayed before I called. I said, ‘Buddha, if it’s my real father, when I ring him up, if it’s my father who picks up the phone, not someone else, then we talk. If someone else picks up the phone, I will hang up and never go looking for him again’”. 

“I prayed before. And then I dialled”.  

Lily’s heart raced.  

But the moment she heard the voice, she knew.  

“I said, Patrick, this is Lily”.  

There could be no telling what would come next. And then it came. 

“Where have you been?”, Patrick said. “I’ve been looking for you for many years,” he said. 

“The last you spoke to me on the phone, you’d just got married and I didn’t want to bother your family. Last time I spoke just a little English and I didn’t want to bother you,” Lily said back.  

“You’re my daughter,” Patrick said. “Call me your father”.  

Lily stuck with ‘Patrick’.  

“What I want to do,” Lily said, “is to have a DNA test for us. I will pay for that. I do in Melbourne; you do in Port Macquarie”. 

“But you’re my daughter,” Partick said. “You don’t have to do it”.  

Lily kept the faith. The test got done and the results came back two weeks later.  

“Ninety-nine-point seven percent!”, Lily said.  

 At that time, Lily’s family had a holiday planned in Queensland. But with her father now ageing, time was of the essence. Lily and her husband reorganized their plans to arrive in Sydney instead.  

“When we arrived in Port Macquarie, it was about 8:30 at night, very raining. I think it was God crying for me. We arrived. We sat down. We all cried. We cried and cried and cried. We can’t say anything. We just cried. Everybody hugged and cried. I remember. I will never forget”.  

“After that, I visit him a couple of times every year until he died, until he passed away”.  

Ten years later (and ten years in the past from now), Lily’s English had improved leaps and bounds after committing to community-based English classes in Braybrook. Her and her husband were operating a small business together, and their two children were growing up fast. Then life threw a new set of challenges their way.  

“Ten years ago, my father passed away, and my husband had cancer. At that time, we had a business in mobile phones. We had a little shop. After my husband got the cancer, I thought I need to do something for myself. Something financial. If my husband passed away, I still need something financial to look after my children,” Lily said. 

“I just sat down in the backyard without my husband, with my children and cried and cried. I looked up at the sky and called to God and said, ‘Please look after me. Please take care of me’”.  

“I didn’t want my husband to know I was concerned for him. I showed him that I’m very strong, but behind that, I’m still worried. Before bed, every night, I sat with my legs crossed and prayed for him. I said, ‘Please, help my husband past this state and get back to normal’”. 

“But suddenly I realised, I’m alright, I’m okay. I can do everything for my children”. 

Her husband responded well to treatment (and remains free from cancer to this day), however the experience had already awakened in Lily a fierce determination to earn, learn, and never stop growing. After one year of treatment, they closed the business to minimize stress and support her husband’s recovery. Lily pursued studies in aged care and gained employment in a residential aged care facility.  

“I studied aged care, because it pushed me to be strong and meant I can get a permanent job and care for my children if something ever happened”.   

“At first when I applied to job and start working, I thought ‘I can’t do this, it’s too much’”, Lily said, referring to the challenging behaviours that can occur in people with dementia.

“But slowly, slowly, I was getting there, and (felt like) it’s a wakeup call for my life. I have to help the people; I have to love the people more than myself. Then I care for them, and now I feel like they are a part of my parents. I treat all the older people just like my parents. When I’m coming, I love them, I hug them, I kiss them. I feel like sometimes even they hit me, but I still love them”.  

At the same facility, Lily was once offered the opportunity to do lifestyle shifts with Vietnamese residents affected by dementia; most with little or no English. While some workers struggled to design engaging activities, Lily thought outside the box:  

“I knew (culturally) these residents love gambling. I went to the gift shop and got fake money. I made up the tokens, and made-up fake money, and set up a game of blackjack. My table kept getting bigger and bigger each time. Sometimes visiting families would join in”.  

“Sometimes, a resident would say (to another resident), ‘Hey, you need money? Are you short?  Here, I have money, I lend you to you’. At the end, they didn’t want to give the money back to me for the next time. People with dementia thought it was real money! They were having a great time”, Lily said.  

This absolute commitment to the contentment, comfort and wellbeing of vulnerable consumers is at the heart of Lily’s caring career, which has since expanded to include employment in early childhood education.  

Lily embodies all the things our aged care and early childhood workforces desperately need. While giving 110% to any job she takes, she also sticks up for herself and is unafraid to stand up for the voiceless when the need arises; be it the rights of her colleagues, or the rights of children and older people to quality care. At times, this has meant having the courage to challenge the powers that be:  

“In COVID, I worked for a (aged care) place that wanted to cut costs by reducing the wearing of gloves. They said ten pairs a day. I said, ‘I dare them to do this. I won’t stand for this. I will stand up. We need to change gloves every single time we meet with a different resident. It’s for the safety of our residents’. One of the managers asked my friend, ‘Is Lily a troublemaker at work?’ The friend said, ‘Lily’s not a troublemaker. She stands up for the residents. She fights for what’s right’. In the end, they didn’t do it. They knew I would speak up”. 

Nowadays, Lily works seven days a week between roles in aged care, early childhood, studies with VICSEG, and caring for her own grandchildren. Her work ethic is undeniable, driven by a core value that any job taken is an opportunity to give. 

“Any job in this life, we have to take our ethical compassion to do our job. It’s not just a job. We have to do from our passion, from our ethics to do a proper job. Of course we need the money for life, but when we come to work, we have to do the right thing”. 

Bella Furnari has been Lily’s trainer at VICSEG since Lily studied for her CHC30121 Certificate III in Early Childhood Education and Care, and more recently, the Diploma, which she is due to complete in May 2025.  

“You know that saying, ‘knowledge is power’,” said Bella. When people know their rights, and know what the right thing is to do, they’ll stand up. But it also takes courage. If you turn a blind eye to these things, nothing gets fixed, nothing gets better. And that’s the problem. We need courage to speak up sometimes. Lily’s an amazing example of this”. 

“It’s the same in early childhood work sometimes,” Bella continued.  

“People know from day dot that if you pursue a career in childcare, it’s not going to make you a millionaire. You’re never going to end up owning a mansion in Acapulco. But it’s when the conditions are unfair, when there’s no teamwork, when expectations and pressures are unrealistic, that’s when people start leaving. We need a workforce aware of its rights and with the courage to stand up. This is something we constantly discuss in the classroom,” Bella said.  

Bella sees Lily as a leader in the making. In her own way, it seems Lily might already be one. But Lily has no interest; at least for now.  

“Some of the staff in childcare ask me if I’m going to be a team leader. And I say no, I just want to be a good educator. Then they say, why are you doing the Diploma then? I say, I don’t know either! In my work, I do the best I can. That’s my job. I don’t want any title,” Lily said.  

“I really appreciate for this country. Vietnam is my mother land. But here is my country. I’m living here the rest of my life. I appreciate that. I had the opportunities to learn, get better, get a job, earn money, and raise my children for a safe life. This is why I have to repay this country. And the only way I can do this is to work and pay taxes”.