Vietnamese people know what it means to endure.
They have lived through the regimes of various foreign rulers. The French arrived in the mid 1850s, plundering the country's resources and claiming it as a colony for about 70 years. During World War II, Japan took over Vietnam and exported rice to the Japanese, while an estimated 1 million Vietnamese died of starvation. One individual who endured in Vietnam was named Marie-Michel Marcel Van. He was born in 1928 in Ngam Giao, a small village located between Hanoi and Hai Phong.