On Election Day, Chang Ly walked into his Dorchester convenience store as night fell. His wife, Van Hua, was behind the cash register. Their son, Danny, a 7th grader at Boston College High, sat at the far end of the counter, doing his homework.
At 7:30 p.m., a man burst in wearing a mask and pointing a gun.
“Give me the money,” he barked, “or I’ll shoot you!”
Standing next to her husband, Van Hua opened the cash register.
The gunman came around the counter, brushed past Danny and pushed Chang back.
The gunman pressed the pistol against Chang’s stomach. Van Hua held out the cash, but instead of taking the money the gunman pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped through Chang’s midsection, exiting his upper left torso and striking the blue Lottery cash register.
Van Hua dropped the money and went to her fallen husband.
“Why you shoot my husband?” she cried.
The gunman ignored her and picked up the strewn cash. He ran out with $300.
Danny called 911.
With great effort, Chang rose to his feet, then collapsed again.
“They kill my husband!” Van Hua shouted into the phone, “They kill my husband!”
Van Hua, whose English is not as good as her husband’s, held the phone to Chang.
“Help,” he said through gritted teeth. “I need an ambulance.”
As he lay there, listening as the sirens drew nearer, Chang Ly vowed he would not die. Not like this. He had come too far, survived more than almost anyone knew.
Almost 40 years ago, when the Vietnam War ended, Chang Ly’s father had to disappear before the Viet Cong made him disappear. His father was in the special forces of the South Vietnamese Army, and he was good as dead if the communists found him.
So he left his wife, his oldest son Chang, and two other boys in a rural part of Soc Trang province.
A few years after his father left, it became obvious to Chang Ly that he had to step up, to be the man of the house, a house that had no electricity or running water. And so he quit school and went into
the waters of the Mekong Delta, to gather rice and reel in fish.
He was 11 years old.
Chang’s father made it to Cambodia, then walked to Thailand. Eventually, he made it all the way to Boston and found work as a cook at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Chang was 18 when he learned his father was in Boston. He had to find him. He paid to get on a boat with 73 other refugees. They were at sea for three days when their boat was taken and sunk by pirates who stripped the refugees of whatever they had, then pushed them, one by one, into the sea.
“I had nothing of value,” Chang said. “So I was the first thrown into the ocean.”
It was pitch black and he drifted for hours. When dawn came he scanned the horizon. There were no boats nearby; he grew exhausted and despondent.
“I was so tired I wanted to die,” he said. “I tried to swallow water and kill myself. But I couldn’t.”
In the midst of his despair, a Thai fishing trawler’s net brought him in. At first, the fishermen tried to force him back into the water. Then someone above, in an authoritative voice, ordered him brought onboard.
“They gave me food and some medicine,” Chang said. “They gave me water. I slept. And the next day they threw me back into the ocean.”
He floated for another day before another Thai fishing boat plucked him from the ocean. Those fishermen were considerably nicer. A few days later, a Vietnamese boat pulled alongside and the Thai fishermen helped Chang to get onboard.
According to a United Nations report, Chang and another man were the only ones of the original 74 refugees attacked by pirates who survived.
“We ended up in Malaysia,” Chang said.
From there, it was a series of refugee camps before he made a series of flights that ended at Logan Airport. His father was waiting for him, and they hugged tightly. Then Chang climbed into an automobile for the first time in his life. He was 19 years old.
Chang began taking English classes, taking the MBTA downtown. He couldn’t read English, but he could count. It was seven stops on the Red Line from Fields Corner to Park Street.
He had to pay back the $700 airfare that brought him to America and was desperate to find work. But first he had to find a trade.
He tried cooking at a restaurant, but didn’t like the heat. He wanted to become a machinist but couldn’t do the math, having left school so young. Then he enrolled in a carpentry training program, and it fit. He got his first job doing building maintenance at the Academy Homes housing project in Roxbury.
In 1994, he married Van Hua, a seamstress. They bought a house in the Port Norfolk section of Dorchester and started a family. In 1997, he struck out on his own, first as a handyman. He grew ambitious and began buying houses to fix them up.
He bought a 10-unit building at the corner of Dorchester Avenue and Romsey Street in Savin Hill and put a convenience store on the bottom floor, in part to give his wife a place to work. He called it D&D, using the first letter of his kids’ names.
In the 15 years he and his wife have run D&D Convenience, it has closed for only two days; once for his oldest son’s 10th birthday, the other time when the entire family drove up to New Hampshire to a water park.
The store is open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, 365 days a year. Van Hua works behind the counter. Chang helps out in the morning and, after tending to his construction projects, in the evening, before he and his wife drive home to Canton, where his parents live with them and their four kids.
It’s been a hard life, but a good one. Then came Election Day, and the masked man with the gun.
Within hours of Chang’s shooting, police arrested Jarris Charley, who is from Roxbury and, at the relatively young age of 21, quite familiar with jail cells and courtrooms.
The shooting, just a few blocks from the mayor’s home, was especially senseless. Customers couldn’t understand why anyone would shoot Chang. He is the kind of guy who eats the difference if you’re a buck short. Everybody in Savin Hill likes Chang.
Chang got lucky. The bullet passed through without hitting any organs.
About 12 hours after her husband was shot, while he was still lying in Boston Medical Center, Van Hua turned the key at D&D and opened for business. At the same time, Chang’s kids showed up at school — his oldest boy to pharmacy college, his only girl to Fontbonne Academy, Danny to BC High, the 5-year-old to kindergarten.
“This is why I work so hard,” he told me. “I want my kids to get the education I couldn’t.”
Less than 24 hours after he was shot, Chang walked out of the hospital and into his store. He was in pain, but wanted to check on the store and drive home with his wife.
This week, still wincing in discomfort, Chang went back to his full routine.
As he chatted with a customer at the store, the sun set, and the headlights that ran the length of Dot Ave. looked like a procession of candles. Chang Ly looked out the window and said, in barely a whisper, something he says every day.
“I love this country,” he said.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.