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Vietnamese family likes the taste of success.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

When Ming and Phung Hsieh went into business for themselves 14 years ago, she was a reluctant partner.

Ming Hsieh, at 33, had worked in Chinese restaurants nearly a decade by then and ever since he left Vietnam as a refugee.

Ming hadn't chosen the restaurant business - it was the only work he could find in Eugene without English - but he'd learned the job well, and he was tired of seeking the owner's permission to try something new.

But Phung was frightened by the idea of starting a business. At 28, she had a job at a preschool and their 14-month-old daughter to look after. She didn't know a thing about restaurants.

"What if you cook and people don't like?" she asked.

Still, Ming was confident, and Phung couldn't really overrule him. "It's the culture," she said. "When you get married and the husband want to do something, the wife has to support."

But the couple had strengths that even they didn't recognize at the time.

Ming was propelled by memories of his grandmother's corner grocery, where he grew up among the dry goods and vegetables - and, most importantly, the neighbors who came by each day to trade.

Phung was raised with the expectation that she would be industrious, and pitching in came as naturally to her as breathing. The day she joined her sponsor family in Lowell, for instance, she picked up a cloth and set to washing the family's dishes.

As Vietnamese boat people, part of the 500,000 who fled across the South China Sea when the communists took over Saigon, the young couple had an uncommon acquaintance with risk.

Phung's parents had to decide which of their children to...

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