Providence has guided the placement of every stitch in the fabric of Sister Sen Nguyen’s life.
She did not know it at the time, but she now feels that the divine was at work from the moment she and her mother fled their village just before Saigon fell to the day nearly 30 years later, when she opened Provide-N-Ce, a west Denver art gallery that supports disabled women in Vietnam.
“Looking back, I see now that it was all very providential. God was in every single move in my life,” Nguyen says.
Nguyen and her mother, Tin, knew trouble was advancing in the weeks before American soldiers pulled out of Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
As communist troops from North Vietnam marched south on Highway 1 toward their village of Phan Thiet, the pair fled by boat to Vung Tau, where they thought they would be safe.
But Vung Tau was overloaded with refugees; death was everywhere. Nguyen, then 19, left her mother behind and went to Saigon a week before the city fell, hoping to find help.
Nguyen was unable to find help before the bridge between Vung Tau and Saigon was bombed, leaving her to face the violent fall of the city alone.
Afterward, Nguyen desperately searched for her only living relative, first in Vung Tau and then Phan Thiet, but found only disappointment.
“I thought she had passed away,” the now 50-year-old Franciscan sister says.
She grieved for six months. And then, around Christmas, a miracle arrived in an envelope: a letter, posted from Denver.
“It was very providential,” Nguyen says. “If she did not come to the U.S., there was no way I would be a sister, which was a childhood dream.”
And certainly, she would not have worked assembling medical equipment or earned a degree in sociology and religious studies, or have been trained as a teacher, or started the gallery.
Nguyen may have become an artist, but probably would not have painted enormous abstract canvases, nor would she have created an exquisite portfolio of black and white photography capturing the end of her mother’s life.
As Vung Tau fell in 1975, Nguyen’s mother jumped on a boat. Like many others, she was pulled from the water by an American ship and taken to a refugee center in Manila, Philippines. She was quickly transported to Camp Pendleton, Calif., and sponsored by a church group for residence in Denver.
From the moment Nguyen received her mother’s first letter, she began plotting to join her. It took 15 or 16 tries before she was able to escape Vietnam, in the spring of 1978.
Thirty-one people made it aboard a small fishing boat that was to travel three days to
Singapore. The boat’s pilot was missing, but the group was committed to escape.
Eight days passed. The boat bobbed lost at sea, the refugees’ food supply was low and their water gone. Ship after ship passed, until finally a freighter pointed them to a refugee camp two hours away, off the coast of Malaysia.
“It was horrifying in those years, but now, I feel the grace and blessing,” Nguyen says. “You must welcome everything that comes to your life. You might not see what it is right away because it is unfolding, but life is a journey of the unknown, and you have to go faithfully.”
After three months in the camp, Nguyen joined her mother in Denver, where a new part of her life began to unfold.
She attended community college, and earned a degree at Regis University and then, in 1992, professed her final vows at Marycrest Franciscan convent in Denver.
The Franciscan sisters follow the word of St. Francis of Assisi. They wear ordinary clothing and minister beyond the church walls, and especially to people who society may have deemed worthless. “We live simply and walk with the people as our companions,” explains Sister Karen Crouse, the convent’s provincial minister. “Our mission includes all people.”
Even a cooperative of young women in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, disabled by polio. The women – known by the acronym THREADS, Together Handicrafting Relationships Exchange and Developing Sufficiency – support themselves by doing fine needlework, like ornamental embroidery and smocking, and recently, extraordinary portraits and still lifes on fine black silk.
“She has real reverence for the pieces, and that is her gift: her reverence for the lives and the creations of the people who spend time doing this work,” says Crouse, who was with Nguyen when she took her first vows in 1986.
When her mother was disabled by a stroke in 1997, Nguyen left her work as a teacher. and hatched the idea of the boutique. It would allow her to care for her mother and continue her mission by selling more of the THREADS work she had sold at fairs since 1990.
In January of 2003, Nguyen signed a lease on a building near West 41st Avenue and Tennyson Street and went to work. A month later, her mother died.
“I think she intuitively knew that I could not take care of her and the shop, but if she had died before, I wouldn’t have had the courage to do this,” Nguyen says. “I had no training in business. I just had to jump in and learn.”
It’s the same sort of optimistic approach Nguyen takes in her work with the THREADS co-op. She has pushed the women to a more refined form of embroidery, like that practiced by the Da Lat Xa Quan group. The XQ embroiderers do elegant portraiture, and their work commands high prices.
At first, the women resisted. But then Nguyen commissioned a portrait of her mother – a black and white piece picked out in blue and grey silk floss.
Nguyen was stunned by the outcome. “The expression, everyone who knew her will know this is mom,” she says, touching the smooth threads, stitched in tight to create her mother’s wrinkled face.
A collection of XQ work is now hanging in Provide-N-Ce gallery, archivally framed and priced at $1,000 to $4,000. THREADS work starts at $300.
Marycrest supports Nguyen’s venture as part of her ministry, but the gallery must also pay its own bills, including her salary. Franciscan sisters work to support the convent and are expected to make at least $25,000 a year, Crouse says.
“We figured she could give it a shot. We don’t want money determining everything, but we have to be smart enough to know it determines a lot of things.”
