Thanh Nguyen was born in a war-torn village in Vietnam where people counted themselves lucky if they could find cans of tuna that U.S. soldiers buried many years ago.
The second-youngest of nine children, she wore heavily patched hand-me-downs and made toys out of paper.
She once heard that in America, people drank from paper cups and threw them away when they were finished. She never dreamed of throwing anything so valuable away. Her family did not even own a refrigerator, and her best meals had come from old cans.
“I had never even tasted chocolate,” she said.
I met Nguyen, 32, at a Starbucks in downtown Denver, where she drank tea from a paper cup as she recounted her story. She wore a fashionable, black pinstripe suit – the kind a banker would wear – and she toted a Louis Vuitton handbag.
“I don’t know how to tell you how fortunate I am,” she said.
Her parents dreamed of escaping communists who had taken over everything after the war. Little by little, they helped their children flee to America. Six of Nguyen’s siblings went first.
Nguyen said she attempted her first escape at age 9. She wound up in prison for 12 days, where she ate nothing but two tiny cups of rice a day until her mother bought her way out. Her older sister fared worse, spending three months in prison after an escape attempt.
At 12, Nguyen fled again with a sister. She found herself on a small boat with no food and little water for seven days. When the rains came, the boat took on water. Two men panicked, jumped ship and drowned.
“I was terrified,” she said. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to die at this young age. I don’t want to die yet.”‘
“I cried so much”
For the next two years, she and her sister would bounce from one island refugee camp to the next. She remembers being stripped while standing in a group so that she could be inspected for disease. In the refugee camps, she clung to her chores, her schooling and makeshift Buddhist temples, avoiding places where she might be abused.
She and her sister spent six months in the Philippines, learning English in another refugee camp. Then, when she was 14, it was off to Singapore, where she boarded a jet bound for Los Angeles.
It would be 10 years before Nguyen’s family would be reunited in the United States.
“The first letter I wrote to my parents was 14 pages,” she said. “I cried so much.”
She came to Denver to stay with her siblings. She worked in a nail salon that one of her sisters had established and went to school, where kids sometimes made fun of her English.
She graduated from John F. Kennedy High School and took courses at Community College of Denver. She grew tired of doing nails and went to work at a Park Meadows department store selling cosmetics.
One day, she was doing a makeover on a customer who must have caught a glimpse of her intelligence. The woman asked if she’d like a job working in a bank. She could work her way up. Become a bank officer.
Moving up
That was 10 years ago. Nguyen started at Wells Fargo and eventually moved to Key Bank.
“She never let anything hold her back,” said Crystal Lung, a vice president of private banking at Colorado State Bank & Trust, who worked with Nguyen at Key.
“She was a stellar salesperson. She was always very driven … strong-willed but good-hearted.”
Last summer, Nguyen accepted a job as a vice president of private banking at First National Bank of Colorado. Her clients are doctors, lawyers, accountants and business owners who need help planning their finances and estates and buying financial products.
She entertains them at sporting events, takes them to the Capital Grille for steaks and visits their offices. But she still sometimes marvels at paper cups.
“People risk their lives to come here,” she said. “All the things I had to go through when I was a child to come here, it was well-worth every bit of it.”
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to Lewis at , 303-954-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
