From Vietnam to America--Peril, Success : Business owner: A Vietnamese refugee who survived a narrow escape from his country now runs a bustling company.
In a region full of entrepreneurial success stories, few have the drama of Phuc Truong’s.
Only 10 years after barely surviving escape from Vietnam aboard a disabled refugee boat that bobbed at sea for three weeks with little food and water, Truong now operates a successful electronics assembly plant in Mira Mesa.
“Sometimes, I still can’t believe it, being here, working for myself,” the 34-year-old Truong said.
Three years ago, his company, Professional’s Electronic, employed seven people--including Truong and his wife, Mydung--posting $192,000 in annual revenue. This year, Truong expects revenue to exceed $1 million, and he is adding 25 employees to his staff of 60.
His clients rave about his work. Frances San Clemente, director of manufacturing services for Doctor Design, an electronics design engineering and consulting firm in Sorrento Valley, said: “No matter what kind of job you send him, it’s always, ‘No problem, piece of cake.’ He says that with a big smile on his face no matter what you want, and he means it with all his heart and soul.”
Another of his clients, an electronics manufacturing firm, refused to comment about Truong on the record out of fear of letting his competition in on his most closely guarded secret.
Truong’s shop specializes in through-hole assembly work, which involves drilling small holes into electrical boards and attaching bulky components to them with solder. It’s a method that many people believe will one day be outmoded by surface-mounted technology, a method of board assembly that is generally considered more reliable, allowing for the creation of smaller electronic devices and being more conducive to automatic assembly.
Truong said that, although increasing numbers of clients ask for surface-mounted work, he is not ready to buy the equipment needed for such jobs. Truong recently purchased a $55,000 machine that will allow him to automatically test his clients’ electrical components. But, he said, he eventually wants to design and manufacture his own electrical devices.
Kien Trang, president of the Vietnamese Federation of San Diego, an umbrella group that represents about 23 Vietnamese organizations, said Truong’s success story is not uncommon among the boat people who fled Vietnam, beginning in 1975.
“When they get to the U.S., they feel it’s ‘OK, we can work hard, we can do anything,’ ” Trang said. “They feel they have to catch up for what they lost.”
Truong was born in Phu Quoc, a small fishing village with coconut trees and white, sandy beaches along the southern coast of Vietnam. His father, Bong Truong, worked as a fisherman and later as a city councilman.
With a population of only 20,000, Phu Quoc was not large enough to support a senior high school. So Truong, an only child, was sent to Saigon to complete his studies. He eventually received teaching credentials from Saigon’s University of Education and spent the next few years teaching math, physics and science to high school students.
In 1975, his life took a dramatic turn when U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. Truong, who was considered anti-Communist, was arrested and sentenced to a Communist re-education camp, where he was forced to spend as many as 10 hours a day reading the works of Communist revolutionaries.
“It went in one ear and then out the other,” he said. “I never listened.”
Because educators were in high demand in the new regime, Truong was released after six months and sent back to teach school in his hometown. Three years later, Truong and his wife booked space on a refugee boat bound for Thailand. But, before the couple stepped aboard, they were arrested by Vietnamese police. This time Truong was sentenced to a year in jail, a hot and dirty place that made the re-education camp seem like a country club.
Almost as soon as he was released, he and his wife made another escape attempt, this time successfully.
The trip should have taken a day and a half, but the boat’s engine broke. For three weeks, the refugees bobbed on the ocean, using an old blanket as a sail. They drank seawater and ate fish thrown to them by sympathetic Thai fishermen.
The Truong family lived in a Thai refugee camp for a year before getting permission to immigrate to the United States.
When Truong arrived in San Diego in 1980, he assumed he would pursue a job in teaching. But he was disheartened by what he perceived as a lack of respect for teachers.
“The students in this country, they do whatever they want to do because too much freedom,” he said. “They don’t care about the teacher. In my country, the teacher is the second parent. Anything the teacher say, they listen.”
A friend told Truong that the future was in electronics, so Truong enrolled at Mesa College to learn how to become an electrical technician. After receiving his credentials, he landed a supervisor’s job at Trilatron Enterprises in Kearny Mesa.
“When I started in this business, only one thing I was thinking: to make enough money for living only,” Truong said. “I just thought I would work for someone the rest of my life.”
But two years later a friend persuaded Truong to join him in a business partnership. The partnership eventually failed, but the experience gave Truong the confidence to strike out on his own.
He had insufficient money to rent a workshop, so he and Mydung, who had learned how to solder electrical boards, began working out of their apartment in East San Diego. Working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, by 1985 they had saved enough money to buy a house in La Costa, converting their garage into a workshop.
Their timing couldn’t have been better.
The personal-computer industry was rapidly growing, providing a steady supply of electronic-board assembly jobs to contract manufacturing shops such as Truong’s. “It was a period of growing importance” for electronic assembly shops, said Robert Bartels, an industry analyst for William Blair & Co. in Chicago.
Although many assembly plants suffered a setback in 1985, when dozens of personal-computer companies went out of business, Truong was able to stay ahead of the curve by taking on assembly jobs for a diverse array of products that today includes laser printers, microphones, radios, satellite memory boards and television monitors.
