Vietnamese Find Many Roads to Success in O.C.

It’s the Vietnamese answer to microwave dinners.

For $8 a night, the A-Dong restaurant in Tustin will deliver to your home a three-course dinner for two packed in a special thermal container. All you have to do is cook rice. The next day, the restaurant picks up the container and drops off a fresh meal.

In Vietnam, they call this home cooking service com thang, or “monthly rice.” In Southern California, these Asian meals-on-wheels have become big business for refugee entrepreneurs. From the San Fernando Valley to southern Orange County, roughly 50 restaurants and free-lance cooks compete to deliver thousands of meals to Asian neighborhoods each night.

“People order our meals out of convenience, because cooking Vietnamese food is time consuming, and they are working people. . . ,” said A-Dong owner and chef Oanh Kim Huynh, 32. “They get nutritious food at a low price and the meals are delivered to their doorsteps five nights a week.”

“Monthly rice” is by no means the only innovation wrought by the Vietnamese refugees who began to arrive in Southern California 15 years ago.

Like many immigrant groups before them, the first Vietnamese to settle in Orange County opened mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, import-export companies, and sweatshops. By the early-1980s, many had opened computer assembly, furniture and machine shops, bookstores, video stores, insurance companies and travel agencies along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster. Then Chinese-Vietnamese developer Frank Jao built seven shopping centers along Bolsa, and the Little Saigon shopping district, now home to about 1,500 businesses, was born.

But contrary to stereotypes of all Asians as entrepreneurial whizzes, the majority of young Vietnamese-Americans have opted for the security of collecting advanced degrees and going to work for large corporations or entering the professions, said Ho Ngoc Au, president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce of America.

Au, a former South Vietnamese deputy minister of economics now living in Manhattan Beach, would like to see more Vietnamese-Americans start their own businesses. But he fears that childhoods shaped by war and teen years spent as refugees have made many of these young people leery of taking chances.

“The Vietnamese here, by and large, go to school to be doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers. . . ,” Au said. “It’s less risky.”

Still, a small crop of 30ish former refugees, many armed with U.S. educations and work experience, are taking the entrepreneurial plunge.

Some have put their Asian sensibilities to work in the American marketplace, launching innovative businesses that straddle both cultures.

Here are portraits of four such start-up businesses: a former literature student who runs a flourishing nursery specializing in rare Asian fruit trees; two young brothers who grew up reading French fashion magazines in Saigon and now design their own sportswear; A-Dong’s “monthly rice” company; and the young founder of the first telephone dating service for Vietnamese-American singles.

A-DONG RESTAURANT

Dinner at Your Door

Early in the morning, the kitchen of the A-Dong restaurant is jammed with giant colanders of chopped Bok choi cabbage, huge bowls of meat and vegetables and about a dozen busy workers.

Dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and an apron, Huynh hovers over two giant woks, cooking food for 700.

The day’s dinner menu is soup made with daikon, an Asian radish; beef sauteed with mustard greens, tomato, green onion and oyster sauce; and charbroiled chicken with vegetables.

Each steaming batch of food is placed in a large bowl and cooled to prevent spoilage. Then the kitchen workers spoon the food into silver thermos-like containers with separate compartments for soup, meat and vegetables.

Prices per night, including delivery, are $5.50 for one person, $8 for two, $11 for three and $14 for four. The A-Dong’s prices are on the high side, since some competitors who cook at home and use lower-quality food price their dinners at as little as $3 per night, said Huynh’s husband, Dinh Trung Huynh, 39.

“Our price is almost double--but you pay for what you get,” Huynh said. “Our vegetables, we have to buy the best ones to keep them longer, because we deliver at 3 o’clock and people eat it at 9 or 10 o’clock. We don’t use any frozen food.”

In a strategy used by many immigrant entrepreneurs, the Huynhs stay competitive by banding together with relatives in a buying collective. Each day, Dinh Huynh orders thousands of pounds of meat, chicken, fish and vegetables from wholesalers, and arranges to split the food with four other com thang businesses run by relatives in Canoga Park, Monterey Park, Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“We buy together, so we buy cheaper,” Huynh said.

By buying in bulk, he said, the restaurants can sometimes get discounts of up to 30%. In addition, several of the Asian meat suppliers trim the fat and cut up their meat into wok-sized pieces, sparing the busy kitchen workers a time-consuming chore, he said.

A-Dong’s storefront has a few tables, and also sells noodles and fast food to go. But the main business is delivering 100 lunches, most of them to Anglo offices near the Tustin restaurant, and 600 dinners, mostly to Asian families from El Toro to Norwalk.

Although the A-Dong has been open for eight months, only about 20 Anglo families have signed up for daily dinners, Huynh said.

But the Huynhs say they have learned to adjust the taste depending on which ethnic group is ordering.

“Americans like it less salty, and no fat at all,” Dinh Huynh said. “And they don’t like shrimp with the shell on. . . .

“But our customers, they’re happy with the food we have.”

KHIEM & NGHI DESIGN

A Fashion Statement

As little boys in the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang, Khiem and Nghi Van Nguyen loved to draw the cowboys in American movies. As teen-agers, they sketched what they saw in French fashion magazines.

Two decades later, their drawings are influenced by abstract artists Vasily Kandinsky and Joan Miro--but their clothes are sold in American boutiques. Doing business as The Khiem and Nghi Design Co. in Los Angeles, the two brothers are the design talent behind Trio Collezione menswear, the Basic Club line for women and Kidd Kootoor for children. Together with free-lance designs, the brothers claim their clothes generated total sales of more than $3 million last year.

The Trio Collezione men’s shirts, which retail for about $80, are an arresting combination of bold, modernistic appliqued patterns in subtle pastel colors.

One lettuce-green-gray cardigan, for example, is patterned with surreal swirls of dusty rose, straw and ocean-colored fabric. And for the spring line, Khiem Nguyen is playing with linen swatches in lavender and sand colors.

If the brothers’ designs are fresh and unconventional, perhaps it’s because their lives have lurched down unpredictable paths. In 1965, their father, an economist for the South Vietnamese government, was killed during a Viet Cong bombing attack on the My Canh restaurant in Saigon. Ten years later, the family joined the exodus of Southeast Asian refugees and were resettled in San Diego.

In 1976, Nghi Van Nguyen, now 33, won a design contest for high school students and was offered a scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. Not to be outdone by a younger sibling, Khiem, now 36, competed and won the same contest the next year.

“If I hadn’t won the award, I think I probably would have gone to school in engineering,” Khiem said. “We were interested in fashion in Vietnam, but we never thought of being fashion designers. We were interested in art, but we were worried about making a living first.”

Many refugees complain of intense pressure--originally from their families but often internalized--to choose “safe” and respectable careers rather than pursuing their talents. The Nguyens say there are only about 10 Vietnamese-American fashion designers, of whom the best-known is probably Los Angeles-based Kim Dam.

The Nguyens worked for several designers in New York before deciding to move back to Orange County and strike out for themselves in Los Angeles.

“We worked for a lot of people for about six years, and we felt we had enough experience, so we try,” Khiem said. “I think it’s more fun to have our own business, more challenge.”

“L.A. is more interesting, younger, more freedom, trendier,” said Nghi, whose Basic Club women’s dresses will sport 1960s lines and geometric designs for spring.

Competition is fierce, and the Nguyens’ company is still tiny by industry standards. Still, the brothers are sizing up the field with an outsider’s cool savvy.

“My goal in menswear is to have every young man on MTV wear our clothes, and every rock ‘n’ roll band wear our clothes,” Khiem said. “If they’re watching, they’ll buy.”

MIMOSA NURSERY

Exotic Fruit Trees

In a dusty lot in Anaheim, Sylvie and Gilbert Guyenne have created a tropical jungle.

Their crowded nursery is a botanist’s delight, with rare and exotic fruit trees from all over Asia, India and the Middle East; ornamental banana plants and bonsai; tiny rose apples, sweet jasmine and a low-slung bush called Queen of the Night, whose fragrant white blossoms only open between 8 p.m. and midnight.

Since opening in 1982, the Mimosa nursery has become a big business, selling about 100,000 plants a year. It has branches on West Lincoln Street in Anaheim and in East Los Angeles, and opened another store in Riverside in May.

From its inception, Guyenne said, Mimosa attracted customers from all over Asia. Now, however, the nursery also has a steady clientele of other plant lovers, as well as landscape architects looking for something unusual.

“We have a lot of Americans now,” Sylvie Guyenne, 35, said in French-accented English. “Also from Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, China, Cambodia, Thailand, India. We have everybody.

“These are for the Vietnamese New Year, Tet,” she explained, stooping to show off a yellow, black and red mai flower selling for between $19 and $50. “The Vietnamese call it ‘Mickey Mouse plant’ because the flower looks like Mickey Mouse.”

Mimosa’s specialty, however, is rare Asian fruit trees. Some are the offspring of a single mother plant, since agricultural regulations and costly customs duties make it extremely difficult to import plants, Guyenne explained.

Others are grown painstakingly from seeds.

“It takes a long, long time,” Guyenne said.

In fact, the nursery lost money for several years while the plants slowly grew large enough to sell for a profit, she said.

“Some plants take four years before you can sell,” she said, adding, “The main thing is, if you open this business, you have to really love plants.”

The Guyennes are a study in learn-it-yourself entrepreneurship. They were university students when they fled Vietnam four days before the last American helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy on April 30, 1975.

Gilbert Guyenne, now 39, had been studying business administration, and Sylvie was majoring in French and English literature. The academic training provided little preparation for refugee life--and neither one of them knew anything about plants.

The Guyennes ended up spending 6 1/2 years in New Caledonia, where they first tried running a restaurant, then farmed. In 1981, they joined relatives in the United States and noticed it was difficult to find Asian plants.

Like many refugee entrepreneurs, the Guyennes had no house, no money, no collateral and no chance of securing a bank loan. Instead, they borrowed money from friends and relatives and learned to run their business by trial and error.

“For the first two or three years, we lost a lot (of plants) because we didn’t have experience,” she said. “We grew winter plants in summer or summer plants in winter, and we lost them. But we learned a lot.”

Some of the fruit trees, for example, flourish in moist climates. One of the most popular is a Vietnamese grapefruit called buoi, which is pear-shaped and sweeter than the Western variety.

To make the tropical tree resistant to the dry California climate, Gilbert Guyenne experimented until he managed to graft the buoi branches onto American grapefruit tree stock.

“My husband learned it from books,” his wife said simply. “Very hard.”

Mimosa also sells nashi pear trees and Fuji apple trees from Japan, jujube date trees from China, crisp star fruit trees, South American cherimmoya with fruit the size of a cantaloupe, sweet lemon trees from Mexico and sweet limes from the Middle East.

“Very good for throat pain,” Sylvie said of the limes.

Old people, especially women, frequently prowl through Mimosa, homesick for the trees and shrubs, the fruits and fragrances of their homelands, Guyenne said.

“The young, they buy only the flowers,” Sylvie Guyenne said. “The old, they buy fruit trees--and roses.”

DC COMMUNICATIONS

Dial-a-Date in Vietnamese

At 26, Linh Thai is one of the youngest--and least conventional--of the new class of Vietnamese-American entrepreneurs.

Until a year ago, his resume read like an all-American immigrant success story. He came to the United States in 1975, graduated from Valley High in Santa Ana, earned a degree in electrical engineering from Cal Poly Pomona in 1987 and went to work as a telecommunications engineer for Magnavox.

A year ago, he quit his job to launch the first 1-900 telephone dating service for Vietnamese-American singles.

“My parents got pretty mad about it,” Thai said. “They were furious. They said I shouldn’t have left my job for this. I just think it’s going to do really well.”

Although school chums and co-workers also looked askance at his dating service dreams, Thai borrowed from friends and family, sold his car, saved his income tax refund and moved back into his parents’ home in Placentia. By day, he continues to do computer consulting work. By night, he has taken the $15,000 he has accumulated, rented a Chinatown office in Los Angeles, installed telephone lines and computers, hired a silky-voiced young operator and placed ads for his DC Communications dating service in Vietnamese-language publications all over America.

In one year, Thai said, he has grossed about $200,000, netted about $50,000 and paid off most of what he owes. Part of his success is surely because of demographics: Vietnamese refugees tend to be young and male, since many families bought dangerous and expensive boat passages only for boys, who were then expected to get jobs and send money home. Official resettlement policy was to scatter them in communities across the United States.

And, according to Thai, the ancient system of matchmaking has broken down in America.

“The Vietnamese tradition is that the parents arrange the marriage, but we won’t accept that any more,” explained Thai, who is still single despite attempts by his own parents to find him a suitable wife.

Still, he said, most Vietnamese are shy about approaching the opposite sex. Outside California, where roughly 500,000 Vietnamese emigres have settled, single immigrants--especially those with limited English--may have trouble even finding the opposite sex.

“It’s the Vietnamese in Wyoming and Missouri, in the states that have a real low density of Vietnamese, I want to reach those people and say ‘Hey, there’s Vietnamese out there too,”’ he said.

Thai said his hot line has received about 12,000 calls so far, about 70% of them from outside California.

Only the men are charged, at a rate of 79 cents per minute, for a maximum of 25 minutes, he said. “Bachelorettes,” as Thai calls his female customers, are introduced for free.

When a man calls in, the operator asks his age, education, occupation, salary, marital status, how long he’s been in America and whether he would agree to date a divorcee. Neither women nor men are asked to send photographs, but they are quizzed on their height.

“Women, usually they look for someone with a (college) degree . . . and stability in their work. . . ,” Thai said. “The younger girls want tall men. The older women just want stability.”

Then the receptionist thumbs through index cards of women in the same area. When she finds a possible match, she puts the man on hold, calls the woman and connects them in a conference call. If they like each other, they can exchange telephone numbers or arrange to meet. If it doesn’t work out, they can be introduced to someone else.

Some Vietnamese community leaders frown on Thai’s service.

“It’s not appropriate,” said Chuyen Van Nguyen, 41, a Republican Party activist from Garden Grove. “It’s too modern, it’s too fast for the Vietnamese people to accept.

“Vietnamese culture is very conservative, very strict,” he added. “It would be an embarrassment to tell people how you met your sweetheart, how you met your wife.”

But Thai says his customers aren’t the slightest bit embarrassed. In fact, he said, his operators have been invited to a number of engagement parties.

“The old way is gone from Vietnam,” he said. “This is a way to fill that gap.”

Times correspondent Than-Thuy Nguyen helped research this report.