Tiffany Nguyen stands inside the Adam Tailor shop, a family business just north of Columbia City, surrounded by tools of the trade: traditional Vietnamese pants and wedding dresses in bold colors; spools of colored thread; ironing boards; customer packages ready for pickup; and racks of clothes.
"I can't recall a time when sewing wasn't a part of my life," Tiffany says.
Her grandfather, Be Van Nguyen, started the business in 1984 after he emigrated from Vietnam. Tiffany, 29, is the family's first native English speaker, and she greets customers by their first names when they arrive. She admits that even though she works at a tailor shop, she can't match the fine skills of her grandparents or mother. "My work is quality assurance: Making sure the jobs we send out to our customers are what they expect," Tiffany says.
But while quality assurance may amount to a job description, it doesn't tap into her true passion: keeping her family's stories alive.
Tiffany represents the third generation in a line of tailors who, beginning with her grandfather, have stitched together a successful business and created a refuge in the Rainier Valley.
She believes the themes that weave through her family's stories — survival, perseverance, community — are important not only to maintain, but to share.
"You have no idea how many stories they have, especially my grandmother," she says. Tiffany has been trying to get her grandmother, Nhung, to talk for years. "The story that we're telling here with this shop barely scratches the surface. There is a much bigger story to tell."
To help tell these stories, Tiffany serves as translator for the family, along with acting as its unofficial historian. She's committed to keeping the fabric of their stories intact, from tales of her grandmother's secret stash of gold to her mother's life-threatening tumble into the ocean.
Independently and together, the family escaped a Communist government, survived life in refugee camps, emigrated to the United States, then went on to establish Adam Tailor, a business that has thrived for nearly four decades in downtown Seattle and the Rainier Valley.
Stories of how her family fled Vietnam and settled in Washington state captivate Tiffany, as they reveal what people can and will endure.
"My grandfather didn't want his family to live in a Communist country," said Tiffany. "So, he left his family to set out for a better life for them."
But leaving them came with a cost: It would be years before he'd see his family again.
The Vietnam War stands as one of the most seminal and complicated global events of the late 20th century. Known in Vietnam as the "War Against the Americans to Save the Nation," U.S. involvement began in 1954, and it evolved into a decades-long military conflict that saw Communist troops in North Vietnam align with Vietcong forces against South Vietnam and the U.S.
The Soviet Union and China were drawn into the fighting, and as the conflict raged in Southeast Asia, in the U.S., a growing number of people protested the country's involvement. In 1973, the U.S. withdrew its troops, though fighting continued until at least 1975, when North Vietnamese soldiers seized control in South Vietnam, often referred to as the "Fall of Saigon." The country reunified the following year.
The human toll was catastrophic. An estimated 3 million people were killed, with Vietnamese civilians accounting for more than half of the deaths. Countless people were displaced.
From the end of the Vietnam War, on April 30, 1975, to the early 1990s, close to 2 million people fled Vietnam, with many bound for the U.S. More than 100,000 would eventually resettle in Washington state. One of them was Grandfather Be.
Be escaped Vietnam in 1980 and landed more than 1,000 miles away at the Philippine First Asylum Center, an asylum refugee camp established by the Philippine government and the Philippine Catholic Church on the island of Palawan. He spent the next four years at the refugee camp, separated from his wife, Nhung, and their three young daughters, all of whom were still in Vietnam. Without Be, Nhung was continually harassed by Communist authorities, who extorted gold from her that the family had saved.
Be — which is pronounced "bay," though most people say "bee" — was eventually sponsored by a U.S.-based church group that helped to process his immigration paperwork and paid for his flight to the United States.
He arrived in Portland, Oregon. There, he borrowed money from strangers in order to call the only person he knew in the country: a man he had met in Palawan who had relocated to Seattle. On his arrival in Seattle, he quickly found work in a tailor shop in the International District, and thanks to a $6,000 loan from a friend that, at the time, Be considered "a fortune," he soon opened his own shop in Pioneer Square. The shop was on Jackson Street, and he called it Adam Tailor because it would appear alphabetically near the start of the phone book.
For the next six years, Be worked up to 60 hours a week so he could save enough money to bring his wife and children, who were living in a refugee camp in Thailand, to Seattle. They would eventually arrive in 1990.
For decades, from the predawn darkness before commuters bustled into the neighborhood, to well into the evenings, Be bent over his sewing machine or tended to a customer's fitting, perfectly framed by his shop's storefront glass. He was well known in Pioneer Square, especially by office workers and professionals who relied on his tailoring skills to keep them fashionable.
Be, and the family members that followed, would become some of the more than 51,000 immigrant entrepreneurs who reside in the Seattle metropolitan area, according to a 2019 New American Economy report cited by the United Nations Refugee Agency. They have contributed more than $31 billion to the local economy and paid more than $12.7 billion in taxes, the report states, while contributing to the region's cultural vibrancy.
But in August 2024, Be, 71, retired from the business due to health issues. Tiffany says a highlight from those Pioneer Square years for Be was his relationship with customers. "They still check in on him by phone and send him cards and flowers," Tiffany says.
Despite her grandfather's retirement, Tiffany continues to remain steadfast in wanting to preserve Adam Tailor.
"The shop is more than just a business," she continues, "it's a living testament to their artistry and a tradition that I'm proud to carry forward."
Carrying it forward sometimes means looking back, and for Tiffany, the story of Grandmother Nhung's dramatic journey to the U.S. decades ago demonstrates how a dream hatched in a small village can manifest halfway around the globe.
This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, “Resilience Amidst Hate,” in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.
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