Tiffany Nguyen speaks of her grandmother, Nhung, with awe.
"I have not met anyone who has been through as much as she has during those eight years," Tiffany said in the Adam Tailor shop in Columbia City. "The treachery and danger she faced — and yet she kept trying."
The eight years Tiffany refers to mark the time period when Nhung, separated from her husband after he fled Vietnam in 1980, worked to bring her family back together. During those years, Nhung and her three children crossed borders and traversed continents, outwitted corrupt Communist officials, and survived capsized boats.
By the time she reached the United States, her husband, Be, was already here. He'd opened the first Adam Tailor shop in Pioneer Square, and joined by Nhung and other family members, they opened a second Adam Tailor in Columbia City. Together, they turned both shops into a thriving business that's lasted more than 40 years.
Tiffany finds value in Grandmother Nhung's story, and as the family's first native-English speaker, she takes joy in translating her family's journeys for others.
"She has crazy stories," Tiffany says of her grandmother, whose tales of ingenuity and escape contain within them one unbreakable thread: She did everything she could to keep the family together.
Nhung was 18 when she first started dating Be in the early 1970s in Vietnam and the two were married in 1973. With the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the subsequent consolidation of the Communist Party's control over the economy, many South Vietnamese people sought ways to flee the country.
In 1980, seeking out a better life for his family, Be escaped to the Philippine First Asylum Center, an asylum refugee camp on the island of Palawan, more than 1,000 miles away, across the South China Sea. Meanwhile, Nhung was still in Vietnam, where the government began harassing her. She and their three young daughters were imprisoned 10 times, and each time Nhung was forced to pay off Communist Party officials.
With her husband far away, Nhung, as well as millions of others, remained caught in a geopolitical conflict that played out on the Indochinese Peninsula. Vietnam runs along the eastern portion of this peninsula, while Thailand occupies the western portion. Cradled between the countries, in the southern peninsula, sits Cambodia. All three countries would play a part in the Nguyen family's fate.
Nhung, now 69, tried to escape Vietnam for "whatever land would take us." She counts more than 50 attempts at escaping.
In one attempt, the engine of the transport boat died and they floated to the city of Cà Mau, in the Mekong Delta region, in the southernmost part of Vietnam's inland territory. There, she and her daughters were captured and jailed for six months.
In another, they were arrested while waiting on the pier for their boat and were jailed for a month in Rach Gia, a city on the Gulf of Thailand.
In her eventual, successful escape in 1988, Nhung and her three daughters, Phuong, Phung, and Nhu, had to undertake one final, perilous journey before reaching the Thai refugee camp where they would settle for two years.
Tiffany describes that final escape.
"They landed in Cambodia, in a forested area, where they were told to wait to be picked up by another group of smugglers. Two days went by, but no one came. The group believed they were being starved into submission and would soon be robbed by the very smugglers who brought them there.
"My grandmother woke early on day three and walked to a town to buy food for everyone. Once everyone had their energy back, my grandmother led the group out of the forest, breaking branches along the way to mark their path. She eventually found a coach that would transport the group to a hostel, where they were immediately arrested.
"But in the chaos, my grandmother was able to escape and found another hostel, which was actually a brothel, where they met a man who could sail them to Thailand the next night."
It took another payment, but they were taken to a refugee camp in Thailand, finally free from the Communists. In the refugee camp, Nhung taught herself to sew and offered a class teaching her craft to others.
What kept Nhung going? Translating her grandmother's story, Tiffany believes it was Grandmother Nhung's strong desire to be reunited with her husband and to build a better life for her family.
"She sewed gold into the hems of her garment in order to pay her way out of Vietnam. When thieves got smart to that, she would swallow the gold, so that she would have resources to be able to start a new life when she finally made it out," Tiffany says.
One family member who would benefit from that new life was Nhung's middle child, Phung, Tiffany's mother. Phung remembers her family's flight from Vietnam and the near-fatal journey that led them to the person she hadn't seen for years: her father Be.
For Phung, childhood was marked by the many attempts to escape danger. When she was almost 8, during one of her family's escape attempts, she recalls the boat capsizing in a river, just as they were about to hit the open sea for Thailand. Her mother and sisters were spilled into the water, none of them wearing life jackets.
Thanks to onlookers on shore and others in canoes, Phung and her sisters and mother were saved from drowning, though they were separated from each other for hours. Once they gathered together on shore, they were immediately arrested.
Officials eventually released the family, but in a cruel twist, officials held on to 13-year-old Phuong, the eldest daughter, as collateral. To pay off the captors, Nhung hitchhiked back to Saigon to borrow money from her parents, who were pig farmers. Once the bribe was paid, Phuong, unharmed, was reunited with the family.
Phung and her sisters witnessed their mom's ingenuity and courage in the refugee camps as well.
Phung remembers the early days of the Thai refugee camp when she was a pre-teen, how the family trimmed tree branches in the forests to build their home. There were the sounds of bombs from the Khmer Rouge, the brutal regime in neighboring Cambodia that had been expelled from the country by Vietnamese forces. Now the Khmer Rouge was operating from the Thai side of the Cambodian border, placing their actions within earshot.
When the family eventually reached the U.S. in 1990, Phung was 14.
"I hadn't seen my father since I was a toddler," she recalls. "And I can still feel the shock I felt at the airport when I saw how long my father's hair had grown!"
When Nhung and her daughters reached the U.S., she began working alongside Be in his tiny Pioneer Square shop. After Phung turned 16, her mother trained her to be a tailor. Mother and daughter have worked side by side since then.
Nhung and Be, often with their children, worked in a 500-square-foot space. They knew something would need to change, though it would take years.
In 2000, Nhung took her tailoring expertise to the Central District, where she opened a second shop near 23rd and Union. Three years later, after finding a great deal on a house on Rainier Avenue South, the family purchased it. They used it as a home as well as a business, and they've been at the Columbia City location for more than 20 years. There, three generations of Nguyen women — Nhung, Phung, and Tiffany — along with other family members, have been the backbone of Adam Tailor.
But the shop is more than a business: It's a refuge for other Vietnamese immigrants seeking a new start. And it's the place where Tiffany learned to stitch together her own calling with the dreams of her family.
If you missed Part 1, you can find it linked below.
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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