MY GRANDMOTHER’S FIRST TWENTY SACKS OF RICE quickly turned into a hundred, and a hundred had the potential to mushroom into thousands—but she knew it would be hard for the business to expand as long as she was forced to pay someone else to mill her rice. Rice mills were a monopoly in the Mekong Delta; every rice farmer had to have his rice milled before he could sell it, and unless he was willing to perform the laborious task of hand-milling, he was forced to do business with the local rice mill—and forced to pay whatever the mill demanded.
My grandmother didn’t like that arrangement, so she built her own mill.
Our first rice mill was located in the Mỹ Xuyên (pronounced Me Zoo-EEN) district of Soc Trang, where my family lived. The site chosen for the mill was the banks of the Bay Sao River, a logical location since rivers were the only “roads” that could be trusted in the Mekong Delta. During the monsoon season, a truck often could be found mired to the axles in mud, but when the rivers rose, a boat just went faster. The mill was an enormous corrugated steel structure that rested on a concrete pad the size of several basketball courts side by side. Inside the building was a series of high-speed electric mills that could spit out a hundred-kilo sack of polished rice in minutes. There was ample floor space to allow for mountains of raw rice waiting processing, as well as hundreds of sacks of finished product ready for delivery.
From the western provinces of Phong Dinh and An Giang, boats came loaded with wet rice ready for milling. Some farmers were willing to unload their rice quickly and cheaply before it mildewed or spoiled, and that led to a second source of income for the business: the family began to buy rice wholesale and store it until a leaner season, when supply would be low and prices would be high. My family also bought large quantities of any commodity that happened to be cheap at the time—cement, sugar, fertilizer—and stored it in enormous mounds in the warehouse until prices were favorable for resale.
My family soon recognized that a second mill was needed, one farther to the south and west, and when that mill was completed in Tham Don, about five miles away, rice growers from all over the Ca Mau peninsula became potential customers. Some of the rice left the family mills by river barge, but to reach inland markets, trucks were needed, and a fleet was built. Some were bought and many more were leased, heavy delivery trucks capable of hauling twenty thousand pounds of rice at a time, allowing the business to expand as far as Saigon—and for those who lived in the Mekong Delta, Saigon was the edge of the known universe.
With an entire fleet of trucks, my family also saw an opportunity to enter the freight business. The big delivery trucks that off-loaded rice in Saigon were returning to the mills empty, so the company began leasing space on those trucks to other merchants in exchange for a fee. When no local merchant was in need of freight service, my family purchased goods and supplies in Saigon and trucked them back home to resell at a profit.
Rice milling, trucking, retail sales, commodities—the business kept rippling outward like a stone dropped into a rice paddy. At its peak the business employed several hundred workers in Peace, Unity, Profit mills and warehouses; it was by far the largest business in Mỹ Xuyên and one of the largest in the entire province of Soc Trang. It’s impossible to calculate the company’s actual net worth, but it was easily worth millions and growing fast.
It takes a lot of work to manage a business empire, and everyone in my family had to play a part. There was never any doubt as to who was in charge of the business or who controlled the purse strings. Firmly entrenched at the top of the food chain was Grandmother Chung, whose role might best be described as a combination of CEO, CFO, empress, and warlord. Her word was law, but she was no distant ruler handing down decisions from her mountaintop retreat; my grandmother was a hands-on chief executive who had literally helped build the business by hand. When the first rice mill was being constructed, my grandmother helped stack the bricks that formed the foundation walls, which was both admirable and dangerous. It was admirable because it proved to everyone that she was not afraid to get her hands dirty. It was dangerous because when my grandmother lost her temper, she had a habit of throwing anything she found within reach.
Everyone knew it was my grandmother’s company and the money belonged to her. She gave her sons money as they needed it, and she did so generously, but it was clearly understood that the money was hers to give. Like most business owners in the Mekong Delta, she put little faith in the Vietnamese currency, so she made a practice of converting the company’s profits into something a bit more secure: gold and diamonds. In Vietnam it was common practice to store wealth in the form of gold because gold was sure to retain its value and it was an international form of exchange. My grandmother kept lumps of gold hidden around the house because she didn’t trust banks, and she kept her diamonds in a Café du Monde coffee can. It always seemed odd to me that she would choose to store the world’s most precious commodity in the world’s worst hiding place, but my grandmother liked to keep her wealth close at hand, and in her opinion a coffee can served just fine.
My father and uncle shared responsibility for the business’s overall operation, and they had no difficulty dividing up duties. Each simply gravitated to the role that suited his personality best, and their personalities could not have been more different. My uncle was the company’s salesman, the one who lunched with potential clients and sipped iced coffee and jasmine tea while they haggled over prices and quantities. He was a successful businessman who worked for a wealthy company, and he wanted his clients to know it, so he wore expensive, Western-style suits with crisply starched shirts and always carried a briefcase—an unmistakable icon of achievement. No detail of his appearance was ever overlooked; he even brushed his toenails before he left the house each morning.
My uncle traveled by car—one of several he owned—and he had his own personal driver. Whenever he dropped by to visit one of the mills, every employee was careful to look busy. They knew there would be no friendly greetings or backslaps from the boss. My uncle was their employer, not their friend, and he expected to be treated with the respect and deference his position was due.
My father was just the opposite. While my uncle was out searching for new clients, my father was handling the day-to-day operation of the business. You might say my uncle drummed up business while my father figured out how to get it done. Even their childhood nicknames reflected the difference in their personalities: my uncle’s nickname was Nam Sao, which means “southern stars,” while my father’s nickname was Nam Xuong, which means “southern mist.” My uncle reached for the stars while my father stuck closer to the ground.
The term COO (chief operating officer) comes closest to defining my father’s job, though it fails to convey his style of leadership. My father’s office was at one of the rice mills, and the employees were his friends. He worked with them, sweated with them, and sometimes partied with them—even with the Cambodians, who were considered a lower class. He knew the employees by name, and he knew their families. He attended their weddings and funerals; he even napped with them. After lunch on an especially hot day, the mill workers would stretch out on the cool concrete pad and take a nap; and whenever they did, my father stretched out right along with them. My older brothers and sisters remember walking to the mill to see our father and having to pick their way through snoozing bodies to find him.
There was no need for my father to dress up to do his job. His standard outfit was a white V-neck T-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals. And he didn’t drive a car, though, like his brother, he owned more than one. My father preferred to speed along the dirt roads between the rice mills and home on a Suzuki motorcycle. When the business began to generate large amounts of cash, his motorcycle doubled as an armored delivery truck; it was his job to transport canvas sacks stuffed with cash to Grandmother Chung at home. That was a task he risked doing only during the day; in the daytime the roads were policed by the South Vietnamese authorities, but at night they were ruled by the Viet Cong.
Despite the family’s growing affluence, my father was a kind, generous, and sympathetic employer, and everyone in the community knew it. His compassionate approach to business was not something he learned from his schooling in Soc Trang or his exile in Cambodia; it was the result of the poverty he had experienced as a boy. He knew how it felt to be poor and hungry, and he was quick to help those who were in need. Sometimes a poor rice farmer would need to borrow rice to feed his family until his own crop was ready for harvest. Loaning rice was a common form of business in the Mekong Delta, and the going rate was one-for-three; if you borrowed one sack, you were obligated to pay back three. My father’s rate was always one-for-one; he never charged interest to the poor.
And he gave to anyone who asked—a habit that would later save his life. In the early 1960s, the South Vietnamese government began to require everyone to have written permission before they could have their rice milled, in an attempt to starve the Viet Cong into submission. But the Viet Cong were not foreign infiltrators; they were often ordinary Vietnamese villagers, and the government’s strategy to starve the Viet Cong had the unintended consequence of starving ordinary villagers too. My father decided the most humane course of action was simply to ignore the law and mill all rice that was brought to him. To my father, they were all just human beings who needed to eat.
My grandmother was known as a kind and generous person too—a healer, in fact. She had learned a lot about traditional Chinese remedies from her late husband, and she maintained a large collection of medicinal herbs with exotic names like Creeping Lobelia, Chinese motherwort, Baikal Skullcap, and Devil’s Trumpet, and she dispensed them to anyone in need. When ailing villagers from distant hamlets would float down the Bay Sao River and show up at my grandmother’s door, she would treat them with whatever concoction she had on hand, and a week later she would find a chicken or duck on her doorstep as payment.
My father cared for the sick as well, but his treatment methods were more modern. He stockpiled antibiotics, such as tetracycline, and dispensed it to villagers of all ages to cure just about everything. Unfortunately when children take tetracycline, it has the unattractive side effect of turning their teeth an ugly yellow-brown—permanently. Luckily for my father, no one had heard of medical malpractice.
By the time my father was in his midtwenties, he was a very rich man. In just over a decade he had helped his family scratch their way up from abject poverty to wealth, power, and fame. They did it with their own hands and their own sweat, and they could honestly boast that they owed their success to no one. My family had done the impossible, and as a result my father felt confident that he could accomplish anything.
He stood almost six foot three—an unheard-of height among Asians—and had wavy black hair. He was young, tall, and handsome, and he had money. With that combination it wasn’t hard to find a girlfriend, and he had plenty of those too. If you ask my father today what his life was like in those days, he will tell you, “I was a playboy”—a term that was just becoming popular in the ’60s. Little did he know that his playboy days were about to end because he was about to cross paths with a woman who was almost as formidable as Grandmother Chung, though she stood barely five feet tall.
He was about to meet the second-most beautiful woman in all of Bac Lieu.