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HOME > SCHOLARSHIPS AND AWARDS > LOCAL LEADERS IN PHILANTHROPY > BIOGRAPHIES
Hua Ngo
[Note: The following biography was prepared and presented at the 2003 gala by Board Member and KRON TV News Anchor Emerald Yeh.] Our next honoree started off in the United States slightly better off than Talat Hasan. He arrived with $30 in his pocket… but with very little education… and a very different family background. In making a new life here, he saw his first hard-won investment literally vanish almost immediately in a heart-rending disaster. This particular disaster made the local papers. But Hua Ngo's early life in Vietnam was replete with hardships… the kind of hardships endured by so many without making headlines. The war in Vietnam cost him three brothers. His family was uprooted and forced to leave everything behind when the communists took over their village.. Hua dropped out of school at the age of 12 to start working in Nam Can which had become a naval base town on the southern tip of Vietnam. His mother worked in a 3-by-4 meter stall, selling vegetables. Hua helped her by selling dried shrimp and fish. His father peddled fish to nearby villages. Hua tried going back to school, but only made it to the 7th grade when the war forced him to drop out again, and this time for good. And this time, he took to selling bread on the streets. On his own now as a teen, he was considered old enough to support himself. Hua joined with a friend to start a little business. They worked as truck helpers, but used the transportation they had to their advantage. They would buy cigarettes and sugar from the truck's destination, then bring the goods back to their hometown to sell. It was a business model that would help Hua establish his fortune in the U.S. When Vietnam fell to the Communists, Hua took his savings to buy a small boat to prepare to escape. He saw no future in his country and was enticed by a picture of Australia a friend had sent. Two years after buying that escape boat, he sold it and joined with others to buy a larger boat. A year later, Hua, now 28, married with two children, ages 3 and 5, bought passage for his family as well as 7 of his wife's relatives for 63 ounces of gold. Some 90 people got on that 40-foot boat. It took them three days to get to Malaysia. The first day of the trip, a storm struck and the captain got sick. Hua ended up steering the boat the rest of the way. Once in Malaysia, Hua and his family remained in a refugee camp for 5 months. They applied everywhere for refugee status, but no country would take them, except the United States. At camp, Hua encountered a woman who had sold fish to him that he in turn sold on the streets back in Vietnam. She gave him an ounce of gold as a departure gift. Hua traded that gold for $280 in cash, but gave the woman $180 back, keeping only $100 to buy clothes for his family. Out of that clothing money, Hua ended up with $30 change and that's what he had in his pocket when he arrived with his family in 1979 at SFO. His first memory of being in America was this: as he was leaving the airport, he saw that green 101 freeway sign pointing North or South. He thought to himself -- which way do I go? How can I drive here? For so many of us, that freeway sign is such a mundane part of our homecoming from some trip, but for Hua it was bewildering and overwhelming -- a metaphor for the fact that his life could go in any direction from this point. Well, he went north to San Francisco. It was a Friday night. The International Rescue Committee gave him $100 for the weekend and got Hua and his family settled in a two-bedroom apartment on Stanyan St., the first few months rent paid for. On Monday, Hua took care of the necessary legal documents and applied for a job. Tuesday morning, he was at work in Berkeley at an asphalt company where he poured 50 pound bags of material into a tank. He hoisted 250 of these bags a day. The bags contained asbestos. He was earning $4.25 an hour. Within a couple of months, he got himself promoted to forklift driver for $6.50 an hour. There he worked for a year. One day, he ran into a friend from Vietnam who was living in San Jose and making a living fishing from his boat off Monterey. He saw that his friend could make a few hundred dollars a day in good weather so he decided to fish for a living. But he had no boat, so Hua took on two jobs in San Jose, working from 5 am to 10 pm while his wife Nga worked in a restaurant as a kitchen helper and went to night school in San Francisco. They saved $10,000 in one year. Hua took that money and borrowed $4,500 from friends to buy his boat. Hua fished for 21 days in Monterey Bay and for the first time, was happy. Then something awful happened. Someone sabotaged another boat in the harbor by drilling a hole in it. The boat sank. Hua's boat was anchored with that boat and went down too. Same disaster for both boat owners, but with one key difference. "He had insurance. Hua said, I didn't." The story made local news. Hua was devastated and did not come home for a week, staying in Monterey instead. With no boat to fish with, Hua began taking fish from Monterey fishermen and selling them from his truck in San Francisco's Chinatown on Stockton Street. He didn't know you needed a permit to do that. He was taken to the police station, fined $50 and then shown how to get a permit at City Hall. "And that," Hua says, "is how my fish business started." He sold to wholesalers in Oakland, San Jose and Fishermen's Wharf. After three months, he made back enough money to pay off the fishing boat loans to his friends. So how did Hua make inroads in the business when clearly, this fish selling business was already carried on by established dealers and distributors? The answer was: speed. Hua got the fish from boat to wholesaler in just two hours, whereas the established delivery time was next-day. Hua's fish arrived fresher and cheaper without having to be stored overnight. By 1982, one year after the boat-sinking disaster, Hua had enough money to buy a bigger truck for his fish delivery. This impressed one man very much- a social worker who showed up to help Hua after his boat sank. Now, one year later, he sees this same man running a successful seafood delivery business. The social worker, Barry Cohen, quit his job and went into business with Hua… and thus was born H and N Fish on Jerrold Ave. off Bayshore. `The business grew with the help of a small business loan. They expanded and started delivering seafood to LA. That's where the business model from Hua's teen years in Vietnam came into place. Once the seafood was emptied in LA, Hua filled the truck with foodstuff, like Thai noodles to bring back to San Francisco to sell. An empty truck was an opportunity wasted. H and N continued to grow by leaps and bounds. Hua often slept in the office, took no profit out and put any money made back into the business. Then in 1989, one more twist of fate. The Loma Prieta quake. The quake damaged San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf area, shutting down about 20 of the 32 seafood wholesalers, processors and producers there. By now, Hua had 10 trucks. Business from the wharf came to him overnight. Today, H and N Foods International has 180 employees and 17 trucks and nearly 1/3 the seafood wholesale market in California, importing seafood from 40 states in the US and 14 countries abroad. If you buy seafood at your mainstream or Asian supermarkets or eat fish in a restaurant, there's a good chance it passed through one of Hua's trucks to get to you. Quite the Horatio Alger story. As for Hua's children, who were only 3 and 5 years old when they escaped with their parents from Vietnam, his daughter Christine graduated with a business degree from USF and runs H & N on the Los Angeles end. H and N, by the way, are the initials of Hua and his wife Nga. Their son, Bobby, graduated from Rhode Island College and Golden Gate University and is a tuna buyer in the Bay Area. Hua Ngo was recently honored by the International Rescue Committee on its 50th anniversary. In turn, Hua has been extremely generous in the community, especially with humanitarian projects, here and in Vietnam. He often gives anonymously. From what we could gather, he has supported the following: flood relief through the American Red Cross, the start-up of a Chinese school in the Bay Area, a scholarship fund for children of people in the fishing industry, Self-Help for the Elderly, and fish research at the California Academy of Sciences. And in Vietnam, the focus is education and hospitals, where schooling and good medical care are lacking for many. His wife Nga, whose name means swan, flies back to Vietnam two to three times a year with money and comes back, as Hua describes it, "empty-handed," having given the money to the people of Vietnam for food and books. Education is an especially dear cause for Hua because of the little he has. If I ever get out of business, I want to go back to school, he said. Many would argue, that Hua got more education out of his life than most of us would in several lifetimes. There is a saying that life is a journey, not a destination. It seems especially apt for Hua, who never rests for long, but instead merely pauses, before darting ahead on a new course. In spite of his success, Hua is especially modest and humble. We are very pleased that he has allowed us this opportunity to recognize his accomplishments, generosity and leadership.
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