From Boat Person To San Lorenzo Businessman

The American Dream is alive and well in Huong Lee, a 47-year-old businessman who recently opened a new laundromat on Hesperian Boulevard in San Lorenzo.

He was a teenager in 1979 when his parents led him and his eight siblings out of Vietnam in what was known as the Boat People exodus.

By way of a Maylaysian refugee camp, and a relocation point in New Mexico, the Lee family made their way to San Jose in the early 1980s (the name was Le in Vietnam but they added the second "E" to make it easier to pronounce here).

In 1982, Lee family members started a business to service food catering trucks. In 1983, they started selling banh mi Vietnamese sandwiches. That business, Lee's Sandwiches, now has several dozen locations and the family advertises it as "the world's largest Banh Mi chain."

Read more about the Lee Family on its business web site.

Huong Lee charted his own entrepreneurial course in 1990 when he opened his first Lee Laundromat in San Jose in 1990.

The San Lorenzo store is his eight -- and another testament to the can-do ethic of many of America's newcomers.