From Boat Person To Serial Entrepreneur

The American Dream is alive and well in Huong Lee, a 47-year-old businessman who recently opened his eigth laundromat, adding to a chain of Lee's Laundromats that includes a location at 38487 Fremont Boulevard.

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 Fremont location came about a decade later.

Lee opened his latest laundromat in February -- another testament to the can-do ethic of many American immigrants.