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The Harrowing Journey to America of PG&E’s First Vietnamese-Speaking Customer Service Rep

In 1992, PG&E’s first Vietnamese-speaking customer service representative was featured in an employee publication under the headline “Vietnamese Newcomers Have a Friend at PG&E.”
A photo of Nicole Nguyen at a San Jose call center accompanied articles on PG&E’s growing staff of multilingual customer service representatives.
“I am one of their first contacts here,” she said at the time of the influx of new arrivals from Vietnam. “My customers say we are the first company they contact that they can trust.”
Thirty years later, Nguyen is still working for PG&E. She spent seven years in the call center, then was promoted and currently is a senior business analyst who works from her Union City home. She and her husband Hoa, a 28-year PG&E gas service representative who retired two years ago, recently bought their retirement home in El Dorado Hills. They’ve achieved the American dream.
But behind Nguyen’s smile in that photo from 1992 is a young woman whose incredible journey to get to America is a story that few coworkers know.
The whole story
Of coming to America, she simply says, “I escaped from my country by boat.” When asked to explain, she asks, “Do you want to know the whole story?”
What follows is the stuff of movies, an astonishing series of events that brought her from Vietnam to California as a teenager in the early 1980s.
Nguyen, then known by her given name Thu (Vietnamese for autumn), was a sickly child, suffering bouts of fever and headaches. Her parents owned a grocery store in Ho Chi Minh City but were harassed by the communist government and their livelihoods threatened, so they made the agonizing decision to send their daughter to another country.
Her father paid for her passage in gold (she’s not sure how much), bought her a fake ID and instructed her to pretend to be Chinese to avoid the Vietnamese government tracing her back to her parents should the plan be foiled.
Nguyen, then 13, was placed in a small fishing boat that set out in the dead of night. But it was overweight and capsized. She didn’t know how to swim. Panicked, she used the moonlight as a guide and grabbed onto a stranger.
“I begged him, ‘Help me! Help me! I don’t know how to swim.’ He said, ‘Let go of me. I need to find my family.’”
She let go.
She latched onto a small canoe, but it sank. Then she saw a rope dangling from a fishing boat and willed herself to climb aboard. But the boat belonged to the Vietnamese Coast Guard, so it brought her back to land. Soaking wet, she caught a bus back to the city and found her way home.
‘I don’t know how I will make it’
A month later, her father tried again to get her on a boat. She didn’t want to go but her father said he would lose the gold if she didn’t go.
“For the love of my parents, I said, ‘Fine, I will go.’ But in my head, I said, ‘I don’t know how I will make it,’” Nguyen recalled.
She reluctantly boarded a small fishing boat packed with 70 would-be immigrants. In the open waters, they met a cargo ship and boarded. It was supposed to carry 600 people but there were 3,000. Off they went.
Two weeks in, with food and water running out, the captain made an announcement that the ship’s engine was failing so he navigated to an island where 600 got off. Nguyen had an uneasy feeling and decided to stay on board.
Suddenly, the ship began to move. What she later learned was that the engine hadn’t failed. The captain was returning to Vietnam to pick up more people and their fares, never intending to leave the country. The male adults hatched a plan and overwhelmed the crew, tied up the captain and forced them to travel to another country.
For the next two weeks, the ship sailed. The conditions were excruciating.
“This is a cargo ship, not a cruise ship,” Nguyen said. “Sleeping on a hard floor, no blankets, nothing. Just lying next to each other. No elbow room.”
One night, the passengers were ordered below deck with no explanation. The ship’s steel trap door closed shut. They were in complete darkness.
“I thought, ‘This is the end,’” she said. “No food, no water and just my imagination and fears running wild. The steel door was huge and there was no way we could pry it open to escape.”
Hours later, the steel door slowly rolled open to reveal the skyline of a city she had never seen — Hong Kong. It seemed like their luck had changed. But while immigration authorities gave them food and water, they weren’t allowed to leave the ship. They stayed aboard for six more months.
Her ordeal was far from over.
Hong Kong and assembly line work
They were then taken to Chi Ma Wan, a detention center outside Hong Kong. They were held like prisoners, men separated from the women and children. They were allowed to write letters home or to anyone from another country willing to sponsor them. Nguyen wrote to her mother’s friend, who lived in Santa Barbara, and asked for a sponsorship.
“My parents had no idea if I was dead or alive,” she said.
Amazingly, her sponsorship was approved but she wasn’t yet allowed to leave. Instead, Nicole was transferred to a nearby refugee camp where she worked in a factory assembly line making remote control toys for $4 a day.
At the camp, she had more freedom but had a 6 p.m. curfew. Still, she had to navigate dangers as a teenager on her own. She was warned to never get in a taxi by herself and had to quit her job to fend off a supervisor at the factory who insisted on marrying her. She cried often, missing her parents.
“I was just a schoolgirl,” Nguyen recalled. “All of a sudden, I’m thrown in the reality with the terrible things that can happen to a young girl.”
In the camp, a list of refugees who had received a sponsor to immigrate to another country was occasionally posted. After two years in Hong Kong, she finally saw her name.
California
Knowing nothing about airports or navigating flights, she was soon on a plane headed to California via Japan. She was now 15.
Nguyen stayed in Santa Barbara with her sponsor’s family for three months, then moved to Northern California to live with her mother’s cousin and then a family friend. She learned English and graduated high school. Later, she earned a degree from City College of San Francisco. In 1986, she married Hoa (also a Vietnamese immigrant), raised a son (he’s now 35) and has had a successful career. In 1994, she became a U.S. citizen and officially adopted the name Nicole to better integrate into American culture. Her middle name is now Thu Mai, a hybrid of her given first and middle names.
She has come a long way from her lowest point, on the ship outside Hong Kong, when she prayed and even contemplated suicide.
“A few times I wanted to end my life, but I bargained with God,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Give me the strength so I can stay alive.’ Not being here would have been too much for my parents to bear.”
Today she lives a happy life, but memories come flooding back, including when shown that article from the PG&E publication three decades ago. Her son has encouraged her to write a book about her journey, something she has considered. So far, she has written an outline. She has returned several times to Vietnam and hopes to visit her mother for the first time since the pandemic began; her father died seven years ago.
But America is her home.
A chair in a stream
As for PG&E, Nguyen said she enjoys working and is just grateful and proud to have been at the company so long.
“They allowed me to grow and also provided support for me and my family all these years,” she said. “I genuinely like to help people. I always think about how I used to have nothing after I left my country and look what I have achieved after all these years.”
One thing she enjoys most is being in nature.
“I even like it more than shopping, believe it or not,” she joked.
When she was locked in the immigrant barracks in Hong Kong, she persuaded the guards to occasionally let her spend an afternoon on the nearby beach to calm her thoughts. Now she’s at her happiest during twice-a-year getaways to the Lake Tahoe area with her husband.
Says Nguyen: “I plop my blue camping chair in the middle of a stream and just relax.”