FIRST OF TWO PARTS

From the tony environs of his family’s home in Kahala Kua, the distance between Terry Nguyen’s mean beginnings and comfortable present can appear as remote as his view of the azure Pacific.

But to Nguyen, a successful dentist with practices on Oahu and Hawaii island, the sea and the grim lessons it imparts have always remained close at mind.

Nguyen was just 7 years old when he and his family fled Vietnam by boat. His father, Tron, was a military physician who found his fortunes cruelly reversed with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Persecuted by the government and jailed multiple times for attempting to secure passage out of the country for his family, Tron and his wife, Thuyet, a successful businesswoman, knew they had to flee their home country to secure a better future for their children.

After several aborted efforts, the family was able to secure a spot on a boat headed for Thailand. With monsoon season in full force, they and other would-be refugees huddled under a jackfruit tree on a farm for three weeks, until the threat of capture prompted an early and ill-advised departure.

The boat was supposed to carry only 70 people, but at least twice as many were crammed aboard. Because of the early departure, the boat was unable to rendezvous with a scheduled supply boat, and whatever meager provisions the passengers brought with them were depleted in the first few days.

A violent storm damaged one of the boat’s propellers, leaving the vessel bobbing in the open sea and its passengers vulnerable to pirates, who took whatever jewelry or other valuables the refugees brought with them. When the jewelry was gone, Nguyen said, they took girls.

Adrift on the South China Sea, the very young and very old were the first to succumb to dehydration and exposure. Tron Nguyen tapped his own veins in an attempt to keep Terry’s younger brother alive, but soon the boy too was dead.

“More than half of the people on that boat died,” Terry Nguyen said. “There were bodies all over the place.”

Tron Nguyen continued to do whatever he could to help the survivors. In the midst of the horror, he delivered a baby girl, the only child other than Terry to survive the trip. And when the other doctor aboard died, he asked the man’s widow if he could use some of the padding of the man’s toe to fish. The widow assented, and what was gleaned from the ocean helped to keep the rest of the passengers alive until finally, miraculously, they spotted land.

With the help of a passing fishing boat, the refugees made it to Thai soil, some literally crawling ashore. The Nguyen family would remain in Thailand for two years and spend another transitional year in the Philippines before arriving in the United States.

In Santa Clara, Calif., Terry Nguyen turned to basketball as a way to transcend his otherness and inadvertently created an opportunity for himself to attend Santa Clara University. After graduating with a degree in biology, he attended Creighton University for dental school.

Nguyen said he applied to the school largely by accident, having mistaken it for another Jesuit school, Georgetown, that his friends were attending. In retrospect, the error bore the brush of destiny. It was at Creighton, at a picnic hosted by the campus Hawaii Club, that Nguyen met his future wife, Lillian, a pharmacy student.

Lillian Nguyen’s family had their own tale of leaving Vietnam and finding new opportunities in the United States. Her father, David Nguyen, had served as an attorney representing the United States during the Vietnam War. When the Communists took over, he was sent to a “re-education” camp, where his son Anthony voluntarily joined him. Upon their release the two undertook a daring escape from the country, traveling overland across Cambodia to Thailand, where they found transit to the Philippines and later the U.S.

By that time some of David Nguyen’s other children had already found their own passage to the United States and had begun establishing a niche in Hawaii. This first wave of family pioneers found work in restaurants, at Waikiki trinket shops and on farms. Eventually, they pooled their resources to found a series of jewelry shops, which proved prosperous in the boom years of Hawaiian heritage jewelry. As their fortunes grew, they were able to bring over other family members, including Lillian Nguyen. Lillian arrived as a teenager and settled in Waipahu and Kaneohe.

After leaving Creighton, Terry and Lillian moved to Georgia, where Terry served his residence. In 2005 the family, which now included two sons, Brandon and Ryan, moved to Hawaii.

Having made good on their shared American dream, Terry and Lillian Nguyen were left to wonder whether the success their generation realized — thanks to the sacrifices of their parents — could be furthered by their own children.

They had no idea.

Next week: Brandon and Ryan Nguyen set new standards.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.