A wonderful story about immigrants who worked hard, learned English, started a business and now employ hundreds of workers. DP
By Gerrye Wong
Asian Week: The Le Family of San Jose is a prime example of hardworking Asian Americans that have built a successful, thriving restaurant and food service enterprise in just 25 short years. Lee’s Sandwiches has become a household name in many communities, with the company owning over 22 shops today. Lee’s Catering has 500 trucks delivering cooked food every day.
The story begins when Chieu Le, a third-year law student, decided that life under the communist regime in Vietnam, in 1979, was becoming too difficult. Le courageously escaped by boat to Malaysia. His wife, Yen, soon joined, and the following year, they emigrated to New Mexico.
In America, Chieu, not speaking any English, worked as a butcher, earning, what he says “was very good pay for an immigrant like me who was learning how to cut meat right on the job — $8 an hour. I worked hard, doing overtime every day because I needed to support my wife and new son here in America.”
Moving to San Jose in 1980, Chieu enrolled in San Jose High School’s English as a Second Language (ESL) program. There, he noticed a Vietnamese-owned catering truck selling food to the students in the schoolyard, and got a job working for them. By the next year, with limited English, he went out to buy his own catering truck. He recalls, “The man didn’t want to sell it to me because he saw I couldn’t even speak English and obviously, looked very inexperienced and poor.”
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
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