First Wife's Family Tree

The founder and his first wife were high school sweethearts at Menlo-Atherton whose mutual friend was an exchange student from Bavaria living with her family in Menlo Park (Fr. Dr. Barbara Schmidt, Sonthofen.)

Their fathers, her paternal uncle, and the founder's family and friends objected to thier romance, but his wife's mother and the rest of the family supported them. Zefferrelli's "Romeo and Juliet" was their favorite movie on account of this. The founder cut off his family and friends for years in retaliation for their disrespecting him and his wife's love, refusing to see or speak to them despite their all living in the same city of Menlo Park, California.

The founder's first wife's families were from the northern part of post French Indo-China Viet Nam and had to flee their estate to avoid being killed by communist forces when they took over North Viet Nam.

The family settled in Saigon, where Father Ky became a Professor of Classical Literature and Uncle Kanh the Dean of Saigon's Law School. Uncle also served as a Colonel in the South Vietnamese Army in Counterintelligence and interrogated defectors from the North. The family also had to flee Saigon when it collapsed because of communist death squads, losing nearly all their possessions once again as they survived and rebuilt as political refugees in California.

In the United States, Uncle Ky became a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute while mom and auntie ran a restaurant associated with a Palo Alto poker hall, which banked its deposits with the founder while he was the vault teller of the Stanford Financial Square branch of Bank of America and his wife worked across the street at Crocker Bank. They also worked Saturdays and Sundays at the Emporium and Macy's at Stanford Shopping Center. They lived in an apartment in downtown Menlo Park and never spoke to the founder's family and friends who lived within a mile or two of them because of thier opposition to thier love and relationship.

The Nguyens helped found Chua Giac Minh in East Palo Alto which was built in sight of Dad and Mom Nguyen's apartment on West Bayshore and the family continues to support it to this day. Cousin Thu-tam, now a dentist in San Jose, helps defray the cost of its prayer books, for example. The founder prays there as often as he can to offer his thanks and to pay his respects to all his ancestral lineages, including the Nguyens.