The pursuit of happine$$
Born amid the chaos of war, Vietnamese women of a certain age learned quickly the value of hard work. Abigail Haworth meets three entrepreneurs for whom such toil has paid off handsomely. Pictures by Nana Chen
What's the first designer item you ever bought?" I ask 42-year-old Vietnamese tycoon Le Hong Thuy Tien as we cruise through Ho Chi Minh City in her beast-like black Bentley. It has come to this. I have been asking about her childhood during the Vietnam war (or the American war, as it's known here) for the past half hour. She has politely refused to be drawn. Fawning questions about how filthy rich she is are all I have left.
"That's a great question!" she exclaims, her perfect eyebrows arching with delight. Sadly, it is only half great. The purchase was so many hundreds of Louis Vuitton tote bags, Bulgari watches and Chanel dresses ago that Tien can't remember the answer. She searches her memory in vain as motorcycles buzz past like flies outside the tinted windows.
Whatever the item was, we establish that she most probably bought it in Paris in the mid-1990s. Back then she was a flight attendant for the national carrier Vietnam Airlines. It was such a coveted job, at a time when few Vietnamese could travel, that she'd chosen it over a fledgling career as a movie starlet. Today she is the president of a huge trading company, Imex Pan Pacific Group.
"I run 25 private equity and venture capital firms that distribute luxury brands and invest in local shopping malls," she says in her girlish, slightly Americanised English.
Unlike others among Vietnam's super-rich, who are reluctant to flaunt their success in a country run by an increasingly jittery and repressive communist regime, Tien is all about the money. Her mission, she says, is to generate annual revenue of US$1 billion. How close is she?
"I'm over halfway there."
Welcome to modern Vietnam - or one side of it, at least - where the pinnacle of achievement is to snare the exclusive rights to distribute Burberry or (Tien's newest acquisition) the franchise for Dunkin' Donuts. The town formerly known as Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 to celebrate national unity after two decades of civil strife, including the war with America from 1965-75. Now it is Vietnam's commercial hub. Gleaming billboards and five-star hotels signal the country's status as Asia's fastest-growing economy after China. Since liberalisation began in the 80s, founding father Ho's communist mantra, "Success, success, great success", has become the creed of hard-core capitalism.