The Tao of Thom Pham

Hang out with Thom Pham for a while and you’ll come to understand that his sense of The Lifestyle derives from his personal creation story, the result of his particular immigrant’s alchemy. He was born in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, in 1974, a year before the capital fell to the North Vietnamese army. The son of a Vietnamese mother and a GI father whom he’s never met, he was one of the lucky Amerasian children able to emigrate to the United States, in his case, through Lutheran Social Services. He came to Minnesota with his older brother, Thanh, in 1988. Thanh was seventeen at the time, he was fourteen.

The boys were adopted by Richard and Mary Johnson and moved in with their family in an eight-bedroom house in the Longfellow neighborhood. The Johnsons had four daughters and a son of their own and two older foster kids—a girl from Africa and a boy from China—and were active at the nearby United Methodist Church, where the girls still sing in the choir. Thom didn’t know any English, and he struggled for some time to interact with his new siblings. Though his brothers and sisters attended South High School, he decided to go to the more distant Southwest, an obvious attempt to differentiate himself from the Johnsons.

His life, though, had never been easy. In fact, the stories he tells about his childhood—most of which are all but impossible to corroborate—are often harrowing. Pham’s grandfather was a well-known sugar cane exporter and a judo master. His grandmother was the daughter of a French father and a Vietnamese mother, and, according to Thom, was the very epitome of a lady. He says he rarely saw his mother. Six years before he was born, she had run away from her childhood home in the port city of Quin Nhon to avoid an arranged marriage. She went to Saigon, took up with an American military policeman stationed there, and bore his two children, Thom and Thanh. She eventually returned to Quin Nhon with her kids, but the shame brought down on the family by this prodigal daughter was too much, so she left the little boys with her parents and returned to Saigon. “We would only see my mother once or twice a year, if that,” Thom recalls.

Amerasians—children born of Vietnamese mothers and American soldiers—were part of the tragic dividend of the war in Vietnam. After the U.S. pulled out, kids such as Thom were another reminder of the brutal internecine conflict, more representative of the superpower invader than of a native son. The young Pham brothers’ grandparents had lost most of their  property to postwar “land reform” and three older sons to the war itself. The boys were forbidden to leave the house without supervision. “But we were kids,” Thom says, “and when that backdoor was left open, we went out.” Waiting for them, however, was a hostile and violent community. Thom says he and his brother would come home beaten—sometimes by other children, sometimes by the children’s parents, sometimes by Communist soldiers. One time, he says, he and Thanh were thrown into the town’s well. Another time, they were detained overnight in a backwater detention center. Once, Thom says, he was covered with honey and thrown into a nest of fire ants. “It was horrible,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘How can these people treat us this way? How can they be so evil?’ ”

The history of Thom’s name reflects the changes he underwent throughout his childhood. He was born Thom Van Roman (the last name of the biological father he’s never met), but his grandparents changed his name to Thom Van Pham when he moved in with them in Quin Nhon. When he was adopted by the Johnsons, he Americanized “Thom” and took his adoptive father’s first name as his middle name—becoming Thomas Richard Pham—refusing to take the Anglo surname. “Do I look like a Johnson to you?” he says today, laughing.

He says he was a misunderstood teenager without many friends, and the judo he’d learned from his grandfather came in handy. “Imagine, Southwest [High] in the eighties,” he says. “There was a Latin group and a white group and a black group—I didn’t belong to any group.” He hints at something more than boys-will-be-boys adolescent violence when he describes marketing his judo skills as his first entrepreneurial venture: “Whoever paid the most money, I would be their friend for a while.”

As difficult as life was in Vietnam, there had been a simple formality about the way he was raised, and at first the laid-back attitude of his adopted land was jarring. “The first two years, I was pretty much locked away from the world, but when I was sixteen or seventeen my cousin had a birthday party,” he says. “It was my first party. Great, I can dress up. That’s what we do in our culture. When you’re invited to go someplace, you dress up. In dress pants, with your shirt tucked in, and all slicked and ready to go. But when I got there, I swear to God, I got so mad, I couldn’t even talk. They’re, like, all in these sweatshirts and shorts and all that and grilling in the garage. And I was like, ‘This is fucked up! What is this?’ I was so mad I wrote to my mom. I wrote, ‘You cannot believe what happened to me today. I went to this party, and people were so disrespectful of themselves and myself.’ And I went on and on about it for three pages.”

Things got better as his English improved, and he became more active at Southwest, joining the swimming team. Then he landed a job at Kinh Do, the popular Vietnamese restaurant in Uptown, where he did just about everything, from busing tables and frying won tons to serving as host. With the money he earned, he bought some fresh threads and a new white Geo Trakker with pink details. He had a hot girlfriend.

If there were any signs of trouble, his adoptive parents deny it. “Thom never acted out,” says his adoptive mother, Mary Mackey (the Johnsons have since divorced). However, Pham tells a story in which he ignored his adoptive father’s insistence on less television and, frustrated, Richard Johnson cut the TV cords in the house. “Then I cut all the electrical cords,” Pham says. “Lamps, appliances, everything. Then I bought a new TV and a new radio, put them in my room, and I was the only one who could enjoy them.” “Oh, I don’t remember that,” Richard says. “If anything, it was his brother who gave us most of the problems.”

In 1998, after studying business for two years at Normandale Community College, Thom returned to Vietnam to see his mother and his grandparents and to spend eight months traveling around his homeland. “I saw people without arms, without eyes, with horrible deformities,” he says. The trip gave him a perspective he was lacking—an understanding that he was one of the fortunate. “And I could understand some of their rage, the anger that drove them to do what they did to me,” he adds.

Though Thom’s brother moved away from the Johnson home when he turned eighteen, Thom decided to remain a part of the sprawling family. What’s more, after working at Kinh Do for a few years, he began playing the real estate market, buying houses, fixing them up, and either selling them or renting them out.

Pham says his interest in business comes from his mother, whom he describes as a successful businesswoman in Ho Chi Minh City, and his grandfather. He attributes his gastronomic instincts to his grandmother, who ran a catering business in Quin Nhon. “Growing up, we would sit around the table, and the topics would always be food and business,” he explains. Real estate, though he became good at it, didn’t satisfy him the way the food business did. So when he was twenty-four, he bought a run-down chow mein joint in St. Louis Park and opened ThanhDo. He created his own menu—pan-Asian comfort food with pot stickers and noodle dishes—and hired his younger Johnson siblings to work in the kitchen and on the floor. He rehabbed and decorated the place himself, scraping decades worth of dust from the walls, repainting the rooms top to bottom, and hanging paper lanterns bought at Urban Outfitters from the ceiling. ThanhDo was an immediate success.

“I remember the first day—I hung a big banner promising 30 percent off,” he says. “People were lined up outside of the place. I came running out from the kitchen screaming, ‘Lock the doors! Lock the doors!’ ”