Phuong Uyen Tran's father and mother harmonious traits: Yin and Yang building Tan Hiep Phat's success
	Five Steps to Success: Setting Price
	Five Steps to Success: Create authentic local products

Mr. Thanh Quy Tran and Phuong Uyen Tran

My father is an entrepreneur and a successful tycoon. But debate, born with the traits that made him that way—or did his childhood give them to him? Was it nature or nurture? It is an age-old but one thing for sure is that his upbringing sharpened those traits.

The man who spent childhood nights facing down two giant hogs which were eyeing him up for their dinner was never going to be fazed by a company like Coca-Cola. And the pigs in question were not like the cute little porcine in the movie Babe. They were two hundred-kilogram monsters, fattened up on milk powder donated by Americans hoping to feed the children my father was living with at an orphanage for four years during the war years in the mid-1960s. His nights in the pigpen were a punishment for fighting, even though he had been standing up for another boy.

But it cut no ice with the nuns who ran the orphanage, situated in the mountains near Da Lat, a cold city in the Central Highlands.

Fortunately, a kindly pig keeper gave him some rice to eat and straw to sleep on. The nuns bred pigs to provide income for the orphanage. Unsurprisingly, pork was featured heavily on the menu, if you can call it that. Breakfast, for example, was a lump of raw pork fat, the size of a man's fist, in a bowl of hot oily milk. Eating this dreadful concoction made some of the children retch. Others would bite into the fat too hard and the insides would spew out in a jet.

Phuong Uyen Tran's family

The tough childhood raises a good, brave man

He soon had to toughen up. Many of the other children had turned into thugs after being tormented by the nuns, and bullying was rife. A large percentage of those boys were not just orphans, but were also the discarded mixed-race offspring of American GIs: abandoned, rootless, and disparaged cultural anomalies.

My father was only at the orphanage in the first place because my grandfather decided to hide him there for fear his two stepbrothers would kill him for the inheritance his mother had left her three children. She had died when he was just nine after being struck by a coach as she dashed across a road in her haste to issue orders to workers at her trucking company.

My grandmother had considerable business acumen and had amassed a small fortune. Likewise, my grandfather was a successful my grandparents clearly passed on the business gene to their son.

My father showed early promise as a trader when his father made allow keep annual visits to the orphanage. The nuns did not allow children to al money, so my father pretended to hand over his a, hidden away in his sandal.

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