Humble Beginnings.

After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, droves of people from Vietnam fled the country and endured severe hardships in order to escape the new communist government. Two of the people from this mass exodus were Jong Kwok and Lee An-Bo Kwok, who fled Vietnam in 1978 and eventually settled in San Jose, California. Both were originally from Chợ Lớn, the Chinese district in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). With no college education and only a Vietnamese high school diploma, Jong and Lee opened China Chen Restaurant in 1983 when San Jose’s Vietnamese community was still in its infancy. Vietnamese restaurants in San Jose were few and far between in the early 1980s, so China Chen was one of the first restaurants in San Jose to serve customers the popular shrimp wonton egg noodles (mì sủi cảo) and fried flour cake (bánh bột chiên).