"I don't have time for a health club," she says, "but I've got to do whatever I can to maintain my energy, keep my batteries recharged throughout the day." She also takes martial arts classes with her husband and the children. "It's a wonderful form of exercise that keeps me in balance."
Public relations, marketing and keeping customers happy are among Hwang's duties. "Basically, coordinating the right people to do the right thing and making sure we're moving in the right direction." She's always juggling three, sometimes four, projects at the same time. An international customer drops by throwing her schedule for the entire day into a state of chaos. "It's like cooking--there's so much going on that if you're not careful you could wind up burning yourself."
She won't be going home before 7 p.m. It could be as late at 9. "I've got to tell myself to go home, otherwise it never stops.
Call her Mrs MegaMotion.
Rose Hwang was born into a wealthy Saigon family. She's reluctant to give out her exact age but we can surmise she was born in Saigon in 1957 or 1958. Her Chinese grandfather started a family fortune as a business consultant to the French. Her father owned successful textile plants and publishing companies. Rose attended a private Catholic school and kept up a rigorous schedule of musical and academic training. She was 16 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese communists. A once rosy future suddenly went black.
Like tens of thousands of the most entrepreneurial and daring Vietnamese, the Hwangs didn't resign their fates to the communists. In 1975, a year after the fall of Saigon, the entire family of seven undertook a daring escape for the capitalist freedoms of Hong Kong. In the dead of night they dressed like fishermen and slipped out on a river boat. They were scarcely halfway to their destination when their boat ran out of water and gas and was captured by a communist patrol ship.
"They said the only reason they didn't shoot us was because there were children on the boat," recalls Hwang. She was sure, however, that the refugees would have been tried and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in labor camps. But their captors made one mistake that proved fatal.
"They didn't think a 17-year-old girl could do them any harm," Hwang says. Left unguarded, she crept around the boat passing intelligence to the other captives who set in motion a desperate plot to seize the ship.
"I had no fear at the time," Hwang recalls, "just the will to get out of the situation. I was determined that I would not be defeated by the Communists." Thanks to Hwang's daring, the refugees succeeded in surprising and overpowering their captors. They killed or imprisoned the communist sailors, then steamed into a port at the border of Thailand and Malaysia.
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Fortunately one of Rose's aunts had already immigrated to the U.S. In 1976 she sponsored the family's resettlement in Mission Viejo in Orange County, California.
Hwang resumed her education and earned a bachelor's in music performance. She worked for a time as a pianist. As she became fluent in English as well as Chinese, Vietnamese and French, she began working as a court interpreter, then in the marketing department of a small high-tech company. Ultimately, her musical ambitions lost out to her sense of duty to her family.
"I was the oldest child," she says. "I wouldn't have been able to help anyone as a musician. I realized there was a reason my parents sacrificed so much for me, so I worked hard. No rest. It was difficult. I felt like a machine, but I had so much I wanted to accomplish."
By a stroke of luck she met Mitchell Phan whose family had fled South Vietnam two days before Saigon fell. The couple married after a five-year courtship. "It had to be the right man who deserved me," Hwang jokes. "I was too valuable to make a wrong decision."
Phan was making $50,000 a year as an engineer, but the rampant capitalism of their new homeland rekindled the familiar entrepreneurial spirit. The couple bought a video store. Hwang ran it while Phan kept his engineering job.
"We did everything wrong," Hwang freely admits. "We learned about the three rules of business: location, location, location. We did all three wrong."
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