THE
PEOPLE
Phom and his wife were very homesick. They didn’t like American food, and there were no grocery stores that sold the ingredients to make Southeast Asian dishes. They had friends in California, whom they would visit regularly, always bringing Southeast Asian foods back with them. Soon, their Albuquerque friends began to make requests. Both of Victor’s parents had factory jobs during the week at the old GTE Lenkurt factory on Eubank at I-40. Phom worked the night shift. When he could afford it, he bought a van and started going to California every weekend. Friends would pick up their orders from the Limarys’ garage. Gradually, Phom saw the opportunity for both enterprise and community support in his travels to and from California. The family opened their first store in 1980 on Central, just west of Wyoming. This was a joint effort by Phom and other members of his extended family. Before too long, he made the decision to go back to selling out of his van, leaving the store to the other family members. In the mid-1980s, Phom opened the original Ta Lin store along Louisiana, just south of where Cafe Trang is now. In 1988, they added onto the building, and after a fire, moved the store to the new addition, facing the parking lot. Victor grew up in Ta Lin, and felt very strongly that he didn’t want to work in the store for his entire life. He left New Mexico for college, receiving a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin. He had wanted a career in computers since he got his first one in 1983, when he was nine years old, the same year he became a U.S. citizen and legally changed his name to Victor. After college, he moved to Dallas and took an office job. He lived in Texas for a total of ten years, and while he loved the work, he didn’t like Dallas, and he didn’t like sitting at a desk, talking to the same ten people all day. He realized that because he had been raised in the hypersocial environment of the grocery store - dealing with people - lots and lots of them - was second nature to him.