Hank Nguyen is a Vietnamese “boat person” in the truest sense. He spent a year building a boat on a remote island in the Mekong River to make his escape from his home country.

Nguyen and dozens of others used the boat to make a perilous journey across the Pacific Ocean to Indonesia, and on to a new life in the United States. In a life marked by more than his share of tragedy, he has found lasting happiness in Kansas City.

In 2017, Nguyen and his wife San opened San’s Sandwiches, a popular Vietnamese restaurant in Gladstone where he routinely serenades customers with a version of the Frank Sinatra standard “My Way.”

See the attached video for the rest of his remarkable story on this week’s installment of “Finding Refuge in KC.”