She Brings Music of Motherland Alive

When Phi-Khanh Nguyen left Vietnam as a 14-year-old, she gave no hint of future stardom.

But now the singer’s stage name, Phi Khanh, is well known to Vietnamese households both here and in Southeast Asia.

Her albums sell quickly in music stores in Westminster’s Little Saigon and on the black market of Ho Chi Minh City.

“It feels strange. I left as a little kid and nobody knew who I was,” the Placentia resident said recently. “Now, 17 years later, they know who I am already, and they have my tapes.”

Someday, she said, “I want to go back, you know, to the motherland and all that, to perform for them in person. That would be very special.”

Nguyen rose to fame with a family band named May Bon Phuong, or Clouds From Four Corners. It was created a year after her family arrived in Kansas, where the Vietnamese community was small but large enough for gatherings--and where the exiles would lament about what they missed, the scenery, the music.

Her father, a guitar player, decided that he could do something about the latter because his four children had been studying guitar and piano. Phi Khanh was especially accomplished.

She had started taking piano lessons early and, at 9, was accepted into the National School Music in Saigon for an education in classical piano and voice. In Kansas, the family’s income did not allow for such extras as musical training, but a piano teacher saw talent in Phi Khanh and taught her for free.

At home, her father insisted that his two girls and two boys rehearse regularly, and he figured in 1976 that they were ready to form a band with one other musician. May Bon Phuong entertained at Vietnamese celebrations in Kansas until 1978, when the family moved to Orange County.

Here, May Bon Phuong was a hit in a place soon to be known as the capital for exiled Vietnamese outside their native land.

Several years later, their cassettes were being shipped all over America, and fans packed May Bon Phuong concerts held in hotel ballrooms.

“When it started, I didn’t feel anything because I was young and we were doing it for fun,” Phi Khanh said. “And then one day, you open your eyes and realize everybody around here knows you.

“Naturally, you lose a lot of spontaneity. I would go to eat in Little Saigon and became uncomfortable when I realized people were staring at me, and I couldn’t eat,” she said. “But I was proud to be a part of the band.

“The happiest moments still are when I go on stage, and I perform, and I know I did a good job,” she said.

May Bon Phuong broke up in the late 1980s, after the Nguyens opened a Vietnamese restaurant and nightclub named Diamond in Fullerton. Her family still performs there, but Phi Khanh and her husband bought their own nightclub in 1989.

She now performs with her own band at Majestic in Huntington Beach every weekend, depending on her husband, John Quoc Nguyen, to manage the business side of their partnership.

The couple also founded Majestic Productions last fall and, over Christmas, produced Phi Khanh’s first album since May Bon Phuong.

She is working on a music video from the album.

“When I was young, I never thought that I wanted to be this or that,” Phi Khanh said. “I just wanted to play piano and sing. But life’s road led me here.”