BIO
Victoria Bryant was born in Pleiku, Vietnam, in 1974. In the wake of the Fall of Saigon in 1975, her parents tried several times to arrange to get out of the country, finally succeeding in 1978, when they escaped by boat. After several months in a refugee camp in Malaysia, they were sponsored to come to Houston by another Vietnamese family. Her family settled in the Heights, where her father got a job as a welder, while her mother worked in a nail salon and later opened her own salon. Because Victoria came to the United States at such a young age, the entirety of her education occurred here. During her childhood, she attended L.L. Pew Elementary School, Holland Vanguard Middle School, and Jones Vanguard High School. When she started kindergarten, she spoke no English, but by fifth grade, she was proficient in the language. However, she continued to speak Vietnamese regularly with her parents.
After graduating from high school in 1992, she went to the University of Houston to attain her BS and Phar.D. She worked as an intensive care pharmacist at the Veterans Affairs Hospital for six years, during which she got married. She and her husband founded an in-home care service for seniors, Ambassadors Caregivers—which is now a thriving company—and she left her job as a pharmacist to focus on their business full-time. After several years, they founded an additional business, Senior Vantage, which deals with healthcare marketing and networking in the healthcare and senior care communities. It was as a result of networking for Senior Vantage that she met City Council member, Danny Nguyen, and began to be active in the Houston Vietnamese American community. She agreed to help him revitalize the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce. She was elected president of the Chamber in 2011 and continues to hold that office at the time of this interview.