By Scott Herhold, San Jose Mercury News
This is the second of five columns on the five major candidates for San Jose mayor.
Mayoral candidate Madison Nguyen in front of the construction site of the Samsung headquarters in San Jose, Calif., April 1, 2014. (Gary Reyes, Bay Area News Group)
Madison Nguyen is the most petite and most polite of the five major candidates for San Jose mayor. She seldom says anything cutting about her rivals. She jokes about accepting the outrageous slings and arrows of political life.
Don’t be fooled. Nguyen’s charm masks a steely ambition, born from her roots in an immigrant family of strawberry pickers. So it wasn’t a total surprise that she took me to the massive new Samsung building to illustrate her ambitions as mayor.
At the northwest corner of First Street and Tasman Drive, the NBBJ-designed American headquarters for Samsung is rising now like a gigantic Stonehenge, with twin 10-story towers, 680,000 square feet and a boast of architectural distinction.
As vice mayor, Nguyen cannot claim special credit for having landed the big fish. The negotiations for the concessions the city gave Samsung were handled by Mayor Chuck Reed and Kim Walesh, the director of economic development.
As a talented evoker of symbolism, however, Nguyen points to the Samsung building as a template of what she seeks as mayor, a vigorous expansion of the city’s drive for jobs and tax revenue.
77 DAYS
“We were able to do everything for them in 77 days,” she told me. “I’d like to use this as an example of what the planning department is capable of doing to show that we are a very business-friendly city.”
The next question was inevitable: Just why would she — of the five major candidates — be the best person to bring in the next Samsung? After all, bringing jobs to town is the first of the municipal Ten Commandments.
“I think the difference is the energy, the drive, the ability to see something magnificent, something bigger in San Jose,” she told me. “I find pride in doing this not just for the city, but for myself.”
To a greater extent than any of her rivals, the 39-year mother of one makes her personal story the centerpiece of her campaign.
It’s a remarkable story: Born in Vietnam less than four months before Saigon toppled to the Communists in 1975, she fled with her family in a boat, landing in a holding camp in the Philippines.
After finally arriving in America, the Nguyens went first to Scottsdale, Ariz., and then to Modesto, where she grew up as one of nine children on the rough side of town, traveling an hour to pick strawberries in the morning, listening to her father lecture the kids about securing a better life.
Read the full article by Scott Herhold from San Jose Mercury News.
