I'm a refugee who came to the US and started a business with $20,000. 12 years later, it's going strong.

• Oklahoma is poised to resettle 1,800 Afghan refugees, third in the nation behind California and Texas.
• Former refugee Vang Pao Her, who also goes by Paul Her, 41, opened a restaurant in Tulsa 12 years ago after resettling in the US.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Oklahoma business owner Paul Her. It has been edited for length and clarity.

My parents are refugees from the war in Laos. We are Hmong and after the war, they moved to a refugee camp in Thailand, where I was born. We stayed in the camp for about six years and then we were sponsored to come to the United States.

Hmong people tend to stay together in what we call our "tribal" or "clan" groups, so we ended up in Lansing, Michigan, which is where a lot of our family members lived. We lived there for about 20 years.

Growing up, I was a soccer player and played in high school and college. I studied business administration at college. Many of my family members were involved in the restaurant business, and I always wanted to be a part of it as well. It's very labor-intensive. Business school is more about theories, but it does prepare you to own a business because you learn about marketing and advertising.

When I got out of college, I initially worked as a manager at Walgreens. I liked that it was a fast-paced job, but it wasn't my passion. I then opened my own agency with Avis Car Rental. I would get a percentage of the sales for the car rentals and the gear people would rent, like GPS systems. I did that for a while and enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, Lansing — and Michigan in general — was hit hard as the car industry suffered from the Great Recession. Everybody was hurting around 2008, so some of my uncles moved to Arkansas and got into the poultry business.

Other family members moved to the Tulsa area, including the smaller towns of Broken Arrow, Owasso, and Collinsville. I didn't want to live in Oklahoma, but made the move anyway — it was closer to my family, and back then, it was very cheap to live here.

In 2009, I opened a restaurant called Thai Village with some friends. We were young — in our 20s — and each put in about $20,000. We figured that although many businesses fail, we didn't have anything to lose at that point.

We found the location and really liked it — it's across from Oral Roberts University, for one, and it was previously a restaurant. It needed some repairs, but we were able to fix it up. The rent was and is a lot more expensive than other areas like midtown Tulsa, but we thought the location was worth it.

The food we make at Thai Village is a bit different. I tell people that all Thai food is similar because it's made from similar ingredients, but it may depend how much coconut or fish sauce you use in a dish, for example. At Thai Village, our food tends to resemble food you would find in the Bangkok region of Thailand.

Starting out was a challenge because no one knew about us. I would spend my days going to nearby businesses and pass out fliers, hoping that we would attract new customers.

It was hard at first. We didn't have a strong customer base and we were barely getting by paying our employees and paying for the apartment we lived in. (I'm now married and have two young kids.)

I thought: "As long as we are able to make a little money to survive, we can make it." We would eat at the restaurant and we remained open during many holidays, but staff still left because they weren't making enough money. We were barely breaking even each day.

Two of the partners ended up leaving, but we bought them out. We survived the pandemic closure as well, and in fact, our clientele has increased because people were using delivery apps like DoorDash and UberEats. Now, they come in.

Since we spent so long locked down, I know fewer people these days — I probably only know about 60% of my customers, and I used to know about 80% or 90% of the people who came into the restaurant. With time, that number will get back to where it was.

But I'm proud because many businesses closed during the pandemic, even the bigger businesses and chain stores.

If people want to start their own restaurants, I'd first recommend working in one. You may cook your own food, but cooking for hundreds of people each day is very different from cooking yourself a meal. Plus, customer-service skills are really important and highly valued by customers in the U.S., even if I don't think customer service is emphasized as much in other places — it's more about the food.

Tulsa has transformed since I first arrived, and so has my business. But I'm making a living for my family and proud of everything we've accomplished.