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GREENSBORO -- All things being equal, this might not seem the time or place for a big gamble. Specifically, a 5,000-square-foot supermarket built, brick by brick, paying cash.

The time? A recession that has the retail landscape pocked with caverns as vast as Circuit City, and even led some of the city’s most venerable small businesses such as Holliday Hardware to downsize and even throw in the towel.

The place? Summit Avenue and McKnight Mill Road, a block from Cone Boulevard. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of retail, within a mile of two mostly vacant shopping centers and a famously defunct mall.

Ah, but in this story, the “who”  counts more than the “when” and the “where.” That’s because the owner of the city’s newest ethnic supermarket opening in northeast Greensboro is a man named Y’Nen Nie.

He is a former Montagnard freedom fighter, a refugee who arrived here with the shirt on his back in 1986, landed a $60-a-week poultry plant job and, 25 years later, has built a supermarket with his own money.

Recession and location notwithstanding, the odds appear to be in his favor.

“It’s ... awesome. This is no small endeavor,” said Sam Funchess, president and CEO of the Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship, craning his neck to take in the imposing storefront of Nie’s American Oriental Market, opening Monday. “This is the American dream. Nie ... how did you say you did this?”

The answer is, to borrow a phrase, a long story, one as old as Ellis Island, with a Mekong twist.

Nie, 53, worked for American forces in the Vietnamese highlands province of Daklak as a child. He still has an Airborne tattoo on his forearm from when he was 12.

After the fall of Vietnam, he continued to fight with rebel forces on the run in the jungle. After a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, he and his wife and arrived as refugees on Thanksgiving 1986, straight from the jungle, speaking little English.

“We had nothing but our bare hands,” his wife, Cham, recalled Friday. “A few ugly clothes. Some children’s clothes. That was all.”

Commuting with friends to Siler City, Nie’s first job paid $4 per hour, cutting poultry. They didn’t complain.

“After the jungle, that $4 an hour was very lucky,” Nie said. “Before getting to America, we never had enough food.”

He then worked two jobs, getting up early to deliver newspapers. His 3-year-old daughter would get in the car to help him, handing him each paper to throw. It was fun.

For four years, Nie worked at Cone Mills for $6.90 an hour, then pooled his money with friends to run the  Montagnard Discount Market near Cone and Summit. The store, which will now be run by a friend, is across from the apartments where many arriving Montagnards lived.

Nie and his wife, Cham, ran the place for 19 years, early morning until midnight, a rundown location with a rutted parking lot, shoehorned between a used-tire store and a meat market. Buying the business was a lesson in itself — he was about to learn about “expiration dates.”

“I never heard of 'expiration dates.’ Everything was expired and we had to throw it away,” he said.

He also learned that tenants often had to make expensive repairs to buildings — a lesson for the future, when deciding whether to invest in his own building or rent yet another location.

Over the years, the family built a neighborhood clientele, selling lottery tickets, keeping the prices right on drinks, stocking anything: do-rags, and electric rice cookers, for example.

Increasingly, Beanie-Weanies and Spam became relegated to smaller shelf space, overtaken by Nie’s skill in importing foods for the burgeoning Asian community — curry sauces, coconut milk, quail eggs in brine, fresh ginger root and yucca — not standard convenience store fare.

The supermarket represents a quantum leap forward: Nie will stock fresh vegetables, frozen meat and seafood from a Chinese restaurant supplier, with about two-thirds American merchandise, 15 percent Hispanic and the rest Asian.

So, to answer Funchess’ question, how did he do it? Government loans?

“I sold the duplex,” Nie said. “I saved my money, and friends put in money. We always had a lot of friends along the way.”

Funchess says it is what accounts for the difference between first-generation Americans and the rest: The newcomers pool their money and stick together; the American-born people seem to be out for themselves.

Studies suggest immigrants take more risks: In 2008, the Small Business Administration reported that immigrants were 30 percent more likely to start new businesses.

As of the last U.S. Census, there were 15,900 immigrant-owned businesses in the state, with some of the highest percentages of business ownership among Mexicans, Greeks, Koreans and Vietnamese.

In the case of the Montagnards in particular, their harrowing exodus created extraordinary loyalty and kinship.

Nie, commanding a group of soldiers on the banks of the rising Mekong, faced the decision of whether to order his men across knowing they faced enemy fire, or wait and face possible drowning. He ordered two across in advance. All ended up  surviving.

Here, he and his wife are an advance guard of another sort. They have raised a family, built a community, even helped build a Montagnard church — something that would be banned in Vietnam. All five of Nie’s brothers, he has learned, have died  under mysterious circumstances in Vietnam, a country where he cannot return, because he is a former rebel and U.S. ally.

But Friday, as he tied colored plastic flags near the curb to announce his grand opening, and friends stocked his shelves late into the night, Nie had the sense that he had finally arrived at home. Bemused, he recalled the naive, long-ago plan he shared with his wife, en route to the United States:  They would sell food and drinks on the street in America and have a business.

In fact, they had no concept at the time of what their life would be here, that their children would attend school, for example, and that they themselves would become citizens.

In the neighborhood Friday afternoon, as school let out for Kayla Whitaker, 6, she and her father cut across Nie’s blacktop parking lot, which was pristine as a just-washed chalkboard. They pressed their noses to peek at the well-stocked shelves in the shiny new store.

“It’s right here in the neighborhood, and it’ll be close,” Kelvin Whitaker said. “We’re already doing fresh vegetables, stir-fry and jasmine rice. And this puts the money right back in the neighborhood. It gives that neighborhood feeling back.”

To Kayla, at least, it seemed just the time and place for Mr. Nie to open a 5,000-square-foot supermarket — this very moment, on her way home from school.

News researcher Diane Lamb assisted in this report.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com