BANGKOK -- You might have seen her.

She's the Vietnamese woman with high cheekbones and a beauty mark on her chin on the cover of the New York Times Magazine some three years ago for a story about the "Viet Kieus" -- Vietnamese returning to Vietnam. She's wearing a Versace dress, holding a martini, and looking at her partner, co-owner of Saigon's famous Q bar, where anybody who is anybody eventually appears.

Or you might have seen her photograph in the book, "Passage to Vietnam," wearing a bra and sunglasses astride her silver Vespa holding a live chicken by its neck -- a picture that made her forever infamous in Vietnam.

Phuong Anh Nguyen may be an archetypal Viet Kieu -- she left as a boat person with her family, suffered horribly on the high seas, remade herself in America, then returned a jet-setting cosmopolitan.

In the two decades since she left Vietnam, Phuong Anh has been almost everywhere and done almost everything. You could find her in a kibbutz or at a wedding in Morocco, playing elephant Polo in Nepal, trekking in Peru or simply visiting close friends in San Francisco or New York or Paris.

Phuong Anh carries two cell phones -- and her passport is as thick as the unwritten novel about her life. "I can't help it. If I have an opportunity to go somewhere, I will take it no matter what," she admits.

She counts in her immediate circle writers, lawyers, millionaires, chefs, hotel owners, artists, NGO workers and even a few movie stars. Her pal, Matt Dillon once flew in and they went around Vietnam together. Gary Trudeau devoted two weeks of "Doonesbury" to her story. She's been interviewed on CNN by Peter Arnett, attended Sihanouk's coronation party in Phnom Penh, vacationed at writer William Shawcross' mansion outside London.

Don Johnson came by and left a note, "Sorry I missed you." She has dined with Norman Mailer, had drinks with Walter Cronkite, Norman Schwartzkopf, Gary Hart, Robert DeNiro and with JFK Jr. and Daryl Hannah -- in fact, they were wearing her famous Q Bar tee-shirts when they got off the plane in New York and the photo showed up in GQ which started a fury of interest, and even more exposure -- Saveur, Romaine, Anabel, National Geographic, Asian Wall Street Journal and many others carried stories about Phuong Anh and the Q Bar.

Yet few know who she is. She's not a model -- she turns down offers. She's not an artist . "Oh God, no, I can't paint or write or take a good picture to save my life," she says, laughing.

She's an entrepreneur, it's true, but few entrepreneurs have such a mystique. No. What attracts so many people to this petite woman is a certain radiant inner strength. In fact, having known her for a decade, if I had to choose one word to describe her it would be "fearless."

Last year, we were eating oysters when Phuong Anh suddenly blurted out, "You know, for years, I couldn't eat oysters."

"Why not?"

"When we were on that island, all we had was oysters and coconuts and I thought I'd die if I had to eat another oyster."

That island -- one of the ten thousand in Indonesia 's archipelago -- was deserted until her family and a hundred other Vietnamese boat people were shipwrecked there in 1979. On that island she buried her older sister, dead from injuries received when she was raped by Thai pirates, and an older brother who was murdered trying to save his sister.

In America, it took years to readjust -- her mother suffered years of depression -- but readjust they did. Two of her siblings settled and became dentists and another a real estate agent; but Phuong Anh grew restless and in 1991 went back to Vietnam despite her parents' objection.

She was single-handedly responsible for Saigon's high-end pubs -- every chair, every candleholder, every lamp designed to her liking. The result was an instant hit. Her clothes are invariably copied by the wealthy in Saigon.

But deep down, she admits, she returned to Vietnam to face her demons. She faced those who forced her and her family out of Vietnam -- worked with them, in fact -- and eventually let go much, but not all, of her rage.

A few years ago, at her mother's urging, to put her past in perspective, she rented a boat and went searching for that island in Indonesia to retrieve her sister's remains. When she thought she found the island, her sister's grave was gone, washed away. "There was nothing left," she says, sighing.

Today, she's a bit tired and wary. Her bar has been closed for six months as the building is being renovated, but many expats have left because of the recession and she's not sure she wants to restart.

"Eight years in Vietnam is enough. I still have lots of my stuff in Europe and New York. Besides, I have so many other things to do." Among her current projects -- buying antiques in India for a friend, maybe a cookbook ("new, interesting dishes from Vietnamese all around the world"), investing in a Los Angeles restaurant, a New York hotel -- and about half a dozen more.

Where is home, then, I ask?

She sighs. She doesn't like the question. At 34, her answer is as non-committal as it was when she was 24: "L.A., I suppose, where my family is. But where do I want to live? I don't know. Maybe New York. Maybe London. Maybe San Francisco."

This is, I think, her strategy. Keep traveling so she can outrun the past. Many Viet Kieus are like her. Born in Vietnam, remade elsewhere, the world suddenly shrinks to a village. They have turned into the first global villagers. Their identity is no longer bound to land, to hearth.

If Phuong Anh ever stops moving, a different person might emerge.

But not to worry. There's the New Year's Eve party for some close friends, around 50 of them.

"We're all going to meet in Luang Prabang, Laos," she says, as she stares dreamily at the river. "We're going to ride elephants in the jungle and take boat trips down the Mekong River and drink champagne. Wanna come?"

 Copyright by Pacific News Services