Thao Huynh was sure the plane had somehow landed in the wrong place when she and her parents and younger sister arrived in the Flathead Valley that stark winter day in 2010.

Where were the bright city lights, she wondered?

“I thought Montana would be like New York or L.A.,” Huynh, 26, recalled with a bashful smile. “America looks so glamorous in the movies. I didn’t really research what Montana was like.”

The young Vietnamese woman, then just 20, had bragged to her friends that she’d be partying in America and living the high life. So began her rude awakening.

Over the next six years she built a new life here. She learned English, put herself through beauty school, worked extra hours at her relatives’ restaurants to pay cash for her first car. Huynh also learned the value of true friendship and the satisfaction of helping others.

Not bad, she says, for a girl who lived a pampered lifestyle in Vietnam, complete with a maid who tended the household while her parents worked at their restaurant. “I was spoiled rotten,” she admitted. “I don’t know how to do anything” when I got here.

On Thursday, Huynh will be sworn in as a U.S. citizen during a ceremony in Missoula. Earning her citizenship is a testament to Huynh’s spirit and determination.

She applied for citizenship six times, each time getting the paperwork back because she had made a mistake. Huynh studied long and hard, learning about the U.S. Constitution and government in a language she soaked in word by word.

Her co-workers at Amore Salon & Spa quizzed her on American government while they cut hair and gave pedicures.

“When I passed, I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I was pretty nervous.

Her boss and mentor, Tracy Anderson, plus a few of her friends at Amore will accompany her to Missoula for this milestone celebration.

It took Huynh’s parents, Nga Nguyen and Hung Huynh, 11 years to get visas to be able to live and work in America. They came to the Flathead Valley to help staff Charlie Wong Saigon Garden when it opened in 2011.

Charlie Trinh, the owner of Charlie Wong and Saigon Garden restaurants, financially helped nine family members emigrate from Vietnam to Kalispell to be part of the restaurant business. Charlie’s wife, Lien, is the sister of Huynh’s father.

Huynh began helping out at both restaurants. Her singular fixation after she arrived in America was to buy a car. Vehicles are so heavily taxed in Vietnam that it’s a real status symbol to own one.

“My goal to get a car cooler than my friend,” she said. “If you have car there [in Vietnam] you really wealthy.”

Huynh saved her tip money to buy a 1993 Toyota Camry, no status symbol by any means in this country, but it was a huge accomplishment for her. She paid cash for the well-used vehicle.

Her work ethic was quickly shaped when she helped one of her cousins build a house in the middle of winter, and then helped build 10 more houses as part of a self-help housing program.

“I watched and then did it,” she said about her newfound carpentry skills.

She wasn’t all that keen on restaurant work, but took the opportunity to learn English, relentlessly asking questions — “what is fork, what is spoon?” Her co-workers and customers patiently helped her out.

Even though she kept busy those first years in Kalispell, Huynh was homesick.

“Here I had no friends the first two years,” she said. “When I first moved here I hated every single minute.”

It was her volunteer English teacher, Valerie Phelps — a mentor she now calls Mom — who steered Huynh toward a career as a hair stylist. Phelps also helped her get a driver’s license.

“Her daughter had worked at Amore. Val said, ‘Why not go to beauty school?” Huynh recalled.

She enrolled at Crevier’s School of Cosmetology in Kalispell and was immediately overwhelmed because the instruction was, of course, in English. Huynh barely knew any English when she moved to Kalispell, but the owner of Crevier’s patiently said he’d help her out.

That didn’t sit well with the other students, who didn’t like the class interruptions if Huynh couldn’t understand something.

One day she overheard a conversation among a few other classmates.

“Why doesn’t she just quit,” they complained.

That made Huynh all the more motivated to finish beauty school. She was one of the first in her class to graduate.

“When I had job they were still in school,” she said proudly. “It’s a career. You touch people’s lives in a unique way.”

Huynh remembers how empty her life was in Vietnam. She’d get money from her parents to go shopping with friends. She had no responsibility, no direction in her life.

What Huynh perhaps didn’t realize at the time is that she had the tenacity to do whatever she set out to accomplish. That was evident when she moved from her rural town of Phanrang to Saigon to study accounting at a university.

She vividly remembers getting her first part-time job in Saigon, riding a bicycle around with map in hand, in 110-degree heat. Huynh snagged a job at a clothing shop and was fired three days later when she inadvertently didn’t offer to assist the store owner.

Her next job at a cellphone store lasted a month, then she hired on at a tea store but had to quit when she fell ill and was hospitalized.

When Huynh’s mother threw up her hands at her daughter’s ill-fated work history, it made her more determined to show her worth. She got another job and saved until she could travel home to place her first month’s salary on the table in front of her parents.

Huynh also showed compassion at an early age, befriending the “native” Vietnamese students who were ostracized because they were different. She explains it as the difference in America between American Indians and other Americans. The native Vietnamese lived in poverty in the mountains without close access to water.

When Huynh realized one of the native girls in her class was hungry every day — a growling stomach was a dead giveaway — she brought extra food to share with her less fortunate classmate. Later she was invited to one of the natives’ ceremonies, and was touched by their celebration of culture.

As Huynh looks ahead, she wants to stay in Kalispell.

She’d like to find true love one day. She watched a talk show recently during which a man told how he’d seen his wife-to-be across a room and declared, “I don’t know who that woman is but I’m going to marry her.”

“I want that,” Huynh confided.

She also likes the adage, “set your goal ridiculously high and someday you’ll get there.” With that in mind, Huynh said she may one day upgrade her vehicle, now a 2014 Toyota Highlander, to a personal jet.

In America, she knows, anything is possible.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.