Hieu Ngoc Tran

Hieu Ngoc Tran was born on January 1st 1972 and passed away early morning on July 26th 2017. Born and grew up in Viet Nam, Hieu has many Vietnamese friends and has many memorable stories. He often shares those stories during families gathering, especially in Christmas times. He never ran out of stories to tell. Most of the stories are funny so every ones enjoy listening to him. Never a boring moment when Hieu was around. Hieu came to the United States in his early 20 with his parents, brothers and sisters. He has 6 sisters and 2 brothers. He was the youngest but the smartest person in the family. Hieu and his family lived in Kansas for a few years. Kansas was just too cold for Hieu and his family so they moved to Texas, where the weather is much warmer, houses are cheaper, jobs are easy to find, no sales taxes, and a lot of Vietnamese restaurants. Texas was their dream state and every ones were happy. Speaking of dream, Hieu saw his dream girl one day at a friend house watching boxing on TV. It was the first time in his life that he felt his heart beat so fast. Shy and inexperience, Hieu did not know what to do. Surprisingly, God gave him the courage to phone her but could not say a word. As times went by, Hieu and Huyen fell in love, got married, and gave birth to two lovely children, Patrick and Savannah. Hieu was a humble man, a kind person, a gentle husband, and a role-model father. After Hieu married Huyen, he gave up his freedom and dedicated his life to his wife and kids. Nothing was more important to him than his wife and kids, not even himself. He lived a very simple life. Went to work in the morning, came home in the evening, and spent times with his family. That was his joy and glory. Hieu was a very intelligent and talented man. Unlike many other machinists, he had a natural talent for machines and computers, especially in software programming. He self-taught himself Visual Basic, Visual C++, Java, and many other programming languages. What he could code in one week would take most people a year. He wrote software to simulate movement and cutting of parts and tools in 3 dimensional view. His talent gave him the recognition he deserve where he worked. Unfortunately, in January of 2013, Hieu was diagnosed with a rare disease called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neuron disease. It is a disorder of the nervous system that causes muscle weakness and interferes with a patient’s ability to function physically; the nerve cells that control movement of muscles gradually die and muscles progressively weaken. After 5 long years of suffering, he finally gave up and returned to God in heaven. Although Hieu left us, our memories of him remain with us and will never be forgotten. His photos will remind us of how handsome and how happy he was. We thank him for being a part of our lives. We all love him.