Peter Nguyen Van Hung

[2][3][4] Peter Nguyen Van Hung grew up in a lower-middle-class family outside of Bình Tuy Province in South Vietnam, with two brothers and five sisters.

His father was a fisherman, but died after a long battle with illness, forcing his mother, a devout Catholic with roots in the country's north, to become the family's main breadwinner.

He left Vietnam in 1979 on an overcrowded boat; rescued by a Norwegian ship after just 36 hours and taken to Japan, he joined the Missionary Society of St. Columban upon his arrival there.

[5] He lived in Japan for three years, studying and taking a variety of jobs to support himself, including as a highway repairman, steel factory worker, and gravedigger.

Peter Nguyen Van Hung's exposure of abuses against foreign laborers and brides led the U.S. State Department to list Taiwan as a "Tier 2" region alongside countries such as Cambodia due to their lack of effort in combating human trafficking, which proved a major international embarrassment for the island's government.