Love at First Smile: A UCF Love Story

By Ashley Cullins

It was fall of 1993, and Phuoc Nguyen ’97 ’10MS was waiting in the Health and Physics Building (now the Mathematical Sciences Building) for his very first college class.

As students from the previous class filed out, he saw something that would change his life: a smile from Ly Huong Luu ’97, directed at him.

Asked if it was love at first sight, Phuoc says, “For me, yes. I felt a connection with her the first time I saw her. I still remember it vividly, as if it were yesterday.”

And for Ly? “No, I don’t remember that,” she confesses, as she and Phuoc laugh.

But she does remember the first time she saw Phuoc walk by in the library, as they were both heading to a Vietnamese American Student Association (VASA) meeting.

He remembers that time, too. “As I was walking to the first VASA meeting, I saw the girl with the beautiful smile. What were the chances that she would be there too? My name means ‘lucky’ in Vietnamese, and luck was on my side that day!”

Falling in Love

Between spending time at the library and serving as VASA officers, Ly and Phuoc crossed paths often.

Shy “hi’s” and “hello’s” soon led to shared study sessions at the library, then a double date to the movies. “It wasn’t really a romantic movie,” Phuoc notes. “It was Demolition Man.”

But even cryogenically frozen crime lords couldn’t cool their growing romance. Ly and Phuoc were soon inseparable.

They shared $1.25 minestrone soup at Fazoli’s while waiting for free breadsticks, split 99-cent Whoppers at Burger King, and hung out at Wild Pizza and the library. “We were two poor college students in love,” says Phuoc.