Timing is Everything

Although the Vietnamese in America were at first a homogenous group, in the course of five separate waves of immigration they have encompassed a diverse cross-section of Vietnamese society, including Kinh Vietnamese (the majority), Chinese, Khmer, and people of at least a dozen other ethno-linguistic backgrounds. The refugees belong to a wide range of religions, including Catholicism, Buddhism, and Cao Daiism, the last being a religious sect that regards Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen, and William Shakespeare, among others, as guiding spirits. The Kinh are also divided by long-standing regional differences, which have far more impact on language and world view than such differences typically do in America. The northerners among the refugees, who fled to South Vietnam immediately after the fall of the French at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, were weaned on harsh weather and infertile soils and are known for their rigorous work ethic. The native southerners, in contrast, have for centuries been thought to exude the attitude of a people who were "born with a spoonful of rice in their mouths." And, finally, there are distinctions in education and class status which cross all demographic categories.

With most ethnic groups, demographic factors such as these often determine how well new immigrants and refugees manage to reconstruct their lives in this country. Vietnamese-Americans represent a major exception to that pattern: the most successful and least successful groups have very similar demographic profiles. Both groups have disproportionate numbers of ethnic Kinh, Catholics, transplanted northerners, and those who held military and political positions in South Vietnam.

This similarity is a cruel irony, but it is no accident. As one might expect, many of the successful Vietnamese, who, true to popular stereotypes, have overachieving children, new cars, and close-knit families, are those who were evacuated from Saigon in 1975. In what amounts to an unplanned experiment in human resilience, a large portion of their South Vietnamese demographic group--primarily families headed by younger officials and officers--did not leave Vietnam at that time. Members of this stay-behind group were not included in official contingency plans, unable to buy their way out of the country, or not convinced that leaving was the safest option. This group represented the greatest threat to Hanoi's rule, and many of them (mostly men but also some women) were soon shepherded into "re-education camps"--an Orwellian euphemism for brutal jungle prisons.

Now that the Hanoi government has closed down all the re-education camps, former political prisoners are arriving daily in the United States under a special State Department resettlement program. Every one of the former prisoners has been permanently and often debilitatingly scarred, and most are left with ambitions only for their children. Even those prisoners who arrived several years ago show few signs of rising out of poverty and improving their prospects the way that those who came earlier did. More than 20,000 arrived last year alone, and as many as 100,000 more are expected to arrive in the next few years.

The timing could hardly have been worse for the former prisoners. President Clinton has recently edged closer to normalizing relations with Vietnam, which would in effect welcome the country back into the community of nations. What makes this particularly painful for the former prisoners is that successful 1975 evacuees, especially younger professionals and businesspeople, are leading the charge for normalization. Even some of those who are founding members of right-wing terrorist groups (a typically unsubtle name is the Vietnamese Party to Exterminate the Communists and Restore the Nation) have started quietly returning to Vietnam to make under-the-table business deals and capitalize on Vietnam's newly booming economy.

Had the recent immigrants escaped from Vietnam in 1975 or shortly thereafter, they, too, might be jockeying for business opportunities, or at least warming to the possibility of returning to Vietnam as visitors. Instead the newcomers simply feel betrayed by the evacuees who are doing so. "A number of those who came before us are changing their mind about the VC government," says one former prisoner who arrived in Boston in 1990. "Some are people who have no education, no political awareness. We never blame these people. . . . Who we blame and hate are the leaders during the war, politicians, people with high education, Ph.D.s trained in the U.S. or Europe. They are trying to shake hands with the VC government. They think they can change them. We know there's no way."

Unlike its Vietnam War campaigns, the U.S. government's initial efforts to resettle the refugees were relatively swift and efficient. By the end of May, 1975, the U.S. armed forces had transported by ship and plane 120,000 Vietnamese--and 5,500 Cambodians and Laotians--to four domestic military bases, initiating the most intensive refugee-resettlement program in U.S. history. The few refugees who could show that they had at least $4,000 per family member were permitted to leave the military bases immediately to make their own arrangements. The rest had to wait, like orphans, for American families, religious groups, or companies (looking for cheap labor) to sponsor them.

The resettlement planners, having learned from failed attempts with the Cuban exiles of the 1960s, went to great lengths to distribute the needy refugees geographically, even if that meant stranding lone Vietnamese families in rural Alaska. But by the time the next wave of refugees--the boat people--began arriving in the country, in 1978, Vietnamese had inevitably begun clustering. The majority of the first boat people were ethnically Chinese, and many found housing and support in urban Chinatowns. (These refugees, who speak Vietnamese with distinctively flattened tones, had taken to the seas when the Vietnamese government started cracking down in the southern city of Cholon, which had been the hub of a large Chinese merchant class for more than a century.) The group that fled immediately after the Chinese was composed largely of coastal fishermen, who had easy access to the most common route of escape. These boat people found economic opportunity (and, unfortunately, intense racial prejudice) along the Gulf Coast. Cities that acquired large Vietnamese populations include Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Arlington, Virginia. But in the 1980s the place that attracted the most new refugees, and the most secondary migrants, was California--the weather was warm, welfare benefits were generous, public education was excellent, and the economy had just begun to boom.

Today more than half of all U.S. Vietnamese live in California--perhaps 125,000 in the north and 275,000 in the south. Strangely enough, the highest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam is in Orange County, which is often assumed to be one of the whitest counties in America. Although the established Vietnamese, who vote heavily Republican, have not changed Orange County's conservative voting patterns, they have left their mark in almost every other way. The major example is Little Saigon, in the otherwise unremarkable town of Westminster.

For those who have visited the real Saigon, Orange County's version won't conjure up images of the original. Most notably, there are no obvious red-light districts, French-influenced high-rise buildings, or bicycle taxis. Essentially, Little Saigon is a clean, unassuming mile-and-a-half-long strip of suburban shopping malls, packed with about 1,000 stores, offices, and restaurants. The concentration of signs written in Vietnamese (easily distinguishable from other Asian lettering because Vietnamese uses Roman characters) is the only real giveaway. The no-frills architecture is almost completely post-1960s southern California. (One exception is the prominent Today Plaza mall, which actually looks more Chinese than Vietnamese; Frank Jao, who developed it and many other malls, is ethnically Chinese.)

But inside Little Saigon's buildings the effect is pure Vietnam. Even in the better restaurants there are very few Caucasians--many fewer, in fact, than one finds in most overcrowded, intimidating inner-city Chinatowns. The area has twenty-five Vietnamese-language newspapers, and its stores carry every comfort of home--even, in the case of the area's thirty busy travel agencies, home itself. And the country's first Vietnamese elected official, the gregarious and blunt Westminster city councilman Tony Lam, can be seen regularly holding forth with constituents over bowls of traditional noodle soup.

No other city in America has such a large and prosperous Little Saigon, and though Vietnamese are among the country's fastest-growing minority groups, probably none ever will, because Little Saigon is the product of a uniquely congenial confluence of factors. The original Vietnamese settlers ended up in Orange County because the area was home to many U.S. veterans of the war, who made trips to the county's Camp Pendleton after the evacuation of Saigon to sponsor South Vietnamese they had worked and fought beside. At the time, Orange County had very few immigrants, and consequently a wealth of available manual jobs, so the Vietnamese had little trouble finding work. That is not to say that the first few years were easy. The manual jobs were demeaning, especially for formerly wealthy and prominent men, and partly as a result the rates of domestic disputes and divorce increased markedly. But the entry-level jobs allowed the Orange County refugees to wean themselves from public assistance very quickly. In other parts of the country jobs were much harder to come by. Like the refugees themselves, the U.S. economy was suffering from the aftershocks of war.

During the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan as President, the California Vietnamese blossomed. Defense industries, heavily concentrated in southern California, provided a steady supply of high-tech assembly and engineering jobs--an irony that was not lost on the war-weary refugees. At the same time, investors from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan were making record investments in American real estate, owing to political and economic skittishness at home. Westminster was attractive to these Chinese investors for two reasons. First, they felt comfortable dealing with the town's ethnically Chinese refugees, many of whom had run South Vietnam's biggest businesses. Second, while real-estate prices were skyrocketing in most of Orange County, Westminster was an undervalued backwater of mobile homes and strawberry fields.

As Chinese money flowed into the community, ethnic Vietnamese, including many boat people, began pooling their own capital by means of time-honored private investment schemes, and they, too, built storefront businesses in the area. Their specialty was professional services such as insurance, medicine, and architecture. "The conditions were perfect for the first- and second-wave refugees," says Yen Do, a former Saigon war reporter who founded the highly respected daily newspaper Nguoi Viet (The Vietnamese People) in 1978. "Through our entry-level jobs we had an entree into the professions, and we developed quickly. We bought houses in the nicer suburbs. We started thinking like Americans."

That the initial waves of boat people contributed at all to the growth of Little Saigon is impressive, because their escapes to the United States were far more traumatic than those of the first settlers. For all the careful preparation that went into securing boats and inconspicuously accumulating supplies, many of those who fled were turned back by coastal patrols and sent to prison camps. Those who made it to the open seas were preyed upon by Thai pirates. More than 30 percent of all boat people died at sea. Even those who reached their destinations--Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, or Indonesia--were immediately corralled in disease-ridden refugee camps, where most faced a wait of a year or more before receiving asylum in the West.

For many of the first boat people, especially teenagers and young adults, the ordeal of escape was like high-altitude training for athletes. "I risked my life to come here," says the graphic designer Nam Nguyen, who arrived as a twelve-year-old in 1979. "The main source of my energy is my desire to make the most of my escape." Even many who are not well educated have been so successful in business that they fill Little Saigon's flashy nouveau-riche nightclub set and have forced some class reshuffling, according to Oanh Ress, who is involved with organizations that provide humanitarian assistance to Vietnam. "Rural people and ordinary soldiers who never had opportunities in Vietnam now own many businesses and are quite rich."

Timing is everything. The Vietnamese who have arrived since the late 1980s--the former political prisoners and, before them, a large contingent of Amerasians and late-arriving boat people--have fared very poorly. Federal refugee assistance has dropped precipitously, from thirty-six months of benefits in 1975 to only eight months today. Jobs are scarcer. There is a housing crisis. In one sense the existence of a comfortable, self-sufficient community like Little Saigon might seem to give the newest refugees an advantage over their predecessors. But, sadly, it often has the opposite effect. "The former prisoners and the other new arrivals have come into this ghetto and have stayed here," Do says. "They are addicted to the ghetto. They don't need to learn English, and so they don't. Eighty percent of them speak Vietnamese exclusively, and many sit around watching kung fu movies dubbed in Vietnamese." The former prisoners have received much help from Little Saigon's impressive network of not-for-profit assistance programs, but many successful exiles have turned away from newer arrivals. "The former prisoners remind the others of war, and they have been ignored for that reason," says Do's twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Anh, echoing a sentiment familiar to U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War. "And people are too busy and ambitious to help them. People just don't have the time to take these people by the hand and to teach them English and to get them out of their depression."

The problems are magnified in cities with smaller Vietnamese populations. Although the newcomers who live in Little Saigon may receive little direct help, at least they indirectly benefit from the prosperity of the successful Vietnamese; shopkeepers and professionals have a huge stake in keeping Little Saigon safe and clean, and they reinvest much of their profits there. In metropolitan Boston, which is typical of cities with mid-sized Vietnamese populations (and, incidentally, is home to the last President of South Vietnam), there is little reinvestment and almost no contact between successful and unsuccessful refugees. As soon as refugees begin to earn a decent living, they flee the low-rent Vietnamese hub in the Dorchester section of the city to establish churches, temples, stores, and restaurants in the suburbs.

Unlike Little Saigon, the Dorchester enclave feels at once depressed and tense. Not only has it been left exclusively to the most vulnerable refugees; it is also an inner-city melting pot of blacks, Latinos, and Irish-Americans which is often on the verge of boiling over. Unemployment among the Dorchester Vietnamese is high, approximately 20 percent--50 percent if one includes all those who are still receiving federal refugee-assistance checks. There are few Vietnamese-owned businesses, and those that exist almost never hire people outside the proprietors' family. Prior English-language training and military education have not led to jobs, so the newcomers play up more-tangible skills: under "work experience" one ten-year prisoner's resume reads, "Re-education camp in Quang Nam province. Kitchen helper and farmer." Stitching together Red Sox caps or stocking merchandise at Filene's Basement discount department store is considered a good position.

The physical and psychological common denominator of newcomers on both coasts and everywhere in between has been severe headaches and depression. Health-care providers attribute the most acute trauma to the difficulty of adapting to the new country. The first shock is that of unmet expectations. Often family members and friends gave inaccurately rosy reports in letters home. Many in the first groups of former prisoners had heard rumors--perhaps spread maliciously by Communist officials--that they could expect a check from the U.S. government for fifteen or more years of military back pay, along with keys to a house and a car. Then there is the breakdown of the family. In the new social milieu even some of the most obedient, hardworking children rebel against the strict Confucian authority of their fathers, and many wives rebel against their husbands. Other children join hard-core Vietnamese gangs, which specialize in well-planned invasions of the houses of other Vietnamese-Americans, who for the most part do not trust their savings to banks. Gangs are not a major concern in Boston or other East Coast cities, but in Little Saigon they are such a problem that the councilman Tony Lam has called for deporting violent gang members to Vietnam.

Especially for those who were locked away in re-education camps, depression and stagnation are also the result of having endured the greatest postwar horrors. "The killing fields of Cambodia were more humane," says Jade Ngoc Huynh, a camp survivor and the author of the forthcoming memoir South Wind Changing. "It is merciful to kill fast. In the prison camps they worked us to a slow death." Two months after the fall of Saigon, South Vietnamese military officers, students, and professionals were told to report for ten days to one month of political study. Strangely, no one seemed to suspect that this was a ruse, and hardly anyone resisted. The peasant guards delighted in breaking their urban, once-pampered prisoners through psychological and physical torture, but invariably the form of abuse that former prisoners remember and describe most vividly is starvation. At the daily meal a group of fifty prisoners might be forced to share enough rotten rice to sustain one person. To survive, the prisoners began to eat cockroaches, banana peels, and the cigarette butts discarded by guards.

Normalization will only bring more anguish to the survivors. While the newcomers wait for milestones in the more distant future--the clearing of the Southeast Asian refugee camps, the return of nationalized property, or the demise of the current government--the more successful Vietnamese-Americans will return to Vietnam in droves, to visit parents and other relatives, to provide humanitarian assistance, and to cash in on the marketable side effects of exile in the West, a process that has already begun. Even those first-wave professionals who now ostensibly oppose normalization will find returning palatable. This conclusion draws support from the recent actions of the other half of the world's overseas Vietnamese: the refugees who settled in Europe, Australia, and Canada. The non-American overseas Vietnamese have not been bound by the U.S. trade embargo and are several steps ahead of their American counterparts in establishing commercial and humanitarian projects in Vietnam.

Most tangibly, diplomatic normalization means that the United States will establish an embassy in Hanoi (reportedly, land has been set aside for that purpose), and the Vietnamese who are naturalized American citizens can expect to receive in Vietnam full legal protection from the U.S. government. For businesspeople, normalization means that U.S. companies will be clamoring for Vietnamese-American consultants to help them negotiate their way through Vietnam's overwhelming bureaucracy and corruption. Vietnamese-American-owned businesses, too, will find it much easier to take advantage of the cheap and relatively skilled labor of Vietnam; now it is technically illegal for any American citizen to trade with Vietnam (though that has not prevented many Vietnamese-Americans from secretly buying large tracts of land around Saigon, or from opening restaurants and hotels, or from running lucrative money-changing businesses). Normalization will also create a huge market for Vietnamese-Americans with professional and technical skills, a fortunate coincidence for the many Vietnamese computer technicians and engineers who have been laid off from high-tech jobs in the United States as a result of recent defense-budget cuts.

Meanwhile, because U.S. refugee-assistance budgets have dwindled, much of the financial responsibility for the newest refugees has shifted to the local Vietnamese communities. The former prisoners, therefore, have become increasingly dependent on the wealthy, established Vietnamese-Americans--precisely those refugees whose hearts and wallets are most likely to be in Vietnam. The former prisoners will survive--but as a leaderless, distrustful mass whose tightest bonds are depression and anger.