After the Fall: Times Happy and Hard : After 15 years, the Vietnamese here still have a way to go before assimilation is achieved.

Fifteen years ago today, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army. The helicopter evacuation scenes are etched in our memories as defining images of the end of the Vietnam War. More than a million Vietnamese have since fled their native land for this country and others, and America has struggled to come to terms with its involvement.

If America’s veterans have had a hard time, so have some of the war’s other survivors, those who sought refuge here from Vietnam. But there is cause for celebration, too. Many Vietnamese have assimilated, motivated by the dreams and values of other generations of new Americans. Moreover, many Americans have looked beyond the pain of the war to welcome these new immigrants.

In the Vietnamese-American community, it has been said that even the lampposts wanted to come to the United States, a sign of the eternal promise of the light of democracy. Yet today, many refugees live in Southern California as a new underclass-people, haunted by war, uprooted from their culture and struggling to get by. It’s a classic case of the gulf between the hope of American life and its realities for those who lack money, skills and education.

Located in Westminster, Orange County’s Little Saigon, the heart of this nation’s largest concentration of Vietnamese, is a bustling place, a sign that for some the transition has been more successful. In fact, those who came first were well-connected and well-educated, and they have fared best, but most of the county’s Vietnamese followed that first wave, and they have struggled in a climate far less benign. It is they who most need the help of America’s best sentiments now. They need understanding, and something quite specific: more programs in English language training to cope. Without such assistance, those with less education and less luck appear doomed to second-class status here.

There is bitter irony in the fact that 15 years later, many Vietnamese live with poverty and racism in a country that fought beside them in their own civil war. There’s a further contradiction when a nation that traditionally opens its arms to immigrants cannot help them assimilate.