Vietnamese Find a Taste of Home in New Life

Half a dozen teen-agers crowd around David Duong in his cramped video shop. A gangly youth wearing jeans and a Madonna T-shirt plucks from a shelf the latest kung fu epic from Hong Kong, places it on the glass counter and reaches for his wallet.

“They like kung fu movies,” Duong says as he rings up the rental. “Also dramas and comedies, just like other normal American teen-agers.”

In Eden Center, a collection of Vietnamese stores and restaurants in one of the largest commercial centers of Washington’s Virginia suburbs, many of the 45,000 refugees who have settled in the capital area find a taste of home amid their adopted culture.

Not all have found in America the heavenly garden envisioned by the developer who named Eden Center. But many, such as the affluent patrons of Duong’s Universal Book Store, say they like their adopted country.

“The problem of adjustment for us has long been resolved,” says attorney Huy Nhat Bui, a former provincial police chief. “Most of us have been settled smoothly and adapted, both culturally and economically.”

But the story of the Vietnamese in the New World has not been as idyllic for everyone, especially those who came to the United States during the years after the earlier migrations.

Fifteen years after the fall of Saigon, more than half a million Vietnamese refugees have found their way into this country, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

And they are still coming--at an average of 39,600 annually since 1980. The high-water mark, 88,543, was in 1978.

Vietnamese have formed large communities in Texas, New York City, Boston and Philadelphia. One of the largest groups, more than 80,000, is concentrated in Orange County.

The U.S. capital tended to attract many Vietnamese among the first waves fleeing their homeland about 1975, when communist forces were completing the takeover of South Vietnam. Government officials and prominent doctors, lawyers and businessmen feared reprisals from the incoming communist regime because of their previous contacts with Americans. Many of those Americans lived in the Washington area and could be counted on to provide guidance and support in adapting to the new culture.

Although they were authorized to leave, many Vietnamese were unable to find space on the diminishing number of flights leaving Saigon during those frantic last days. They tell harrowing stories of escapes.

After a clandestine departure with other refugees on a fishing boat, Saigon physician Hien Tran and his family nearly lost their lives in a typhoon. A Malaysian naval vessel found them adrift in the ocean without fresh water and almost out of food. But rather than rescuing them, the refugee-saturated Malaysians towed them out to sea and advised them to go to Australia--a voyage the equivalent of a death sentence.

By evasion and stealth, the group finally managed to make their way to an overcrowded Malaysian refugee center and, eventually, to the United States.

Like Tran, the early arrivals tended to be well educated, with marketable skills and were able to adjust quickly to American life. Earlier this year, Tran was named head of the Children’s Center of Springwood Psychiatric Institute near affluent Leesburg, Va.

Later arrivals, who tend to be from rural areas and less educated, have had more trouble adjusting, according to community leaders and local government officials.

“I see all kinds of kids with all kinds of problems,” says Khiet Dang, a Vietnamese counselor at a local high school. “The kids who came over in 1975 and 1980 are different from the ones who came from 1985 to 1990.” The more recent arrivals, he says, “try to become Americanized as fast as possible and they pick up the wrong values.”

One result has been crime. Many Vietnamese, traditionally wary of banks and currency, hide their assets, mainly gold and jewelry, in their houses. Earlier this year, the Vietnamese community in northern Virginia was terrorized by youthful gang members who attacked and robbed them in their homes.

Many Vietnamese say they would like to return someday to a non-communist Vietnam.

“I would like to go back to help rebuild the legal system,” says Bui, standing amid evergreens and pink water lilies in the traditional Vietnamese rock garden he has built in the front yard of his Falls Church home. He explains that each part of the garden symbolizes some part of his home village: a lake, a mountain, a Buddhist temple.

Whether he would abandon the roots he has put down in this suburban lawn forever, he says, smiling, “is a difficult question.”