The Word Is Their Oyster : Immigration: Vietnamese book publishers in Orange County believe they will continue to flourish by meeting the needs of the older generation and the continuing flow of refugees.

Ask Khoi Nguyen, an Anaheim medical technician, if he’s read any good books lately and he mentions one you won’t find on the bestseller lists.

It’s “Thien Duong Mu” (Blind Heaven) by Duong Thu Huong, a now-imprisoned dissident novelist from North Vietnam whose books are reprinted in the United States and France.

“It means the (Communist) government built up a heaven for the people to look forward to, but actually it’s a blind heaven--nobody sees it,” Nguyen said as he browsed recently in a Vietnamese bookstore in the heart of Orange County’s Little Saigon.

“Right now we’re interested in reading books written by Vietnamese authors during the Communist regime,” says Nguyen, 38, who was a university student when he escaped Vietnam on the American airlift out of Saigon in 1975. “I have an interest in seeing the life of my brother and father, the suffering they had to go through during the transition of an independent country to Communism.”

Says Orange County author Pham Quoc Bao, 50, whose first book chronicled his five years in a Communist prison: “People would like to know about the kinds of struggle for survival in the hardest time.”

Memoirs and autobiographies by former Communist political prisoners and books by former North Vietnamese military officials are among the most popular titles emerging from the small but thriving Vietnamese book publishing industry in the United States.

Despite the rapid assimilation of the young generation that grows up with MTV and Bart Simpson, Vietnamese book publishers say they will continue to flourish by meeting the needs of the older generation and the continuing flow of refugees.

At Tu Luc 3, a Vietnamese bookstore in Garden Grove, owner Don Dao said fiction, English-Vietnamese dictionaries, cookbooks, self-help, psychology and exercise books and translations of U.S. bestsellers are also popular with his mostly 30-and-older customers.

Keeping Vietnamese bookstore shelves stocked are an estimated 20 Vietnamese publishing companies in the United States, each turning out anywhere from two to 20 new titles a year. That doesn’t include an untold number of reprints of books that were originally published in Vietnam and self-published books, including memoirs and poetry and essay collections.

To keep production costs low, even the publishing companies usually publish their books in paperback, with typically modest first printings of only 1,000 to 1,500 copies.

The books are sold in an estimated 36 Vietnamese bookstores around the country, in addition to several hundred less-traditional literary outlets such as video and record shops, restaurants and grocery stores.

It’s not surprising that the largest concentration of Vietnamese bookstores--five--is in Orange County, home to more than 70,000 of the estimated 700,000 Vietnamese in the United States.

Yen Do, editor and publisher of Nguoi Viet, the oldest and largest Vietnamese daily newspaper in the United States, says the current crop of Vietnamese nonfiction is especially appealing to those who arrived here just after 1975.

“The books explain a little bit why South Vietnam fell and what’s happened to the victorious Communists--how they were corrupted by their victory,” said Do, whose Orange County-based company has published 25 books.

For the recently arrived refugees, the books take on a great importance.

“It’s like opening up a new horizon for them,” said Viet Dung, a book publisher who also manages Number One Printing in Garden Grove. “The first thing they do is find some books to read and get some information and open their minds again.”

Indeed, being able to read and buy books represents the return of a freedom that was lost after the Communist victory in 1975. In the months that followed the fall of Saigon, Do said, the Communists “organized the militant youth movement to go into every home and bring books to the street and burn them.”

“They tried to destroy the collective memory of the whole people. But fortunately a lot of people tried to hide their books because they knew that they could later sell them” on the black market.

With glasnost, Do said, “there now is an effort to reprint those books in Vietnam and overseas too.”

Over the past two years, said Do, the trend has been the publication of books written by former North Vietnam’s military leaders.

“Basically, those books were not focused on propaganda any more,” said Do, chuckling. “This is the book of the glasnost time: they criticize each other. “

Do said many of the Vietnamese publishing companies in the United States began by reprinting books published in Vietnam before 1975 and they continue today.

“They have made a positive contribution because it helped the Vietnamese here have material for the study of their language,” he said. But the negative side to it, he said, is that because Vietnamese copyright laws do not apply in this country, authors in Vietnam do not receive any royalties.

Do said that although the Vietnamese in this country “enjoy the freedom of publishing and keeping books, the irony is once they are here they must spend most of their time for their economic survival.”

Vietnamese are not only under pressure to learn English in order to work--English grammar and vocabulary books are top sellers in the Vietnamese community--but books are also vying with TV and other leisure-time pursuits, particularly among young Vietnamese.

The young generation is one reason Vietnamese book publishing in this country appears to have stabilized.

“It’s not growing at all because the younger generation is reading English,” said Dung. “And if we say it another way, it’s getting smaller and smaller. But there’s a need for it, and we’re filling it.”

Do, however, remains more bullish about the future of Vietnamese book publishing in this country.

Because of the recent wave of new immigrants who do not speak English and who need books to help them adjust to their new lives in America, Do said, there has been an increase in the publication of practical books on subjects such as U.S. laws, taxes, business practices, investments, electronics and health care.

Do also predicted that Vietnamese publishers in this country will one day be able to sell their books in Vietnam--an untapped market of 69 million people.

At the same time, Do said, “people at home (in Vietnam) want to reach the overseas market”--some 2 million Vietnamese live outside Vietnam--”so then we’ll have a cross-cultural (exchange) between the Vietnamese overseas and the Vietnamese at home.”

But there’s another source of potential readership for Vietnamese book publishers in this country: Many Vietnamese parents such as Khoi and Hang Bui Nguyen are seeing to it that their American-born children learn to read and write Vietnamese.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening the Nguyens sit down with their 7-year-old son, Brian, for reading and writing lessons.

The Anaheim couple plan to do the same with their two younger children.

“There are several reasons,” said Nguyen. “It will give them the advantage of (knowing) an additional language when they grow up. And, secondly, they will learn their mother language so they can enjoy literature from their motherland.”