Going Back Home to Help : Laotian, Vietnamese and Cambodian Refugees Are Returning to Their War-Ravaged Countries With New-Found Western Business Skills

Puongpun Sananikone is fond of quoting a Chinese aphorism: “Out of misfortune good things come.” Now, the international management consultant is striving to make it apply to the war-scarred country that he reluctantly fled 17 years ago.

Sananikone, a member of one of Laos’ most prominent industrial families, came to the United States in 1975 to avoid detention in a hard-labor “re-education camp” by the new Communist regime. Fluent in six languages, he has since built a company in Honolulu that promotes economic development in Asia and elsewhere.

But Sananikone’s dream is to apply his management skills to underdeveloped Laos. The 47-year-old immigrant is one of a growing number of Laotians, Vietnamese and Cambodians who, having established themselves in the United States in the wake of the Southeast Asian war, are looking homeward to apply their new-found skills to the countries they left behind.

“Although I walked down the banks of the Mekong (River) with tears in my eyes and tremendous personal pain, I have worked and acquired experience in all these countries,” Sananikone said during a trip to Washington earlier this year.

“A number of us who have enriched ourselves professionally represent a new reservoir of expertise that was never there in Indochina. I think morally we have an obligation to try to find a way to tap into this vast pool of resources--technological as well as familial--to help Indochina out of stagnation and poverty. This is an historic opportunity.”

It is, however, an opportunity still fraught with obstacles for any of the million or so refugees who aspire to either return to their native lands or to pursue business ventures there.

Even the most gung-ho among them acknowledge that political liberalization and stabilization, development of free markets and the concept of contracts and the establishment of mutual trust remain prerequisites for large-scale investment. Bloated bureaucracies, endemic corruption and a paucity of basic business practices are major hurdles as well.

In the meantime, the expatriate communities--particularly the Vietnamese--remain sharply divided about whether refugees should engage in activities that could help prop up Southeast Asian governments long regarded as the enemy. Some hard-core opponents contend these regimes should simply be allowed to fall of their own weight.

“All of them lost their country, so understandably, they are a little bitter about this,” says Douglas Pike, director of the Indochina program at UC Berkeley.

“The question is, what should you do from here on out? Do you try to stonewall things and make them worse in the hopes that it will blow up like it did in Eastern Europe? Or do you help improve the economy there in the hope that you start changes that way? You can make a case for either.”

Among those who choose the latter approach, the hopes of Sananikone and his Vietnamese and Cambodian counterparts have been buoyed by recent events in Southeast Asia. Increasingly, they believe that they may be able to go home again to turn battlefields into marketplaces.

In Cambodia, the four hostile factions entered into a United Nations-sponsored peace agreement to end the civil war last year. A U.N.-run election is scheduled in April or May.

Vietnam has taken steps to meet American conditions for ending a crippling U.S. trade embargo that has been in effect since the last troops left Saigon in 1975. This includes supporting the Cambodian peace process and accounting for American soldiers missing in the war. The Bush Administration has responded by expanding humanitarian aid.

The Laotian government, meanwhile, has adopted a policy of jintanakaan , billed as its equivalent of Soviet perestroika, or restructuring. The United States recently upgraded its diplomatic relations with Laos to the ambassadorial level and eased trade restrictions.

Consequently, the overseas Indochinese, many of whom have traveled to their native lands in recent years, have seen new economic opportunities begin to emerge. Some have already engaged in preliminary discussions with senior Communist leaders as well.

“The refugee community is tremendously anxious to do something,” says Gary Larsen, chairman of International City Bank in Long Beach and head of the alumni association of the East-West Center, a Honolulu-based program to encourage better relations between the United States and Asian and Pacific nations.

“These people have got the skills, they’ve made a little money, they understand Western participatory democracy to an extent, and they’ve been away from their countries for 15 or 16 years. The mood has changed and the time seems right.”

Since 1975, 1 million refugees have come to the United States from Southeast Asia. In 1990, there were 614,547 Vietnamese, 147,411 Cambodians and 149,014 Laotians here, the Census Bureau found. Another 90,082 Hmong, a primarily Laotian hill tribe, had also immigrated.

California is home to nearly 45% of those Indochinese who resettled across the Pacific, including 280,223 Vietnamese, 68,190 Cambodians and 58,058 Laotians, the Census reported.

There is little question that many of these expatriates represent a potential source of capital as well as a pool of workers with skills that are desperately needed in Indochina.

“These countries lack capital, they lack infrastructure, they lack telecommunications, but the biggest lack is human resources--the engineers, architects, accountants, managers, investors and entrepreneurs who deal with the characteristics of a market economy,” Sananikone says.

Le Ly Hayslip, 42, was one of the first to get involved with Vietnam. After marrying an American and leaving her battle-ravaged village near Da Nang in 1970, she returned for a visit in 1986. Stunned by the desperate straits she found, the Escondido resident established a foundation that has since built two medical clinics and shipped 22 tons of donated medicine and medical supplies. Such actions are permitted under the U.S. embargo.

In Marxist Vietnam, the concept of free markets has begun to take hold under a five-year-old policy known as doi moi , or renovation. It has encouraged the creation of private businesses, established one of Asia’s most liberal foreign investment codes, ended price controls on major commodities and allowed American dollars and gold to be traded.

Some Vietnamese emigres who have gained affluence in the United States already have been exploring investment possibilities. Traveling back to their native land in recent years, ostensibly to visit relatives, they have quietly begun to make contacts and identify opportunities.

Frank Jao was 28 when he left Vietnam with his wife in April, 1975--one week before the Communist takeover. A marketing consultant, he feared for his safety because he had worked for American firms and had been a translator for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Jao resettled in Orange County, where he has landed on his feet in a big way. As a commercial real estate developer, he joined with other Vietnamese emigres to build “Little Saigon” in Westminster. Jao estimates that he was responsible for 60% to 70% of the more than 1,500 businesses established there in the past 12 years. His company, Bridgecreek Group Inc., manages nearly $200 million in holdings.

Jao, who has two American-born daughters, has been back to Vietnam twice in the past three years.

“We concluded that we have to wait for things to develop and improve before we can go in there,” Jao says. “The Vietnamese government has to provide an environment that would enhance a free-market economy. Without that, it would be meaningless. And, on top of that, we have to wait for the embargo to be lifted.”

Cambodian politics, meanwhile, are less stable. Amid an uneasy peace, a patchwork of warlord governments rule their own fiefdoms. Recently, the notorious Khmer Rouge guerrillas balked at disarming under the pact, threatening to unravel the process.

The Khmer Rouge has been blamed for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians during its brutal reign in the late 1970s. It remains the most powerful of three guerrilla factions.

Still, the capital of Phnom Penh has experienced an economic boom, fueled in part by the prospective arrival of 22,000 U.N. peacekeeping soldiers and officials and a resurgent tourist industry.

In the United States, some Cambodians aspire to return to play a role in the upcoming elections. Some have gone back to set up travel agencies, real estate offices and restaurants. And others are providing humanitarian aid or working with the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia.

Than Pok heads one of the groups that is returning to Cambodia this year. A former Ministry of Education chief of staff in pre-communist Cambodia, Pok is executive director of the United Cambodian Community, which provides social services in Southern California to refugees from throughout the world.

The Santa Ana resident won a $400,000 grant to teach the disabled in Cambodia how to repair motorcycles and raise poultry. His organization has raised another $60,000 from the Cambodian community and from others to provide loans for the disabled to start their own businesses. Pok, 50, and four staff members depart for Cambodia in September.

“I have a chance to contribute more, to feel I am making a difference over there,” says Pok, who lost three brothers during the Khmer Rouge genocide. “We’re helping them when they’re most in need. It’s exciting.”

Laos, in some respects, represents the least complicated situation. The United States never cut off diplomatic relations, so the poor, landlocked nation was not subjected to the full-scale trade embargo that Cambodia endured and Vietnam still faces under the Trading With the Enemy Act. Thus, Laotian emigres have been able to travel freely.

Laos’ economic situation has improved since reforms were instituted several years ago, but it still suffers from a dearth of management and technical expertise. Hydropower and timber are its major natural resources.

Khamchong Luangpraseut, who supervises Indochinese programs for the Santa Ana school district and is active in the effort to help rebuild Laos, has encouraged Laotians around the country to begin saving money on a monthly basis to invest in projects in Laos by 1995. He counts himself among those Laotians who will return if the Vientiane government will embark on a program of national reconciliation and economic development.

“The first ones who want to go back are the senior citizens, because their parents have been buried there, and we have this expression that you want your face to be covered with Laotian soil before you go away from the world,” says Luangpraseut, a former Royal Lao government civil servant whose family was assassinated in Laos in 1961.

“The second category would be young people who graduated from universities here but who didn’t find the right challenge here. I’m counting on these people a lot.”

Sananikone, whose family was fiercely anti-communist and counts within its ranks a former Laotian prime minister, has helped to increase farm productivity in Fiji, to train senior Chinese officials in national economic accounting and to assist Thailand in improving rural irrigation.

He has been back to Laos six times since 1990, including one trip with potential overseas investors. His firm, PacMar Inc., working with a Swedish firm, in the past year completed a forestry conservation and development master plan for Laos on behalf of the Asian Development Bank.

It is also advising Chinese and Laotian companies engaged in a joint venture to determine the feasibility of building mini-hydroelectric plants to provide power and irrigation to isolated villages in northern Laos. The effort is part of a U.S.-funded program to encourage opium growers to produce alternative cash crops.

Last year Sananikone organized and chaired a round-table conference in Bangkok on “Indochina in the 1990s.” Participants in the conference, which was sponsored by the East-West Center, included high-level Vietnamese and Laotian officials, as well as key Indochinese business and community leaders from throughout the United States.

“We can be a bridge between Indochina and that vast pool of resources,” Sananikone says. “We have been through decades of war, and there are wounded hearts and wounded minds on all sides. There are some serious efforts in building this bridge. We are still far from completing it.”

Alan C. Miller is a staff writer in Washington and Stu Glauberman is a Honolulu-based writer who frequently focuses on Southeast Asian issues.