Vietnam Refugee Finds New Future in Homeland : Asia: After living for years in Southland, he returns to set up shop as a business consultant and organize country’s first trade fair for U.S. firms.
After fleeing his homeland in a fishing boat, Giang Tran prospered as a real estate developer, studied to become a lawyer and wrote two books.
The 30-year-old Vietnamese-American drove a BMW, lived in a posh condo in Santa Ana and flew from Los Angeles to San Francisco just for lunch.
“I wasn’t a millionaire, but I lived like a millionaire. Whatever I had, I spent,” he said. Eventually, Tran lost interest in that lifestyle because, “I found no value in what I was doing.”
Last year, drawn by family ties and childhood memories, he returned to Vietnam, setting up shop as a business consultant. Now he’s busy organizing the country’s first trade fair for U.S. companies since the end of the Vietnam War.
As managing director of Vietnam Investment Information and Consulting, Tran also advises about 40 foreign firms about ventures in Vietnam.
“I’m not thinking about what is the latest suit from Georgio Armani,” he said. “But I am thinking about how much it would cost to build, say, a 50-megawatt power plant.”
Tran, a native of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, said he hopes to encourage some of the more than 2 million Vietnamese living overseas--the Viet-kieu--to return to help rebuild their impoverished homeland.
Thousands of Viet-kieu are combing the country, seeking to broker deals between foreign investors and local companies, although only a handful are working as consultants for foreign firms, said Vo Xuan Tuong, an official at the government’s Central Committee for Overseas Vietnamese. Overseas Vietnamese themselves have invested $64 million in about 40 ventures, according to Tuong.
The Hanoi government, recognizing that the Viet-kieu can play an important role in bringing badly needed capital and expertise, last year cut taxes they pay on profits transferred abroad to 5%, versus a 10% rate for other foreigners. Viet-kieu also are free of restrictions faced by others in buying shares of non-government Vietnamese banks.
Tran said the efforts of younger overseas Vietnamese are especially needed to heal the divisions between those who fled the country during and after the war and those who stayed behind. Divisions are something he knows well.
Tran’s father, Tran Ngoc Chau, served as speaker of the national assembly of former South Vietnam before he was jailed in 1970 as a suspected communist, a charge Tran said was fabricated.
His uncle, Tran Ngoc Hien, was an intelligence officer for the North Vietnamese army during the war. Tran left a sister behind when he fled with his parents and four other brothers and sisters in 1979.
Tran and his family spent nine months in refugee camps in Malaysia and Indonesia before settling in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. He attended high school there, going on to attend Cal State Long Beach.
While in college, Tran started a real estate business in the Vietnamese-American community of Westminster. He gave the flourishing firm his full attention, even after beginning law school in 1986 at Western State University.
He also found time to write a Vietnamese-language account of his experiences.
“The book was a way to express my frustration with a very strange country that I found myself in, with strange people, but also with myself as a stranger, as a man looking for his identity,” he said. He wrote a second book, about his yearnings for a new challenge, in 1987.
Tran interrupted law school in 1989 and returned to Vietnam to seek his roots. He looked up his sister, a doctor living in Ho Chi Minh City, but kept the trip secret--even from his family--to avoid causing an uproar in Southern California’s fiercely anti-communist Vietnamese-American community.
Several trips later, he had abandoned his property business, formed Vietnam Investment Information and Consulting and pinned his hopes on a future closely tied to Vietnam. Last year, Tran and his Vietnamese wife moved to Hanoi, the country’s 1,000-year-old capital.
The transition from life in California wasn’t a problem, he said. “To me it’s a normal thing. The big thing is if I can do what I want with integrity.”
For example, Tran often finds himself in situations where clients would be better served if he paid bribes to local officials. But he refuses to do so.
“If I bribe, then I’m corrupted. I want to be an incorruptible man, in whatever I do,” he said.
Tran, who intends eventually to resume his legal studies, doesn’t know how long he’ll live in Hanoi. The Vietnamese have treated him well so far, even as a southerner in the once hostile North.
But he said he labors against two extreme opinions many local people have about Viet-kieu businessmen.
Many assume that he’s either a billionaire or “an ex-convict, a cheating type.”
“Facts will speak louder than words,” Tran said. “After a few more years in Vietnam, and after what I’ve already done, I’ll have their trust and confidence.”
