An Emerging Asian Tiger: The Vietnamese Connection

Nearly two decades after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese are the world’s newest major global tribe. Long the pawns of hegemonic pow ers, they have established a world wide economic and cultural net work well-suited to take advantage of a potential economic boom in their native country.

The Vietnamese diaspora grew out of their national tragedy. When the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1975, almost two million Vietnamese fled into exile in more than 50 countries; nearly half settled in North America. The largest community is in Southern California.

As a result, the overseas Vietnamese, or viet kieu , have become a de facto cosmopolitan people, establishing strong business and communications links in such diverse economic centers as San Jose, Greater Los Angeles, Houston, Seattle, Paris, Sydney and Vancouver. “It’s the beginning of a diaspora phenomena,” observes Michigan State University sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut, a leading scholar on the community. “The events of 1975 were like a fission bomb: They splintered Vietnamese all over the globe.”

Today, with the lifting of the U.S. embargo on commerce with Vietnam and that country’s gradual re-integration into the world economy, this “fission” is turning into a “fusion” linking the dispersed Vietnamese communities. The Vietnamese are gradually learning how to exploit their dispersion into an economic and cultural asset.

For a traditionally agricultural people, this transformation has been unsettling and difficult. In the United States, Vietnamese communities have struggled with language problems, high rates of welfare dependency, predatory gang warfare and internecine political conflicts.

In part, these problems stem from the suddenness of their departure from Vietnam. Three-fifths of all 1975 refugees, notes Whittier College sociologist Steven Gold, had less than 24 hours to prepare for exile; four-fifths had less than a week. Subsequent immigrant waves have largely consisted of “boat people.”

Yet, the Vietnamese in the United States have begun to make remarkable progress. Although as many as 88% of all new refugees start out unemployed, within three years, that percentage falls below 30%, according to a University of Michigan Study.

More impressive, virtually destitute communities have created thriving immigrant economies, notably in Westminster’s Little Saigon. Indeed, even amid a still shaky Southern California retail market, the area’s landmark shopping center, the Asian Garden Mall, is not only fully occupied but has a waiting list of 58.

Little Saigon’s economic dynamism in an environment of relative poverty and still high unemployment highlights the presence of one segment of California’s estimated $140 billion “underground economy.” Those familiar with Vietnamese enterprises admit that many operate outside the formal legal economic structure. Sewing shops, even food-processing plants thrive in back yards, anterooms and garages, providing income that supplements welfare and other assistance.

“Vietnamese are always hiding something,” says veteran Vietnamese journalist Thuy Le. “The psychology from back home was that we are always being invaded by someone, so you never reveal what you are doing.”

Yet, the next generation of Vietnamese seems certain to find their place within the economic mainstream. This prediction is more than simply a result of Vietnamese predominating among the ranks of valedictorians in many Southern California communities, particularly in northern Orange County. Among 77 nationalities studied in South Florida and San Diego, Vietnamese youngsters boasted, on average, higher grade-point averages and studied longer than native-born and other ethnic immigrants.

To Rumbaut, co-author of this study, these cultural factors suggest that, over time, Vietnamese welfare dependency and impoverishment will dramatically fall. “No group started out more indigent in modern U.S. history than the Vietnamese,” he says. “But as far as the children are concerned, what is clearly happening is an economic shift toward becoming a well-educated and economically successful population.”

Already, Vietnamese are increasingly represented in the professional and technological life of their communities. The under-40 generation, in particular, composes much of the technical and engineering staff at many high-technology companies in Southern California.

But perhaps the greatest opportunities lie in the expansion of links between overseas Vietnamese and the emerging economy of their homeland. With nearly 70 million people and important natural resources, Vietnam is widely expected to become the next Asian “tiger.” In the last two years, GDP growth has approached 7%, with double-digit increases in trade.

The expanding technical and entrepreneurial prowess of the overseas Vietnamese may accelerate economic development back home. Some, like Fountain Valley attorney Hoa Phu Truong, use their U.S.-honed skills and Vietnamese cultural backgrounds to steer U.S. multinational corporations through the ever-changing course of doing business with a reforming communist regime.

These links to the home country could stimulate Vietnamese-oriented businesses throughout California. Some realtors report a growing flow of capital from Vietnam as entrepreneurs there seek safe havens for their excess cash. Others, such as developer Frank Jao, who is most often associated with Little Saigon’s development, envision more legitimate overseas trade-related activities supplanting strictly immigrant-oriented retail business. “Little Saigon will be like Koreatown in Los Angeles,” Jao predicts, “but well beyond that. It will be like Hong Kong is to China.”

For many older Vietnamese, however, potentially profitable economic links pose dilemmas. Yen Do, editor of Westminster-based Nguoi Viet, the diaspora’s leading Vietnamese language newspaper, foresees “a period of confusion” as the older generation, within Vietnam and overseas, learns to bury old resentments and work for common benefits.

To smooth this process, Do and other leading Vietnamese business and cultural figures have set up an organization called Project Twenty. Its main goal is to prepare the community for next April’s 20-year observance of the fall of Saigon. Do has actively recruited younger Vietnamese because he fears they could lose interest in their native country if not participants in its reconciliation.

Paradoxically, Vietnamese look largely to their traditional enemies, the Chinese, who occupied their country for nearly a millennia, as role models for their tribe’s development. Vietnamese officials have studied the Chinese experience in Singapore and Taiwan, as well as the course of the mainland market, to guide their economic development.

Taiwan and Hong Kong are the dominant overseas investors in Vietnam, helping drive per-capita incomes in the area of former Saigon, the traditional focus of Chinese interest, to nearly twice those in Hanoi and other parts of the country. Even within the local Vietnamese diaspora community, it has been the ethnic Chinese, roughly one-third the total, who have been quickest to re-establish economic ties with the mother country.

Yet, if the Chinese provide the dominant force, Vietnamese suspicions of them may lead officials to seek ever-closer ties with their brethren in North America, Australia and Europe. In particular, U.S. technology, capital and military might are seen as counterweights to the potential re-imposition of Chinese domination over Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

After 20 years, Vietnam’s wayward children could end up with front-row seats in the development of a new and powerful Asian economy. For the United States, and particularly Southern California, the potential blessings of such a tribal connection could be enormous.*