Revealing Little Saigon--From the Outside In

Strolling through the Asian Garden Mall, the indoor Vietnamese shopping center in the heart of Little Saigon, novelist Nina Vida discusses the fine art of bartering Vietnamese style.

“It’s quite a ceremony,” she says, recalling the time she went shopping for jewelry with a Vietnamese female friend. “I was completely out of the thing because it was all in Vietnamese at this point. They went on and on and finally the girl brought out some strawberries from behind the counter and we all had some strawberries and I said to my friend, ‘Are we through?’ And she said, ‘No, we’re just resting.’ ”

Vida’s friend--a former Vietnamese refugee who was among the first wave to arrive in the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and is now a successful businesswoman--provided much of the inspiration for the shrewd protagonist in Vida’s new novel, “Goodbye, Saigon” (Crown Publishers; $20).

Meet the brash and beautiful Anh, a fast-talking self-promoter who supports her mother, brother, sister and her sister’s four kids as a “shoeshiner” at a poker casino. As Vida writes: “They didn’t shine shoes. They shined egos, reassured losers, fawned over winners” waiting “for a few stray chips, a tip, a commission, a fee for services to come their way.”

When the fat-cat American lawyer she has been bringing good luck to at the pai gow poker table stops showing up after three months, Anh goes looking for him. It turns out the cocaine-snorting lawyer is near death after overdosing and his secretary, Jana, a law school dropout, has been handling his cases in his absence. A single mother, Jana needs money as desperately as Anh does.

Together they set up a bogus law practice in Little Saigon. The name of the game is to settle cases out of court. Business booms. But when Anh rebuffs a vicious Vietnamese gang leader’s demand for a cut of the action, the two women and their families find themselves in jeopardy.

Family honor, revenge and Anh’s tragic past in war-ravaged Vietnam all play a role in Vida’s vivid portrait of Little Saigon.

The novel, which was optioned by Richard Zanuck while still in manuscript form last year, is just now hitting bookstores. But it’s already receiving advance praise. Kirkus Reviews calls it “powerhouse fiction” and a review in Glamour magazine describes “Goodbye, Saigon” as a “thrillingly polished tale.”

So convincing are Vida’s immigrant voices and her portrayal of the Vietnamese experience that when Ann Patty, Vida’s editor at Crown Publishers, first read the manuscript she assumed it was written by a Vietnamese immigrant.

“It felt so true to me it was hard for me to believe she wasn’t Vietnamese,” Patty said by phone from New York. “It seemed like I was reading the kind of recent immigrant experience that I hadn’t read before and it didn’t feel filtered.

“Part of what I found remarkable about the novel is that if you look at Amy Tan or some of the Spanish people who are writing books that are becoming popular it’s an experience filtered through a couple of generations having been in this country, and I think it’s due to the language barrier. You don’t get the raw new (immigrant) experience because the people don’t know the language well enough to write it.”

Explained Vida over lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant: “I just put myself in the voice and head of the immigrant.”

There is, of course, more to it than that.

Although Vida’s home in Huntington Beach is only a 15-minute drive to Little Saigon, she not only had never visited the Vietnamese business district in Westminster but she wasn’t even curious. “I just figured it’s like any other ethnic community: It’s different in it’s own strange way, but what does it have to do with me?”

But that changed in 1990 after Vida’s husband Marvin--a former Century City lawyer who had taken a long sabbatical in the ‘80s--decided to go back to work part-time and wound up in a law office in Little Saigon, the heart of Orange County’s more than 71,000-resident Vietnamese community.

The clients, as well as the entire office staff, were Vietnamese, and when the original American lawyer dropped out of the picture, Marvin Vida started his own practice, quickly becoming a trusted friend to his Vietnamese staff.

In turn, the Vietnamese women in his office wanted to get to know his wife. They began inviting her to lunch. Dinner and parties followed and the Vidas reciprocated.

As Vida got to know her new friends, they began telling her stories about their struggles to make a new life in America and they talked freely about the horrors and hardships of their past lives in Vietnam.

Vida says she wasn’t thinking of writing a book, but she started jotting down the dramatic and unusual stories she was hearing, dropping them into a file marked “Little Saigon.”

After 2 1/2 years, she says, “I had quite a big file.”

The turning point came when she and her husband attended a Vietnamese wedding that ended in a riot after rival gang members started a fight.

“Bottles started to fly,” she recalls. “Everybody was climbing over the bandstand to get away and there was blood everywhere. I said to my husband, ‘Let’s get out! I want to go.’ But my husband wouldn’t go because it was his friends’ (wedding) and he just didn’t want to leave them. By the time it got to the point where they were going to start shooting each other, the police were there.”

That was it, she says. When she returned home from the wedding, she went up to her office and wrote five pages of notes on the incident; she knew she had enough background material and insight into the community to write a book.

Still, she had reservations about writing what she had learned, thinking, “these are my friends, I can’t really use these stories.”

“So I asked my closest (Vietnamese) friend, ‘What do you think about my writing a novel about what I know about Little Saigon?’ She said, ‘I think it’s a wonderful idea. Nobody knows us like you do.’ And I said, ‘OK, you know it’s not going to be all rosy, rosy and good stuff. It’s going to be everything I’ve seen.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I know. What do you think, I don’t know? Of course, I know. That’s OK.’ ”

Once she decided to write the novel, Vida says, she passed up no chance to observe Vietnamese life and culture. She asked her friends to take her to a Vietnamese fortuneteller and to the gambling club in the City of Commerce where Vietnamese play the Asian card game called pai gow.

She and her husband also regularly went to a popular nightclub in Little Saigon, a place where patrons must pass through a metal detector and security guards search women’s purses. But once inside, Vida says, “time is erased. You are no longer in the United States in 1994, you are in Saigon in 1960. The women are in sequins and high heels and the men are in finely tailored suits and ties as though it’s New Year’s Eve.”

Her husband also would fill her in on his work in Little Saigon, telling her about having to bail gang members out of jail or clients arrested trying to smuggle cash to Vietnam.

Although Vida borrowed her Vietnamese friend’s speech pattern--the rapid-fire cadence and the use of American slang when least expected--she emphasizes that the story of Anh is not her friend’s story. It’s based on a compilation of all the stories she’s heard and all the Vietnamese people she’s met over the past few years.

Vida describes Anh as “shrewd and conniving. She’s annoying and she talks too much, but I think she’s a good person. She’s full of integrity, loyalty and nobility. And she’s a survivor. I think she’s to be admired.”

Jana, she says, is also “a survivor of a tragedy of her own. There’s no pretense and there’s no glamour, and she is who she is. She’s also pretty astute, pretty clever and she thinks her way out of things. They both think their way out of things.”

Vida, who had her husband review all the legal references in the novel for accuracy, says it’s not uncommon in Little Saigon for Vietnamese without law degrees to open up law offices. They operate by settling cases before having to go to court.

“People want money right away; they don’t want to go to court,” Vida says. “They’re willing to have a few thousand in their hand rather than the $100,000 the case is worth if they had a real lawyer. Also, these offices are taking a very small percentage of the settlement or the recovery because they don’t do anything. They can afford to take a small fee, whereas a guy who’s writing briefs and taking depositions and going to court can’t compete. It’s a big problem.”

It’s too early to see how the Vietnamese community will react to Vida’s novel. But one of the first Vietnamese to read “Goodbye, Saigon” is Kieu Chinh, an actress who appeared in “The Joy Luck Club” and is a backer of Viet World magazine in Little Saigon.

In a letter to Vida, she said she read the book nonstop and that it evoked “sad, angry, touching feelings.” The dark side, she added, “is a complicated part and the hardest one to describe in an immigrant community’s life in the United States. Under your sharp observation, however, the scenario and all the characters in the story appeared as lively as real people, real life in details, well set between the present in the United States and intercut with flashbacks in Vietnam.”

Vida is sure, however, that some Vietnamese may not be pleased with her not always flattering depiction of Little Saigon.

“But how do you deny what’s there?” she says, adding that “I also talk about corrupt policemen in there, I talk about judges who are idiots in there, and insurance attorneys who are idiots. I mean, we’ve got idiots everywhere. It’s not only (the Vietnamese). But they’re very sensitive and like to put a good face on things. I don’t blame them; we all do. We don’t want people to look inside (our lives). Especially when you’re newcomers, you don’t want people to think badly of you. And I don’t think people are going to because I think there’s enough good portrayed” in the novel.

What surprised her most in coming to know her Vietnamese friends, she says, “is their capacity for loyalty, which is unsurpassed. I just have never seen anything like it. The other is their generosity. If you need a dollar and they only have one dollar, they’ll give you the dollar. If they’ve got a house and you don’t have a place to live, they could have 10 families living in there and they’ll say, ‘Move in.’ ”