A Life’s Debt Left Unpaid : As Traditions Fade, Vietnamese Americans Face Quandary of How to Care for Aging

Each morning, the 97-year-old man walks carefully down the hallways of the Palm Grove Care Center. Though he can’t get very far without the aid of a four-legged steel walker, he forces himself to take a few feeble steps on his own each day.

When he no longer needs the walker, he says, his two sons will bring him home, whisking him away from this strange place where people speak a language he cannot comprehend.

“I’m only here for a few more days,” the toothless gentleman said one morning, his gaunt body supported by a floral print couch. “My children promised they would pick me up when I could walk on my own again.”

No one has the heart to tell him this homecoming is unlikely. “His children have their own lives and don’t have the time to give him the attention he wants,” said a family friend who has been visiting every week since the old man was brought into the center this year.

The elderly man and many like him represent a painful quandary for Vietnamese Americans, a challenge that did not exist in their homeland: How to care for aging parents.

Some are placing elders in senior housing or care homes, a break with tradition that would have been unthinkable in Vietnam, where the social contract requires that the elderly be provided for until death. Caught unaware, some parents suffer from depression, wondering how their children could defy a 2,000-year-old custom of caring for aged parents.

For the relatively new Vietnamese immigrant community, it is another generational clash, a heavy price they must pay as they assimilate into American society.

“The people who are forced to pay the price are the ones who have sacrificed all that they had so that their children could have stable lives,” said Nghia Tran, executive director of the Santa Ana-based Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a nonprofit agency that runs a senior center for Asian Americans. “What thousands of years solidified, 20 years have chipped away.”

In Vietnam, the elderly are honored and respected--even deified after death. The older they get, the more power they wield within the social structure of family, village and community. Custom and tradition dictate that parents make lifelong sacrifices, or hy sinh, for their children. And once grown, the children pay back the debt by taking care of their fathers and mothers in old age.

It is common practice for three generations to live together under one roof, ensuring that hieu , or filial piety, is passed from one generation to the next.

But as the expatriate community continues to assimilate, Vietnamese American leaders fear that such time-honored traditions are becoming anachronistic.

“As we acculturate, we also need to look for ways to instill in our children the traditions that we were brought up with, or else they will be irretrievable once lost,” said Anh Nhu Nguyen, coordinator of the Seniors Program of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County. Nguyen is exploring ways to create programs that would foster empathy between the young and the old.

The Vietnamese are not the first immigrant group to face this social quandary. Other Asian communities such as the Japanese, Chinese and Korean--whose cultures are also based on the Confucian principle of a chain of sacrifice, obligation and responsibility between parents and children--confronted the issue decades ago, when they settled in the United States.

“The experiences of the Vietnamese are not that dissimilar from other immigrant groups [that] also came from cultures where their values and norms are different from those of America,” said Harry Kitano, a professor of Social Welfare and Sociology at UCLA.

“The nature of work in the U.S. is different from that of Vietnam,” said Thomas Freeman, professor of sociology at San Jose State University. “Here, the pace is quicker; relationships are more impersonal. There’s work deadline to worry about. Children just don’t have time to give their parents the care and reverence they were used to in Vietnam.

“Parents believe that they have become a burden to their children,” Freeman added.

Van, an 87-year-old woman, says she is content at the St. Francis Rest Home in Santa Ana because here she is not her children’s ganh nang , or heavy burden. Like all the parents interviewed for this story, Van insisted on anonymity and refused to identify her children, not wanting to embarrass, anger or alienate them.

These days, Van sits alone in her room for hours, reading her Bible and reciting her rosaries. She does not remember how long she has been at the tree-shaded home, where she is the only Vietnamese person and where, because she cannot speak English, she spends almost all her time alone. She says it has been “several lonely years.”

“My sons brought me here and said I had to stay here,” the cherubic silver-haired woman said. “I was very sad in the beginning and I cried every day, but what could I do? They said that this place is best for me because I am old and they can’t take care of me.”

As old customs fade, Nguyen and community leaders said, the abandonment of aging parents by their adult children is occurring with disturbing frequency.

“More and more, we are hearing stories of how people are pushing their parents out of their house and telling them to take care of themselves,” said Thich Nguyen Tri, a Buddhist monk whose temple in Garden Grove has temporarily housed several Vietnamese seniors. The majority of these seniors would have problems coping, Tri said, because they do not have money and do not speak English.

“The Vietnamese always remember the meaning of on-nghia [gratitude-loyalty],” Tri said. “These people who no longer revere and respect their parents have forgotten this meaning, and it’s very sad.”

Mrs. Ann came to the United States in 1978 as a refugee with her four grown children. For years, the 66-year-old woman shuttled from one child’s home to another as, one after another, they told her she couldn’t live with them, she said.

She now lives in senior citizen housing in Santa Ana, where the $158 monthly rent for her one-bedroom apartment comes out of her $311 Social Security check. Her children don’t visit her often, Mrs. Ann said, so she takes the bus to see them.

“What a pitiful woman I am, yes?” she said. “If I could, I would want to live with my children forever. I don’t want to live alone, away from them. All I do is yearn for my children’s love, following them around as if I was some dog or cat craving the attention of its owner.”

Another woman, 82-year-old Nguyet, wakes up in the middle of the night every night. She tosses and turns in bed, mulling over the unforgettable words she said her daughter told her just last month: “Mother, you need to go and find another home.”

There was no reason given, Nguyet recalled, but she wasn’t surprised at the calmly spoken decree.

“We have changed, my daughter and I,” Nguyet said at the center of the Asian American Senior Citizen Assn. in Westminster, where she goes every day to play Chinese cards and be with Vietnamese men and women her age.

“She keeps reminding me that I’m now living in America and that I must let go of my Vietnamese ways, but I can’t,” said Nguyet, who emigrated to Orange County three years ago to reunite with her daughter, who left Vietnam in 1975. “They wanted their own space. I was in their way too much.”

Both Nguyet and Mrs. Ann were adamant that their children not be contacted for their side of the story, each fearing that it would worsen relations.

“It took a lot of courage--and anger and pain as well--for these people to come forward with their stories,” said Yen Do, editor of the Vietnamese-language daily, Nguoi Viet. “Vietnamese don’t talk about these things, don’t expose family members, because they feel it would shame their family.”

Furthermore, some Vietnamese American community leaders say, most Vietnamese children would not want to admit that they do not provide for their parents.

“For whatever personal reasons, these children cannot or will not take care of their parents,” said Mai Cong, president of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County. “But to admit that publicly would isolate them from the rest of the community.”

Cong and others point out that most Vietnamese American children still follow the tradition of taking care of their parents until death. But the custom is on the wane and the community is searching for ways to help seniors adapt.

The Orange County Vietnamese community is exploring the possibility of public housing for seniors, said Tony Lam, a Vietnamese American city councilman from Westminster.

“Perhaps one day we will have senior housing where our elders could seek comfort from each other,” Lam said. “That’s the least we could do to help them.”