Viet Kieu: a Bridge Between 2 Worlds

The Communists here once viewed them as the enemy--a disgruntled, dispossessed throng of countrymen who had sought refuge in 70 countries, dreaming of the day the Hanoi government would fall and the Vietnam of their memories would be reborn.

They had left--more often than not, fled--by boat, by plane and on foot during three of Vietnam’s epochal moments: when the French were defeated in 1954, when the Americans were chased out in 1975, when ethnic Chinese here were purged in 1978. By the mid-1980s, the number of Vietnamese living abroad, or Viet kieu as they are called, had surpassed 2 million, two-thirds the size of Hanoi itself.

But time has opened some paths through the minefield of reconciliation. Today, increasing numbers of young Viet kieu are accepting the invitation of a government that wants to tap into their economic strength and brainpower. They are returning to their ancestral home to work and live.

The new Vietnam they find emerging from the dark, postwar years--when dancing and speaking to foreigners were banned, and re-education camps dotted the land--is very different from the country their parents, and many of them, left behind.

What distinguishes this largely California-based group from others who have trickled back over the decade is that this is the first generation of thoroughly Americanized Vietnamese to return. Products of two worlds, many speak English as a first language. They are, initially, strangers in their parents’ land--and, in the end, a bridge in helping two countries overcome the animosities of a devastating war.

“To be honest, I felt a lot of apprehension coming back,” said David Thai, 25, who used to live in Orange County but now runs one of Hanoi’s most popular coffeehouses. “I expected to see a lot of guns and cops. I didn’t know how people would react to me. I mean, I grew up with so many conceptions of Vietnam, of communism, of the war. But they were my parents’ conceptions, because we left when I was 2.”

Andrew Hien, 35, a former San Jose resident who now is a marketing consultant in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, observed: “Being here is like being on a frontier. There is so much opportunity, it’s electric. And it’s exciting because we’re the first generation to come back to contribute to the rebuilding of Vietnam, not just profit from it.”

Ngoc Nguyen, 27, an architect and onetime Houston resident who is helping design a new city being built south of Ho Chi Minh City, noted: “I truly feel like a pioneer. A lot of things we’re doing in urban design have never been done before. If I’d have stayed in the States, it would have taken me five or 10 years to get where I am today.”

Many parents of the Viet kieu are aghast at their return. They risked their lives to escape communism; now their children are seemingly embracing it. In letters home and visits back to the United States, their sons and daughters try to explain that the “market-Leninism” the Hanoi government practices is mellower and more flexible than the system from which their parents fled. But the message does not always bridge the generation gap.

Generational Differences

“I tell my family how taken I am with Vietnam and its culture,” said one returnee, “and someone always says, ‘Ah, so you’ve fallen in love with communism.’ ” Another says he sent his younger brother in Orange County a T-shirt imprinted with the Vietnamese flag that a generation ago flew over the North but not the South. The boy wore it to dinner and was sent away from the table with his father’s warning: “Don’t ever show that flag in this house again.”

Clearly, any hope that the older, conservative Viet kieu generation harbors of reclaiming the Vietnam of its youth is only a dream. The government in Hanoi is stable, and the population supports the reforms that have helped counter disastrous policies of the 1970s, when farms were turned into collectives, hundreds of thousands of people were dispatched to re-education camps, and billions of dong were wasted trying to emulate the Soviet system of heavy industrial development.

“Two years ago, I went back to the village [in what had been North Vietnam] where my mother and father were born,” said businessman Vic Duong, 40, whose parents live in San Francisco. “Some of the family is still there. They were curious to see what their cousin from America looked like, but our worlds were so different. It made me realize how far we’d traveled from that little village.

“I’ll admit,” he added, that “when I first decided to come back to get into business, my parents said: ‘Why? Why would you want to do that? You’ve got everything you could possibly want here in America.’ But, you know, my father came back to Vietnam for a visit . . . and when I was taking him to the airport, he said I’d made the right decision.”

Many Americans can’t distinguish a Viet kieu from any other Vietnamese. But to native Vietnamese, that task is a snap. Viet kieu men are usually taller and heavier. Occasionally, they wear shorts--something only laborers wear here--and sometimes they forget to take off their shoes when entering a friend’s home.

They may not speak the language perfectly, having spoken English at home, even though Vietnamese was the language of their parents. They go out to dinner with friends and get funny looks when they suggest everyone divide up the bill; here the concept of Dutch treat does not exist--someone is always designated as host.

“I wouldn’t call it culture shock,” said one Los Angeles Viet kieu, “but just like any foreigner coming to a Third World country, there’s a lot that is strange and unfamiliar at first. It doesn’t take long, though. A couple of weeks and I felt very much at home.”

Once they are settled, their lifestyle is usually unremarkable. They eat in the same restaurants where other expatriates and middle-class Vietnamese do. They ride motor scooters. They live in modest apartments.

They date--in fact, Viet kieu men are considered great catches because they have foreign passports, education and probably some financial cushion--and they generally don’t complain about the lack of amenities and entertainment in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Most work long hours and carry cellular phones.

Thai, the Hanoi coffeehouse owner, is fairly typical of the new breed of Viet kieu returning here. At 6 feet, he towers over most Vietnamese. He is a graduate of Savannah High School in Anaheim and the University of Washington in Seattle. He was a Los Angeles Lakers fan and had $700 in his pocket when he arrived in Hanoi last year.

Growing Up as an American

His mother came to visit and cried: Her son had lost 15 pounds and was living in an apartment furnished with only a chair and a mattress.

“I grew up as an American kid,” Thai said. “My friends were predominantly white. I preferred speaking English to Vietnamese. I hated it when my father brought us to the Buddhist temple; I wanted to go bowling. You could say I completely denied my heritage. I’d never dated an Asian girl. I went to college and saw other Asians and I’d say to myself, ‘I’m better assimilated than they are.’ I didn’t even have an accent.”

Thai eventually began studying Asian affairs and making Asian friends in college. An interest in Vietnam took root. In 1995, he came back for the first time with a group of Vietnamese American students to study at the University of Hanoi for a semester.

On the bus from the Hanoi airport, the students threw high-fives and someone shouted, “Wow, we’re in ‘Nam, man!” Thai said it took about five minutes to fall in love with the country of his birth.

At the Au Lac Cafe, he has brought Western concepts to an Eastern setting. He talks about teamwork and focus and long-term goals. He runs a two-week “academy” for new employees and has set up a school to teach the local kids math and English.

All his workers share in profits, even the raggedy street urchins who used to hang around and are now uniformed mini-businessmen, getting a cut of profits in return for shining customers’ shoes and doing odd jobs. Thai donates a percentage of proceeds each month from a particular beverage to charity.

“I want to make Vietnam a better place,” said Thai, who has expanded his menu with the addition of two new items--hamburgers and hot dogs.

According to the Vietnamese government, the largest Viet kieu communities are in the United States (1.2 million), France (300,000), Australia (200,000), Canada (200,000), the former Soviet Union (80,000) and Eastern Europe (12,000). The United States is the leading source of returning Viet kieu.

The government does not keep track of how many have resettled here, but last year, 270,000 Viet kieu entered Vietnam to visit, conduct business on temporary stays or live, compared with 80,000 in 1992. Hardly more than a decade ago, only a relative handful were coming back each year.

The first expatriates to return as visitors, beginning in the late 1980s, encountered many problems and inconveniences, as Hanoi fretted about having anti-revolutionaries in its midst. Visas were difficult to get. Once here, Viet kieu were kept under police surveillance. They were required to stay at hotels and could make only daytime visits to their families. The economy was under state control, so there was no business for them to get into, even if they had wanted to. Freedom of movement within the country was limited.

But a few years ago, Hanoi came to accept that Viet kieu could be a potent force for Vietnam’s development. This was a community that was already sending $1 billion a year back to its families here. Viet kieu held important positions in the United States, Australia and Europe in research, business administration and banking. More Vietnamese medical doctors were working abroad than in Vietnam.

Vietnam’s Communist Party estimated that the “Viet kieu economy” amounted to $20 billion a year. If the overseas Vietnamese invested just 10% of their income in Vietnam, it would amount to $2 billion annually, party officials said. The potential was clear. Hanoi dropped an ill-conceived 5% tax on repatriated money and gradually liberalized laws to make it easier for Viet kieu to return and stay for indefinite periods. So far, the government says, Viet kieu firms or individuals have invested in 50 official projects.

“I know we have made some mistakes in the past, and we are correcting them,” said Pham Kuac Lam, vice president of the government’s National Committee for Overseas Vietnamese. “Our policy is now open. It is up to them to decide. If they think it is better to stay where they are, and just come back once or twice a year to visit, that is all right. If they want to come back and stay and participate in the reconstruction of Vietnam, then we welcome them as an integral part of the Vietnamese population.

“The overseas Vietnamese,” Lam added, “have an important role to play in our development. Theirs is a community that is strong in gray matter and deep in the pockets.”

Foreign Passports Provide Options

In many ways, Viet kieu are at an advantage and a disadvantage when they return. The advantage is that they have foreign passports and can always leave. They also earn much higher salaries than other Vietnamese if they work for an international company.

The disadvantage is that they are under pressure to prove they are worthy of the higher compensation and responsibility. They also lack the political safety net that other Vietnamese have; they don’t, say, have an uncle at a particular ministry who can take care of problems that might arise.

Although the Communist Party’s suspicion of Viet kieu--and of foreigners as a whole--has not entirely faded, and some returnees say the police still pay more attention to them than they do to other Vietnamese, most do not encounter problems with authorities. The transition is usually fairly smooth as long as they keep a few guidelines in mind:

* Don’t flaunt your American-ness or the fact that you have become better educated and more prosperous than you would have had you stayed in Vietnam.

* Keep a low profile and stay clear of politics.

* Be prepared to contribute to, and not just take from, an economy that is struggling to catch up with the rest of Southeast Asia.

* Slow down, be patient and do not get rattled if the simplest government encounter becomes a tortuous, time-consuming affair.

“For the most part, I haven’t found that I am resented because we left and did not suffer as much as the Vietnamese who stayed,” said one Viet kieu. “But sometimes you can kind of see people, particularly the poorer ones, thinking, ‘If I had done what you did 20 years ago, what would my life be like today?’ ”

Lan Ai Trinh, 27, came back to what was once Saigon--”a place I never thought I’d see again”--15 months ago to research and write a book on her family’s saga.

Holed up in a $250-a-month studio apartment over a food shop, she finds bittersweet memories: the 1978 purge, the transformation of her family from prosperous to impoverished, the imprisonment and the escape--her father by boat to Thailand, her mother on foot to China--and starting over again, in Houston, New York, Australia, Hong Kong and now, for her, Vietnam.

“I’m determined not to be plagued by the past,” said Lan, who put on hold a successful career as a Hong Kong television producer to come back. “I keep saying I want Vietnam to be my last stop, but I’m not sure exactly what will happen. All I can say for sure is that for now, this is home.

“More than anything,” Lan noted, “I think I’m seen by other Vietnamese as a foreigner coming back with U.S. dollars. I don’t mean that to sound cynical, because I have cultivated some very good and real associations with local Vietnamese. I eat at food stalls on the street. Yesterday I tried on an ao dai [traditional flowing pants suit] for the first time and it felt pretty natural.

“My initial feeling when I arrived at the airport was, I’ve gone too far to come back now,” Lan went on. “But, although it took me a while to realize it, the me who left is not the same me who is returning. The same goes for Vietnam. It’s changed too.”