Vietnam Refugees Finally Find Home

On a ragged dock in the Mississippi Delta, 50-year-old Rick Cao darns the nets of the Miss My Phuong, using both hands and a big toe to sort through a bird’s nest of nylon. Soon, he’ll shove off again to mine the Gulf of Mexico for shrimp, and he might go weeks without hearing a word of English on his marine radio. The Vietnamese, he explains, “are taking over the gulf.”

At an office park outside San Jose, 42-year-old Thinh Nguyen folds himself into his Acura after another 15-hour day. He hasn’t had a day off in months, and, well, that’s just fine. In 1975, his family arrived in the United States with $75. The Silicon Valley’s latest megadeal just made him a millionaire.

On a community college campus in Huntington Beach, 25-year-old Duy Tran lugs a backpack stuffed with math and computer science books. Duy lost his youth in a Kuala Lumpur refugee camp where he was penned in with barbed wire for eight years. Today he’s a receptionist by day and a student by night, and when he dreams in English, he wakes up smiling. “All I ever wanted,” he says, “was freedom.”

The Vietnamese have found a home in America. But it hasn’t been easy.

Twenty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, nearly 2 million Vietnamese Americans have clawed their way past poverty, pirates, disease and ill-informed government programs. Their tale speaks volumes about the durability of culture--and about the ambiguity inherent in America’s offer of asylum.

After Saigon fell, federal officials decided to scatter the oncoming wave of Vietnamese refugees across the United States. The goal: to prevent the immigrants from overwhelming one U.S. community, as many believed Cuban exiles had done years earlier in Miami. The government hoped to blunt the impact refugees would have on a region’s resources--its culture, its politics and, especially, its welfare system.

“We don’t want any ghettoism,” one immigration agent told the Senate at the time.

Experts and immigrants, however, say the social experiment was a failure, serving only to delay formation of ethnic enclaves that provide nests, of sorts, for immigrants in America--and a critical first step for assimilation.

Many also argue that scattering refugees produced a host of other unintended consequences--isolation, exploitation and, ironically, extended dependence on welfare.

In the end, the strategy was for naught: A massive secondary migration began almost immediately, sweeping many Vietnamese families out of the American towns that sponsored them and into a handful of coastal and Sunbelt communities--particularly in California--where they found strength in numbers.

In suburban Virginia, thousands of refugees, including many who had worked with the U.S. military during the war, latched on to government and defense work and pieced together a skeletal remnant of their old guard in South Vietnam.

In Houston they have resuscitated a depressed section of midtown. Not far away, in bayous that bear an uncanny resemblance to the deltas of Vietnam, they cast their nets into the Gulf of Mexico.

In San Jose, they helped fuel a high-tech revolution. And in Southern California, they formed Little Saigon--the largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam itself.

Among the thousands of refugees who made that secondary journey was Thanh-Phong Tran. Settled outside Philadelphia in 1975 by a charity sponsor, Tran and his wife and four children felt isolated. Like so many others, they soon found their way to Southern California.

The retired engineer, now 73 and living in Cypress, was one of the refugees who put Little Saigon, quite literally, on the map. After intense lobbying by the immigrants, it is now marked as an exit off the Garden Grove and San Diego freeways.

“Americans can live by themselves, wherever they want. Not Vietnamese,” Tran said. “We are like birds in the sky: We flap together. We would be lost if we did not live together.”

Little Saigon: Spiritual Capital

On Sunday mornings, the Asian Garden Mall on Westminster’s Bolsa Avenue bustles with self-sufficiency. Merchants hawk steaming bowls of the venerable noodle soup called pho, and durian, the enigmatic fruit that is said to taste like heaven but smell like hell. Inside, behind statues of Buddha and the god of longevity, dignified old men stroke stringy, white goatees and sip ca phe sua da, a Vietnamese coffee.

This is Little Saigon, the commercial and spiritual capital of Southern California’s Vietnamese American community, estimated at more than 200,000 strong. It is home to Westminster City Councilman Tony Lam, the nation’s first elected Vietnamese American official, and more than 2,200 Vietnamese-owned businesses--video stores, tailor shops, French-style cafes and bakeries offering ornate, four-tier wedding cakes.

It also is the cultural core of the world’s Vietnamese emigre population. Lynda Trang Dai--a singer known worldwide as something of a Vietnamese Madonna--lives here, along with influential writers and artists. Vietnamese-language radio programs based in Little Saigon broadcast simultaneously in Houston and San Jose.

Not long after the fall of Saigon, early refugees had just four Vietnamese businesses to choose from in Orange County--a pharmacy, a grocery, an insurance company and a restaurant. The mile-long, working-class stretch of Bolsa Avenue looked like suburban blight to some, but to Vietnamese Americans like Frank Jao it looked like gold.

The seventh of 11 children, Jao grew up in a harbor city north of Hanoi. Later, in Saigon, he discovered his entrepreneurial side. By 14 he had four people working for him, distributing newspapers, and he later acted as an interpreter for the U.S. government. After fleeing on one of the last flights out of Saigon, he landed in Orange County, found investors to turn low-end property into businesses that catered to refugees and built two shopping centers that serve as the district’s anchors.

Within a decade, the area teemed with Vietnamese refugees and 200 businesses that catered to them.

From the start, Little Saigon has been plagued by dissent. Violence erupted in the early years between foes and supporters of normalizing relations with Vietnam. Factions today compete for everything from control of the annual Tet parade to dominance of the local banking business. Last year, a Westminster video store owner hung up a Communist flag and a picture of the late Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, leading to seven weeks of protest and 52 arrests.

Through it all, it “has become the symbol of the Vietnamese community in the United States,” said Le Cong Giao, 70, an Upland resident who fled Saigon on the next-to-last flight, then became a religious and cultural leader of Southern California’s Vietnamese community.

“We were the poorest of the poor. And yet, we found our way. No matter what you do, people will find their way to their own people. That is why we have Little Saigon.”

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It wasn’t easy fashioning a home in Orange County. As late as 1989, Westminster denied a parade permit to Vietnamese veterans in Southern California. “If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam,” a City Council member told them. White residents held community meetings--later compared with Klan rallies--to stem the tide of refugees.

Indeed, Orange County--traditionally white, conservative turf--seemed at first blush in 1975 to be an odd home for an ethnic enclave. Yet those very politics helped create Little Saigon. Liberals considered the Vietnam War a mistake, the product of misguided government policy. But conservatives, especially those connected with the region’s many military bases, remained staunch supporters of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.

“To them, these weren’t immigrants. They were refugees from communism,” said Cal State Fullerton assistant professor Jeffrey Brody, who studies the Vietnamese American experience.

Nevertheless, much of America had become convinced that immigration and welfare programs had led directly to racial tension in the country. More than half of Americans, according to polls conducted at the time, opposed opening the nation’s borders to Vietnam War refugees. The Cuban Refugee Program, which since 1959 had provided 450,000 Cuban exiles with free health care and other benefits, such as interest-free loans, was not seen as a model to emulate, but a costly program to avoid.

“There was a kind of compassion fatigue,” recalled Minh Q. Steven Dovan, a San Jose attorney who emigrated from Vietnam in 1961 and became a leader of the Vietnamese American community in Northern California. “It was a question of timing and luck--bad luck.”

During the Cuban exodus “it was fashionable to be a refugee from the Cold War,” said Ines M. Miyares, a Cuban refugee and an associate professor of geography at Hunter College in New York who specializes in Southeast Asian immigration. “By the time Vietnam fell, you had a country that was completely disillusioned concerning the Cold War. These were refugees from a war that nobody wanted in the first place.”

Saigon Bayou: Just Like Home

There are evenings when Hen Lam finds himself kicking off his loafers after another 14-hour day, rolling up his pants like a kid and wading into the murky Grade Callou Canal in Dulac, La. He plucks a patch of water lilies, ambles home and boils them into sweet mullet stew, and he swears he can taste his childhood in Vietnam.

For Canh Nguyen, it happens when the sun is filtered through the eucalyptus cane just right, when business is slow because the shrimp are scrawny or just being coy. When he finds himself with a rare moment of solitude on the deck of his fishing boat, the Li’l Gene. He could swear he is back in Vietnam, slicing through the whitecaps of the South China Sea.

They are part of one of the most remote outposts of the American immigrant experience, one of the more curious “clusters,” in the parlance of demographers, of Vietnamese communities in the United States. By numbers alone, there are larger communities. But measured by percentage of population, several towns scattered across the lip of the gulf, from Texas to Mississippi, are the most Vietnamese in the nation.

Four of the five highest concentrations of Vietnamese measured in the 1990 census were in bayou country--cities such as Amelia, La., which topped the list at nearly 30% Vietnamese. One of the town’s elementary schools has become one of the most diverse schools in the country--largely because Vietnamese American children now make up one-third of the student body.

Vietnamese fishermen were attracted to the region by the vast resources of the Gulf of Mexico. But they were hooked by the simple country life they thought they had lost forever.

Though the language and culture of the gulf were alien, the pace of life was just like home: Here folks wipe their palms on their jeans before they shake hands. They live on streets like Bygones Lane and along creeks with no names, and measure their commuting times by the number of drawbridges they have caught down.

“I feel like I am home,” said Lam, who escaped Vietnam in 1978. “We didn’t change. We just changed places.”

Vietnamese shrimpers and crabbers huddle together at tiny harbors among napping alligators and matted sloughs of cypress. They sell the seafood, in many cases, to Vietnamese wholesalers who sell it, in many cases, to Vietnamese restaurants and markets.

Many speak no English, have little interaction with the English-speaking world, live in Vietnamese neighborhoods, attend Vietnamese churches and have the same neighbors in towns such as Morgan City, La., that they had in their hometowns in Vietnam. On Sunday afternoons, they can be found squatting in traditional Vietnamese gardens, tending to parsley plots wearing non bai tho, the same conical straw hats they wore in Vietnam.

“They do nothing white--nothing English--at all,” said the Rev. Francis Quyet Bui, pastor of Holy Family, or Thanh Gia, Catholic Parish in Louisiana. “They don’t have to.”

It is not paradise, though. Not by a long shot.

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, violence between Vietnamese and American fishermen erupted along the gulf. In Seadrift, Texas, two Vietnamese brothers were accused of murdering an American fisherman. They claimed self-defense and were acquitted--but not before four of their boats were firebombed.

Today, there are still reports of whites, blacks and Asian Americans taking turns running each other out of various neighborhoods.

And many whites in the area still believe the government simply handed money to refugees after the war to launch shrimp and crab businesses. There is no truth to the rumor, but the prejudice associated with it lingers.

“We fought them and then we bring them over here and we feed them,” said Buddy Daisy, owner of a small seafood company in Houma, La.--making no distinction between Communists and refugees from South Vietnam, former allies of the United States.

In this wary marriage of traditional cultures, however, some Vietnamese fisherman have developed close friendships with Gulf Coast natives and have mastered the off-the-books politics of the bayou to get ahead.

On a March morning near Amelia, for example, De Nguyen deftly maneuvers his boat next to a trap and reels it in by hand. Thirty blue crabs bicker inside--a nice haul, considering most traps don’t start filling up until May.

Nguyen is allowed to scatter his traps in 50 square miles of privately owned Louisiana swamp because he has befriended the men who maintain the property. On this day, it is time to pay his respects to those men--Tom Dontay and his son, Boogie--at a primitive camp outside Dulac.

Boogie, who alleges he has no other given name, once shot a 13-foot alligator from the front porch (its head is the centerpiece of the back bedroom). Guns, including at least one assault rifle, are scattered throughout the camp. For his guests, who are few and far between, Boogie reaches under the dock, grabs an oyster, pops it open and hands it over in the half-shell. They don’t get much fresher than that, he points out.

After a short chat on that March day, mostly about poachers, De Nguyen promises to visit soon. As he is leaving, Tom Dontay says: “I don’t know who gave you the boat, but he must be an awful good friend.”

Nguyen, who bought the boat himself by saving crab profits, rolls his eyes, poking fun at the persistent rumor that refugees received government handouts to launch their businesses.

“Uncle Sam!” he responds. “Welfare!”

A sore subject today along the gulf, welfare was at the heart of the U.S. government strategy for resettlement of Vietnamese refugees.

Seeking to prevent the welfare state that many saw in Miami, officials offered Vietnamese markedly different--and fewer--benefits than they had given Cuban exiles more than a decade earlier. And unlike the Cubans, Vietnamese refugees were ineligible for welfare while they were under the guidance of sponsors.

The immigration program relied on a network of volunteers, mostly churches, to sponsor refugees. Each journey began at a settlement center, the biggest of which were Camp Pendleton; Ft. Chaffee, Ark.; Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.; and Ft. Indiantown Gap, Pa. From there, refugees were sent to sponsors scattered across the country.

Intended to speed assimilation and reduce welfare dependency, the government’s approach may have had the opposite effect. By scattering refugees, the program delayed the natural maturation of the immigrant community and forced the Vietnamese to regroup on their own, if that’s what they wanted.

And in not providing the intensive aid and education given to Cuban refugees, the program did little to boost the new Vietnamese immigrants out of the almost instant poverty in which they found themselves.

“Many of them had been farmers, for instance,” said Miyares of Hunter College. “If you’ve farmed on communal lands, and suddenly you are transported and you have no marketable skills, who are you?”

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In 1979, the U.S. Department of Housing, Education and Welfare reported that most refugees were “living in marginal circumstances,” and that the ultimate goals of the refugee program had failed. In some communities, as many as 60% of Vietnamese Americans were receiving some sort of welfare.

“They speak little English, are trapped in the secondary job market or on welfare, and live in overcrowded, ghetto-like housing,” the investigation found.

The government’s refugee policy had other unintended consequences, critics say. By encouraging employers to sponsor refugees, for example, the government may have opened the door to exploitation.

In a 1997 dissertation at the University of Kansas, sociologist Brad Whorton, who now works for the New Mexico Department of Education, reported that a poultry processor in Oklahoma “sponsored” nearly 700 refugees. One refugee coordinator, Whorton wrote, concluded that a “ ‘large portion’ of sponsorship offers were of a ‘contract labor nature.’ ”

The State Department continues to defend the program, and says its refugee policy hasn’t changed.

“You shouldn’t resettle large groups of people in one place in any short period of time, because you quickly overwhelm the social service systems that they need to get acclimated,” said a State Department official. “You are giving them a chance to land on their feet.”

When Hen Lam stepped off an airplane in 1978, his feet landed in snow. He found himself in Alaska, the destination selected by immigration authorities for 81 Vietnamese refugees under the policy of scattering them to all 50 states.

It did not look like home. And it did not look like any place he wanted to call home.

“It was cold,” Lam said. “It was very white.”

Like most Vietnamese refugees, Lam didn’t stick around long. He worked his way to Amarillo, Texas, then to Louisiana.

Moving to join relatives or developing Vietnamese communities, and sometimes just moving for the weather, they began clustering. By 1980, half of them no longer lived where they had first been settled. One-third were already living in California.

“The assumption was that if we spread everybody out, they are going to become American faster. They would essentially blend in, and that’s what we wanted, to make the problem disappear,” said Miyares. “People don’t work that way, especially in cultures where ‘group’ is more important than ‘individual.’ We didn’t understand that.”

In larger communities like Houston and Little Saigon, they found better access to job training and English lessons. And they found work. A government study found that by the mid-1980s, most refugees who had jobs found them through fellow refugees--selling jackfruit and rambutan to other refugees, for example, in Vietnamese grocery stores.

As those communities developed, the economic fortunes of Vietnamese refugees improved. Between 1980 and 1990, the median household income of Vietnamese Americans doubled to $33,500, slightly above the national average, according to U.S. Census figures. And nearly 40% of Vietnamese Americans had become proficient in English--up from 27% in 1980.

Figures cited in a 1999 UCLA study showed other dramatic gains: The proportion of college graduates among adults was 17%, up from 13%. The rate of participation in the labor force among males 16 and older was 72%, up from 66% in 1980. Rates of business and home ownership also soared.

Even communities made up of so-called boat people--the second wave of Vietnamese refugees, most of whom arrived in the late 1970s under even more dire economic conditions than earlier refugees--have seen significant strides.

The suburban area south of Washington, D.C., for example, is now home to more than 50,000 Vietnamese Americans--half of them boat people, said Nguyen Dinh Thang, executive director of Boat People SOS, a nonprofit community service organization in Fairfax, Va.

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Today, many of them have latched on to the region’s primary industries--defense and government--and others run Vietnamese restaurants. While many struggle, others consider themselves assimilated into everyday life, and count more Americans than Vietnamese Americans as colleagues and customers.

Centered in Falls Church, Va., the community’s social hub is Eden Center, an L-shaped strip mall named after the largest mall in Saigon before the war’s end. Opened in 1984, the center has dozens of Vietnamese-owned shops specializing in Asian products. There are restaurants, bakeries, hair salons, jewelry outlets, fabric and herb stores, travel agencies and music and video stores.

“I had a dream to go somewhere and to establish my life,” said Kiem Van Le, who spent 10 years in labor and refugee camps before immigrating to Fairfax County in 1986. “When I came to the United States, it was a dream come true.”

San Jose: High-Tech Haven

Perhaps nowhere in the country has that process matured as gracefully as it has in Northern California, home to probably the most economically successful, and most assimilated, Vietnamese community in the country.

Its heart is San Jose, an early destination for refugees after the fall of Saigon. Many in that first wave were highly educated workers who found they could earn relatively good pay--without learning English first--assembling electronics for the fledgling technology companies that would eventually ublossom into the Silicon Valley.

Considered prize hires by the companies, many of those early workers learned English and were promoted off the assembly lines. And their children--along with younger refugees--naturally gravitated to the opportunities of the Internet revolution.

A year ago, a precocious clique of twentysomethings emerged from their cubicles, quit their jobs and embarked on a quest for “angels,” the Silicon Valley gamblers looking to drop a few hundred grand on a fledgling dot-com. It didn’t take long to line up investors.

The investors “were wowed by the technology,” recalled Cathy Tran, director of marketing at GoLinQ.com. “They were wowed by the creativity and the energy.”

They were wowed by something else, too: the ethnicity.

Four of GoLinQ.com’s senior managers--including its chief executive--and the majority of its 25 employees are Vietnamese American. Within two months, GoLinQ had raised $1.25 million in seed money--all from Vietnamese American investors.

By Silicon Valley standards, that’s small change. But the company, which helps small businesses establish an Internet presence and then takes a slice of those businesses’ online profits, hopes to earn $20 million in revenue this year.

And its initial success is a reflection of a symbiotic relationship developing between Vietnamese Americans and computers, primarily in Northern California, where there are more than 100,000 Vietnamese Americans today.

“We band together first because we chose to seek freedom from Vietnam,” said Phien Huong, 45, who owns a small tailoring and fabric shop near downtown San Jose. Huong emigrated from Vietnam seven years ago, time enough for three of her eight children either to start working for the computer industry or to start taking classes that will give them a foot in the door.

“But there is a strong connection between the Vietnamese and the computer industry--and that industry starts right here. It has brought us much success.”

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Thinh Nguyen started his professional life in America by working at an outdoor carwash in winter, which is pretty darned cold when you’re wet, even in Louisiana. He worked his way through school and found his way to Northern California. He’s now the network systems manager for Xros Inc., a high-tech start-up that is building a state-of-the-art optical switch--and just got bought by Nortel Networks Corp. for $3.25 billion in stock.

The deal will bring the average employee of Xros about $1 million for each of the next four years--and it will bring Nguyen, as a manager, quite a bit more, he said bashfully.

Like Nguyen, GoLinQ.com’s 26-year-old CEO, Michael Han, sees his young legacy in the context of the Vietnamese journey to America.

“I wanted this community, the Vietnamese community, to be a part of something,” said Han, who led the charge to line up investors. “I presented it like this: ‘We are the new generation. And we can group together to make something happen.’ ”

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VIETNAMESE AT HOME IN AMERICA

Twenty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, nearly 2 million Vietnamese Americans have clawed their way past poverty, pirates, disease and ill-informed government programs. Their tale speaks volumes about the durability of culture--as well as the ambiguity inherent in America’s offer of asylum.

Scattered across the country by the U.S. government after the 1975 fall of Saigon, many Vietnamese refugees felt isolated and uncomfortable. A massive “secondary migration” transported thousands of families from towns in the North and Midwest to ethnic enclaves in Sunbelt and coastal cities, where they have thrived. A snapshot of the Vietnamese American population, based on the latest statistics:

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San Jose

Headquarters of California’s Silicon Valley, the heart of the second-largest Vietnamese American community. Many of the first immigrants found work in high-technology companies, and the industry continues to employ many Vietnamese Americans at all levels.”

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Little Saigon

The nation’s largest Vietnamese American community is centered in a neighborhood of Westminster, where nearly 15% of residents are Vietnamese. About 200,000 Vietnamese Americans live in Orange County and adjoining counties of Southern California.

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Houston

The city’s Vietnamese American community, third-largest in the

nation, is known as a conservative, tightly knit enclave with a high rate of small-business ownership.

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Saigon Bayou

Though not as populous as many Vietnamese American

communities, an area stretching from Seadrift, Texas, past

Biloxi, Miss., includes several towns with the highest concentrations of Vietnamese in the country. Topping the list is Amelia, La., where nearly one-third of residents are Vietnamese.

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Fairfax County, Va.

Centered in Falls Church, the nation’s fourth-largest Vietnamese American community grew rapidly after 1975 as Vietnamese government workers gravitated to suburbs of the nation’s capital.

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Ebb and Flow

The fall of Saigon on

April 30, 1975, triggered an exodus of nearly 2 million refugees and other immigrants to the United States over the next 25 years.

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1975: The first wave of refugees--including many of the country’s most affluent and well-educated citizens --fled Vietnam with the fall of Saigon.

1980: A second wave of refugees peaked with exodus of “boat people.”

1992: The flow peaked again after an increase in refugees released from re-education camps and immigrants sponsored by their families living in the United States.

Total Vietnamese immigrants and refugees, 1970-2000: 1,824,197

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Sources: 1990 U.S. Census, Centers for Disease Control, Immigration and Naturalization Service, State Department

Graphics reporting by RAY F. HERNDON and SCOTT GOLD/Los Angeles Times

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Lessons and Legacies: 25 Years After Vietnam

The longest war America has ever fought--and the first one it lost--Vietnam continues to provoke questions and evoke emotions both vivid and complex. The U.S. was involved in Indochina from the late 1950s until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Throughout this month, The Times is examining the impact of that turbulent time on American society and popular culture and on institutions from the military to the media.

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Also see https://www.latimes.com

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Times staff writers Ray F. Herndon, Sunny Kaplan and Claudia Kolker and Times librarians Sheila A. Kern and Lois Hooker contributed to this story.