Proud Culture at a Crossroads

Chinese invaders. French colonists. American capitalists. For thousands of years, the Vietnamese have fended off those who sought to conquer them, co-opt them, or simply to change them. It has become, many say with a shrug, a way of life.

In Orange County, however, the biggest threat to Vietnamese culture may be the Vietnamese themselves.

In the world’s largest community of Vietnamese emigres, a generational gap has divided the Vietnam War’s refugees and their children.

Older Vietnamese Americans-- despite a new educational effort in Little Saigon to preserve language and culture--can only watch helplessly as their children forget the language, move out of their neighborhoods, quit the family businesses.

And young Vietnamese Americans have already developed a catch phrase for their generational struggle: It’s known as “riding that hyphen”--the one sometimes trapped in the middle of the phrase “Vietnamese-American.”

Giao Cong Le, a clergyman for 43 years in Vietnam, Orange County and elsewhere in Southern California, sees it in his own family. As head of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s mission in Vietnam when the war ended, he caught the next-to-last flight out of Saigon in April 1975 after ushering 400 refugees out of the country.

Now retired, he watches the generational gap unfold as his four children grow up. His oldest children can look into the sky and “tell you a Skyhawk from an F-15,” he said. “Because they lived their life in war. They understand why we left our country. They share with me the fears, the suffering.”

As for his youngest child, a 25-year-old physical therapist, “I don’t think he has any idea why we left.”

And three of his four grandchildren don’t speak Vietnamese at all.

“Whether we like or we don’t like it, that’s the way life is,” Le said. “They are very much Americanized. They could not help it. But they no longer share the same goals or the same way of life like the first generation. Parents are very irritated about it. The second generation and the third generation will be ... diluted of all culture. They are just Americans.”

At first blush, it seems a typical immigrant experience: Becoming Americanized is an important part--even a necessary part--of making a new life in the United States. It’s happened to the Irish, to Mexicans, to other Southeast Asian immigrants, to every ethnic group that has arrived here in the last two centuries.

But the transition is more dramatic for Vietnamese Americans: Unlike immigration from Mexico, for instance, theirs was largely limited to a few years after the fall of Saigon. Immigration has dropped off dramatically in the years since--from a high of 127,000 entering the United States in 1980 to an estimated 20,000 this year. The decline means there are fewer new arrivals to keep the language and traditions alive.

Assimilation Is a Leading Concern

Instead, Vietnamese-language news and entertainment media may be the greatest force for conserving culture, a recent poll by The Times’ Orange County edition found.

More than 80% of Vietnamese households in the county watch Vietnamese-language television at least once a week, the poll found. More than half--young and old alike--listen to Vietnamese radio every day. And younger Vietnamese Americans often watch Vietnamese videos; three in four say they watch them at least once a week.

The poll also reflects the dark clouds on the horizon, however: Vietnamese Americans in Orange County consider assimilation the second most serious problem facing their community today--behind crime but above concerns about discrimination and the job market.

The changes are especially painful because they strike at the heart of Vietnamese traditions of family and generational hierarchy.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of these values in Vietnamese culture. Consider the poem “Spring in the Royal City,” written in 1508 by Nguyen Thanh Gian:

Many a country has built its power on citadels. Let us rather make justice and humanity our fortresses, so that generation after generation, spring after spring, our children may hand down our fine traditions for 10,000 years.

In droves, however, the children of Vietnamese who fled to the United States are leaving their parents’ homes when they turn 18, though in Vietnam three generations typically live under one roof.

Children routinely abandon their parents’ small businesses, though back home they would have certainly taken over those businesses when their parents became elderly.

Family hierarchies are different in the United States--here, for example, women often make decisions about children’s education, not men--and some Vietnamese families have struggled to confront that.

The struggle plays out in subtle but important ways.

In Vietnamese, for example, if a parent tells a child, “I don’t like what you are doing,” the hierarchy of the family is built into the pronouns used. It translates into “I, your father, don’t like what you, my son, are doing.” There is no generic--and equalizing--”you” or “I”; every pronoun reiterates its subject’s role and rank in the family and in society.

That, of course, is not true in English. In the United States it is easy to forget who is the adult and who is the child, as the parent of any impetuous teen will quickly tell you, and as Vietnamese American parents are learning now.

“In our language, it is very difficult for children to be rude or impolite,” said Van Le, 73, a former vice dean at the University of Saigon who emigrated in 1975 and lives in Huntington Beach. “Here it is simple. And that is hard.”

‘Kids Won’t Listen to Parents Anymore’

Conversations with Vietnamese Americans can sound like sessions of family therapy.

“A lot of times, parents don’t understand what the kids are going through,” said Hop Tran, 21, a UCLA senior majoring in physiological sciences and hoping to attend medical school next year. Tran was born in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, after Communists seized control of South Vietnam and ended the Vietnam War. His family moved to France when he was 7 and arrived in Huntington Beach in 1993.

He remembers only bits and pieces of his time in Vietnam-- snapshots of school and old friends--and has taken courses about Vietnamese history to help him understand his heritage.

Still, even he struggles with a generational divide--his parents speak to him in Vietnamese, for instance, but he’s not always able to come up with the right words, so he responds with a mix of Vietnamese, French and English.

“There is a wide gap,” he said. “There is no real communication anymore between the two. Kids won’t listen to parents anymore. They just get fed up. Things get kind of out of hand.”

A primary source of stress for Vietnamese American families is, in a way, something many American parents complain about too: the fact that young adults move out so soon, and move so far away. In Vietnam, the term “roof family” refers to a family in which parents and children live together forever under one roof. Parents consider it their duty to take care of children until the children grow up. Then, the children take care of the parents.

“But now we are refugees,” said Hien Nguyen, 34, a Saigon native who escaped Vietnam by boat, then spent eight years in Malaysian refugee camps before arriving in the United States less than two years ago.

“We still want to live as a roof family. But we can’t. We have to adapt. Here, you just have to go wherever your job leads you. We try to keep our roots. But if you live in a new world, you have to adjust.”

Some young Vietnamese Americans are trying to close the gap between generations.

For example, Tran, the UCLA senior, is among a group of Vietnamese American students who organized a Thang Tu Den, or Black April, commemoration marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

“I don’t think the kids understand what their parents came through, what their history is. And that’s sad because it tells you so much about who you are,” he said. “The kids don’t understand who their parents are. That’s a pity.”

Some in the older generation also are taking steps to address the problem. On the second floor of a Garden Grove strip mall, where signs are in Vietnamese, 150 educators and business leaders gathered on a sunny morning in February to launch an institute for Vietnamese studies.

Publicly, the Vien Viet-Hoc institute was billed as an educational program, offering classes in Vietnamese history, language and culture. Its unstated purpose, however, is to fight the Americanization of the Vietnamese youth.

An emcee stood at the podium, flanked by an American flag, the yellow-and-red flag of the former South Vietnam government and two magnificent, snaking dragons crafted from peppers and pineapples. As a synthesized version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” croaked through a tape player, onlookers stood dutifully and silently, their arms stiff at their sides. When the South Vietnam anthem began, the group sang lustily:

“Noi giong, luc bien phai can giai nguy. Vang tieng nguoi nuoc Nam cho den muon doi. (No danger, no obstacle can stop us. And who can repress the soul of our youth?)”

The classes will be taught primarily by older Vietnamese nationals. Though the classes are open to the public, administrators quietly concede that they hope to train young Vietnamese Americans in the traditions and culture of their homeland.

“After 25 years, we have a barrier,” said Trung Quang Nguyen, a Westminster attorney who sits on the institute’s executive board. “The younger generation understands how they are American. They do not understand how they are Vietnamese. We have to identify what it means to be Vietnamese American.”

Van Le, the former University of Saigon vice dean, thinks the two sides need to meet in the middle.

“My generation is too conservative. The way we are, it is too much,” he said. “We try to adapt, but we still have a feeling”--he pointed to his heart--”that we are Vietnamese. And they have no tradition. They have forgotten everything--the value of the family, the hierarchy of the family. So at the moment we have a problem.”

It’s enough of a problem that, even before they leave Vietnam, mothers and fathers who are preparing to emigrate to the United States are resigned to their children’s Americanization.

In Nha Trang, north of Ho Chi Minh City, deep inside a maze of narrow, ragged alleys where chickens and rats run underfoot, Nguyen Anh’s house leaps out at visitors. Among shacks piled on top of shacks, Anh’s house has a fresh roof and shiny tile. Inside, she sits on a spotless leather couch, watching a soccer game--Liverpool vs. Derby County, broadcast in Vietnamese--on a JVC television.

Anh’s husband of 21 years, Dung, runs a successful aquaculture business, raising shrimp just outside the city.

The family is preparing to move to the United States--thanks to Nguyen Dung’s brother, who has agreed to sponsor them across the Pacific Ocean.

Already, Western influence is creeping into their three children’s lives: They have developed an affinity for cold cereal and cheese, they are learning English and they play American video games on the computers at school.

Nguyen Anh is bracing for more changes once they arrive in Southern California.

“If you live in America, there are some changes that you have to make in order to assimilate,” she said. “My children may lose the language and the culture. But I am not afraid of that.”