Far From Home, a Transplant Flowers

At Mimosa Nursery, where the wide, hot sky of East L.A. is etched with power lines and the silhouettes of pink Spanish-style apartments, owner Gilbert Guyenne has painted scenes from his Southeast Asian home. Papaya, mango, guava and jackfruit trees stand in orderly rows; birds whistle from bamboo cages; and water lilies--the kind Guyenne once peeled and ate as a soldier in the Mekong River Delta--float placidly in ponds. As you wait to pay for your ylang-ylang, you might find books for sale beside the register one of Guyenne’s own novels, about the world he left back in 1975, the year Saigon fell.

Ex-soldier, ex-husband, father of five and purveyor of rare fruit that is sweetly familiar to other Vietnamese Americans, Guyenne (nee Nguyen Dung Tien) understands the sorrow of exiles. “We have a lot of things deeply inside,” he says, “a lot we cannot express by talking.”

Which is why Vietnam-born customers flock to his business and why, if they come looking for nam doc ma i (a type of mango), they might leave with a shamu thrush, a bird whose baritone jungle calls rise abruptly, midsong, to a haunted, soprano wail. Guyenne himself began writing for the same reason, to find a voice for his visions, to free the spirits from his past.

Born in 1951 in the rural province of Nha Trang, he remembers a green landscape that unfurled beside the sea and a slow-paced life in which people were close and even the poorest gave food and shelter to a stranger. One of six children of a small-time grocery wholesaler, Guyenne worked hard and wound up at a university in Dalat, studying economics and political science as war-torn South Vietnam collapsed around him.

After Saigon fell, Guyenne fled the rule of his former enemies, settling first in New Caledonia, where he acquired his new name, and later in Anaheim, but he continued to brood about his country’s ruin.

By the early 1980s, he and his Vietnam-born wife, Silvie, had children to feed. Guyenne needed work. He observed the success of a Vietnamese couple who imported Southeast Asian plants for fellow homesick immigrants. Homesick himself, and longing especially for fruit he’d eaten as a child, Guyenne decided to start a nursery with his savings.

He wasn’t a complete novice. In New Caledonia he had grown lettuce as a tenant farmer. Still, he says, his early years were very painful. “I did not know the weather in California. With winter coming, I ordered tropical plants. I displayed them all around, and in one night, the whole nursery turned black because of frost. I said, ‘What is this?’ In our country, we did not know what frost is.”

He worked 12-hour days, struggling to understand the climate and how to tend trees that, like him, were far from their native soil. And over time, as the local Vietnamese community grew, Mimosa, which opened in Garden Grove in 1982, grew too. As it did, Guyenne discovered an even wider clientele, people with roots in Guatemala, Mexico and South America who were just as keen to taste the fruit of home--their home.

By the early ‘90s, he had three more Mimosa nurseries--in Riverside, Anaheim and East L.A.--and his five daughters were growing up as Americans. But then his marriage foundered, and he once again reexamined his life. His anguish about the past resurfaced. He had fresh visions of the war.

During what he calls the worst four years of his life, fighting the ground war in the Mekong, Guyenne watched close friends lose their moral compass. He witnessed widespread corruption, including Vietnamese army generals trafficking in drugs. “The war turned our life upside down. It affected the morals of the country. Prostitutes made more money than anyone. Drugs and crime were everywhere.”

In 1994, he was introduced by a friend to Nha Ca, the editor of Viet Bao, a Vietnamese-language newspaper based in Westminster. Ca encouraged Guyenne to write his memories down, to work his thoughts into stories for her fiction page. Inspired, Guyenne wrote a few, then a few more, and finally, he wrote a novel that Viet Bao published as a daily serial.

“Mercenaries,” a reflection on the causes of South Vietnam’s defeat, appeared in 1994 and was published again by the company as a book. But it was Guyenne’s second novel, “Black Gold,” a 600-page tome he wrote feverishly in six months, that captured the attention of his community. A multigenerational saga that has been called by some a Vietnamese “Godfather,” the book recounts the history of Vietnam through the prism of the drug trade.

Nina Le, general manager of Viet Bao, which also published “Black Gold” as a serial, believes the book found an audience because it “deals with subjects most Vietnamese writing doesn’t.” In the days and weeks after it ran, the paper was besieged with calls from readers wanting to know more about Guyenne, whose prose style, Le notes, is uncommonly contemporary and fresh, full of street talk and low-life characters that emerge vividly from the page.

Unfortunately, says Guyenne, this vernacular tone has made the book hard to translate into English. But despite offers from Vietnamese filmmakers to adapt the book, he is holding out for a wider audience, hoping eventually to see English versions of both the novel and any movie adaptation.

A wiry, intense man with graying hair, weathered face and a habit of falling abruptly silent, as if his quick, melodic English can’t keep pace with his racing thoughts, Guyenne has plenty meanwhile to keep him busy.

With the help of two of his daughters, Carole and Colette, and two old army friends who sought him out after their release from North Vietnamese prison camps, he plants and propagates, tends and sells thousands of trees at his East L.A. nursery. (Silvie runs the remaining branch in Anaheim; the others closed in the wake of their divorce.) He also fusses over 500 bantam chickens and another 500 birds from an original collection of 5,000 he bought several years ago from a Chinese dealer.

“I have loved birds all my life,” he says. “But once I had so many, all of them in cages, I thought of how it feels to be in prison, and I stopped collecting.”

When a customer wants one, he sells a bird, but he enjoys their familiar presence in the nursery. “The sounds of my birds are the sounds of Vietnam,” he says.

For Robert Cardenas, an Altadena landscape contractor who discovered Mimosa 10 years ago, the exotic bird calls were just part of the charm of a place where plants he’d never seen before thrived: litchi nut and jujube trees, the flowering, banana-scented michelia. Wax apples. Rose apples. “I kept coming back for plants and information,” he recalls. “And one day, I saw some books on the counter. Gilbert told me he had written them. I was intrigued.”

They became friends, their talks about trees evolving into disquisitions on politics, literature, life. Cardenas, an antiwar and community activist during the Vietnam era, longs to write someday himself. Guyenne listens and sometimes gives advice.

“For me,” says Cardenas, who was born in nearby Boyle Heights, “Mimosa is a sanctuary. I like the chickens running around, the way they used to at my grandmother’s. When I go there, I make a point not to rush. If Gilbert’s free, we’ll sit and chat.”

Other customers clearly have the same idea, and it’s not uncommon to hear Guyenne switch from English to Spanish to Vietnamese as he fields questions, moving through aisles of grafted guava trees, bonsai figs and water hyacinths. “Plant papayas close to your house,” he counsels, “so they won’t be killed by frost.” And, “Don’t over-water your michelia.”

Tropicals, after all, can be tricky to grow in the arid summer heat and crisp Decembers of L.A. Getting them settled in takes knowledge, Guyenne observes, and an awareness of their origins. Yet if you treat them right, they’ll flourish, producing blooms and fruit with all the sweetness of a memory.

“Plant a mango in your backyard,” he says, “and you are home.”

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An Exotic Population Some exotic fruit trees available at Mimosa:

Banana, 20 varieties

Coffee

Assorted guavas

Jaboticaba

Jackfruit

Jujube

Litchi

Macadamia nut

Mango, seven varieties

Papaya

Pawpaw

Sapota, four varieties

Soursop

Wampi

Wax jambu