IMMIGRATION AND INTEGRATION: THE VIETNAMESE EXPERIENCE

Nguyen Ngoc Bich

Nguyen Ngoc Bich is the Board Chair of the National Congress of Vietnamese Americans. This presentation was made at the University of Metropolitan London on March 22, 2006.

On April 30, 1975, Communist tanks crashed into the front gate of Independence Palace in Saigon fulfilling Ho Chi Minh’s dream of reunifying Vietnam. While this victory was hailed around the world as the equivalent of the Bible story of David’s triumph over Goliath, the Vietnamese people knew better. They knew that when Vietnam was divided 21 years earlier by the Geneva Agreement (July 20, 1954) into two zones, a communist one run by Ho and his cohort and a non-communist one in the South, nearly a million northerners (850,000 to be exact) already voted with their feet and ran South. One of the famous expressions born of the experience of 1975 was, “Even if power poles could walk they would run from Communism.” In other words, the Vietnamese people knew instinctively, by long experience, that the arrival of Communist rule can always be taken as a predictor of vast refugee movements.

Contrast that with the so-called wisdom of politicians, such as Mr. Kissinger, who at first advised President Ford to count on no more than 50,000 refugees as a result of the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. In the end, after a great deal of wrangling back and forth, the American administration decided that it would take in 137,000 deemed “vulnerable elements” following the Communist victory. Actually, even out of that figure, in the chaos of that spring, the U.S. eventually managed to rescue only some 30,000 on its presumed lists before the bamboo curtain fell definitely on that unfortunate country that was South Vietnam.

Only a poet has words to describe something like this. Nguyen Chi Thien, then in jail in North Vietnam, could register this national shudder in a since famous poem, “Out of Indifference” (1975):

Out of indifference, infantilism, imbecility
Wishing to be left alone, not having to sacrifice
The whole country is now one
One huge block of suffering, one block of hatred!
Happiness & dream, morality & dignity
Are all crushed the moment the Party surfaces.
History turns a page, brutally, like a calamity
Ignoring that truth that Right must always win out
This great blow is not simply my own
But a blow to us all!

That “calamity,” in the years that followed, eventually brought out nearly three million souls forcing the world to take notice, turning antiwar icons such as Jean Paul Sartre and Joan Baez against their erstwhile heroes in Hanoi. It would be tedious to go over the immense suffering of the “boat people,” then “walk people” (across Cambodia and other land routes) and “wall people” (jumping over the Berlin Wall) during those years. Suffice it to say that probably half a million people lost their lives in the attempt to flee the “communist paradise” but those who succeeded became the originators of the Vietnamese Diaspora as we know it today: about three million resettled in over 120 countries around the world.

The largest contingent is now, of course, in the United States, some 1.2 million strong, followed by France and Australia (about 200,000 each), then Canada (150,000), Germany (120,000 each), Great Britain (50,000), Japan (20,000) etc. In the Vietnamese Diaspora now spread all over the world, one should also include those in China (maybe 1/4 million), in the former Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation (about 100,000), various Eastern European countries (Poland, Czech Republic, etc.), Taiwan (about 60,000), South Korea (roughly 40,000), Malaysia, Singapore and even some Middle Eastern countries but these Vietnamese are in many ways different from the ones found most commonly in the West: they are for the most part not refugees from Communism but originally guest workers or students who overstayed their contractual obligations and became residents, almost never allowed to become citizens of the new countries; or they may be brides sold to foreigners who bought them and took them out of Vietnam. However, because of the totally different background of this latter group they are not considered refugees and therefore do not fall neatly into the categories under discussion today.

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A refugee is by definition someone running away from something, in the case of most Vietnamese in the western world it’s from Communism. So he knows what he is running from but usually does not know where he would land or end up, a situation which calls for a great deal of flexibility and adaptability. It is thus common for a Vietnamese refugee coming to a country like Great Britain, one, not to know the language; two, not to have much previous background of the country; three, not to know the mores of the British people; four, not to have the connections necessary for making one’s way through life. In such a bind, only a great deal of determination to beat the odds would get the refugee to overcome his initial difficulties and remake his life in the new society. Fortunately, determination is something that most Vietnamese refugees have in plentiful store—partly as a matter of upbringing but also partly because there is no other way possible.

The story, I believe, in England as elsewhere is roughly as follows:

The parents would accept any job and sometimes two, three minimum-wage jobs in order to keep the family financially afloat while the children would be sent to school and told to do well, simply because there is no other avenue open.

The children, helped maybe by the closeness of siblings where older ones would watch over and tutor the younger ones, would normally do real well in school, providing the one joy that is seen as the return for the love of the parents.

After several years of sweat and sacrifice like that, the family would accumulate enough wealth to be able to move into a home of their own while the children would go on to college and university.

After a few more years, with the children out of school (especially when they are out of college and university) and the family well established, the path is wide open for making it truly in the new society.

This general pattern is something that one would find over and over again in the stories of most Vietnamese families uprooted from the “old country” and resettled abroad. Of course, seemingly smooth as it is, that process is not without a great deal of sweat and tears, punctuated sometimes with exhilaration and joy, but in the end successful.

Integration, the Vietnamese way

So what is it that allowed the Vietnamese to be generally successful abroad in negotiating their way into the receiving society and fully integrating an originally rather alien culture? The answer is not always obvious.

Back in 1980, Darrel Montero, a sociologist then teaching at the University of Maryland, made a study entitled The Vietnamese Americans in which he compared three groups of political refugees and their integration into the United States: about 40,000 Hungarians who came as a result of the aborted Hungarian revolution crushed by Khrushchev’s tanks in 1956, the Cubans who came in the wake of the Castro revolution in Cuba and the Vietnamese, some 137,000 of them, who came in 1975. The common thread that linked all three groups was, of course, that they were all refugees from Communism. But beside that there was not much that is comparable among the three groups. In terms of race, the Vietnamese are Asian, the Hungarians White European and the Cubans a mixed bag of white and black Latinos. Language-wise, the Vietnamese speak a tonal monosyllabic language, the Hungarians a Finno-Ugric language and the Cubans a Romance language, Spanish, that is much closer to English than these other two. Culturally, the Vietnamese are Orientals influenced by popular animism, ancestor worship, Confucianism and Buddhism; the Hungarians and Cubans are Christians. Geographically, Cuba is only 190 miles away from the U.S. whereas Hungary is pretty far and Vietnam halfway around the world.

From a quick look at these backgrounds, one would guess that the most likely to succeed in the U.S. would have to be the Cubans—what with geographic proximity (hence familiarity with things American), similarity of language (English and Spanish), shared cultural traits (Christianity even though in the case of the Cubans, it’s Catholicism instead of Protestantism), shared racial traits (mixed white and black heritages). Even the Hungarians would, from the appearance of it, integrate faster than the Vietnamese considering that they were White Europeans and Christians and shared many traits of twentieth-century culture with the United States.

Yet, a longitudinal study from 1975 to 1979, compared to a similar four-year period in the case of the other two cohorts after they arrived in America shows that on all socio-economic indicators the Vietnamese were doing better. And this was across the board whether it was educational level attained, personal or household income, owning a house and a car, etc.

Some observers suspected that the edges gained over the other two groups by the Vietnamese were the result of more enlightened (read sophisticated) refugee assistance policies on the part of the American government, which were not available to the Hungarians and Cubans. While there may be some truth to this, it nonetheless remains that the Vietnamese arrived on U.S. soil at a time when there was a backlash against the war in Vietnam and everyone associated with it, including the people of Vietnam, at a time when there was a recession and jobs were scarce, whereas both the Hungarians and the Cubans, especially the former, were greeted as heroes when they first came to the U.S.

Thus, the advantage gained by the Vietnamese after four years in the U.S. must, at least in part, be attributed to some of the social practices of the Vietnamese, like their family solidarity and loyalty, their sense of honor (which makes them reluctant to accept welfare for too long) as well as their industry and perseverance.

Just a couple of examples should suffice to show the positive effect of Vietnamese immigration on the economy in many countries. I do not know about England but the entrepreneurial spirit of the Vietnamese can be illustrated in many different ways around the world:

In Moscow or Prague, even East Berlin, there are Vietnamese markets containing sometimes up to 500-600 stalls usually covered by tent material selling almost everything under the sky but mostly textile, shoe products and handicrafts from Vietnam. Throngs of people come in and out of these places, carting away all sorts of purchases because they can be had at prices much cheaper than in the regular stores.

In the U.S., Vietnamese have been credited with revitalizing a fair number of rather sorry downtown areas in several cities around the country. They have done this for the Milam area in Houston, Argyle area in Chicago, a good part of downtown San Jose, parts of downtown Philadelphia, the Clarendon area in Arlington, VA, etc. And this is how they did it: as they first come, they would move into crime and drug-infested areas of town, not out of choice but because this is about the only place where they could afford the low rent and decrepit housing and make a start. But a strategy soon developed to rebuild their lives: they would, for instance, pool resources, accepting crammed quarters to accumulate savings that come from small salaries but earned by more than one person. After a few years this would allow them to open small businesses that do not require a great deal of sophistication or even language, such as a restaurant, a barbershop, a mom-and-pop store, etc. Also, in their spare time, they would learn the trade or the tricks to upgrade their surroundings, houses and gardens. In the meantime, the children would be told to go to school and do only one thing, to focus on their studies. This is how, after a few grueling years, the family as a whole would grow out of poverty. They would then have the choice of either staying in a community in which they have all had a hand in upgrading or moving on into more upscale neighborhoods.

Where are the Vietnamese now in socio-economic terms?

Vilified, called “losers” by much of the world press after 1975, or even “traitors” and “scum of the earth” by their communist victors, the overseas Vietnamese can now take a certain ironic comfort if not pride in the fact that the Hanoi rulers had to revise their opinion, twist their tongue and call them in recent years “the extension of Vietnam’s innards thousands of miles away” (“khuc ruot xa ngan dam” as the expression goes in Vietnamese). But the overseas Vietnamese are not dupe, they are not about to fall into the trap because they are mindful of the The Red Riding Hood story when the wolf, imitating the grandmother, pipes lavish praise into the ears of Little Red Riding Hood as to how wonderful she is or looks.

This is reflected in the amount of dollars they send home every year as compared to the flimsy amount of investment money they bring into the country. If the GDP of Vietnam, i.e. of its 84 million people, at the present time is estimated to come to 58 billion dollars per year, the GDP of 3 million overseas Vietnamese is believed by various experts to be between 30 and 40 billion a year. This explains why they could afford to send home between 3 and 4 billion U.S. dollars a year to help their friends and families or for charity purposes but as far as investment money is concerned, the overseas Vietnamese contribution is minimal, barely reaching one billion in almost 20 years since the Foreign Investment Law was first passed in 1987. If one realizes that the whole world pledges around 2.5 to 3 billion U.S. dollars per year in terms of grants and loan money to Vietnam, then one can see the economic and financial strength of the Vietnamese Diaspora.

It has been said that by pumping that much cash into Vietnam, even though given directly to families and friends, the overseas Vietnamese are actually helping to shore up the regime economically since the money eventually would have to be spent and circulated in Vietnam, thus indirectly doing its share in keeping the economy afloat and even developing. True, nonetheless this is not direct investment money which would be an indication of the level of trust in the government’s laws and policies.

Furthermore, the presence of overseas Vietnamese money, which tends to be outright grants, cash for the most part with no strings attached, hence much more flexible than the ODA (overseas development assistance) money, and which in recent years surpasses every time the whole amount granted and loaned, with strings attached, by the entire international community, is a common reminder of the economic strength of the Vietnamese Diaspora. As such it is the most eloquent reminder of the superior performance of Vietnamese when they are free from the shackles of a communist government and find themselves in a freer environment of competition and individual enterprise.

But the overseas Vietnamese do not just outperform economically the Vietnamese back home, they outperform the latter, one can say, in almost every field of endeavor. And that is the challenge that the government in Hanoi finds it hard to face and to counter. In other words, there is an undeclared but intensive, even if unwitting, competition going on between the overseas Vietnamese and those back home living under communist tutelage that is demonstrating, day in and day out, the superiority of the way of life in western democracies like Great Britain over what is called in Vietnam these days “the market economy with socialist orientation.”

This superiority is hard to argue when it is the sometimes the very same people who thrive in one environment and are stymied in the other. Take, for the instance, the Vietnamese children inside Vietnam and those outside of the country. It is, after all, the same children, the same individuals even, our children, who generally strive their best in school whether inside or outside of Vietnam—simply because it is a Vietnamese tradition for the family to sacrifice for the education of the young ones. But inside Vietnam, they are under a lot of pressure, economic as well as political, to sometimes abandon their studies or forced to study things that they don’t believe in, such as Marxism-Leninism or the thought of Ho Chi Minh. Whereas outside of Vietnam, they are under no such pressure, public education being free in most western democracies at least until college; but more importantly, they are free to choose what they want to study.

This explains why even the communist government in Hanoi has to acknowledge an indisputable fact of life in the Vietnamese Diaspora, the existence of a mass of highly educated youth, conservatively estimated at 300,000, or one-tenth of the overseas Vietnamese population, who are trained at world-class level at universities across the globe. It is this basis in itself which has brought about the phenomenal success of the Vietnamese Diaspora in the last 30 years or so; even its economic success is only a factor, a result, a consequence of that educational basis.

Knowledge-based Success

How can one demonstrate that?

Simple, for success in the modern international environment of the twenty-first century does not, as a rule, come from thin air. In most cases it is very much knowledge-based. A veteran Vietnamese reporter, Mr. Trong Minh Vu Van Chat, who lives out in California, more than two decades ago, already thought of documenting the success of overseas Vietnamese by creating the first sustained Who’s Who of overseas Vietnamese known under the title of Ve Vang Dan Viet, with an English edition entitled The Pride of the Vietnamese. This series, which so far has come out in five fat volumes, is an indication of the multifaceted success of the Vietnamese people outside Vietnam. By just picking here and there some examples, one can see that the outstanding success of the overseas Vietnamese in the last 30 years is very much due to a firm foundation of knowledge.

Take, for instance, Bill Nguyen of California. About six years ago, he was considered one of the most successful entrepreneurs in that millionaire-abounded state. Well, what did he do? Still in his 30’s, he came up with a software that was sold for 670 million U.S. dollars. After he sold that one, he fiddled with an idea which in about half a year later brought him another 87 million dollars. I think it was in 2002 that a huge international computer technology conference held in Las Vegas, gathering some 6000 people, had the motto: “Yesterday, Bill Gates; today, Bill Nguyen.”

But as far as IT (information technology) is concerned, Bill Nguyen did not top the batch. That distinction must be reserved to Trung Dung, a MIT-produced young man living in Boston, who about two years ago came up with a software that allowed multinationals to read at one glance their financial situations around the world practically with a click. This was considered so useful that he sold the software for 1.8 billion.

Speaking about MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), no one in its entire history has approached the record of Nguyen Tue who in seven years managed to get seven degrees, from bachelor of sciences up to and including two Ph.Ds, from that same institution.

Or take Duong Nguyet Anh, the so-called “Bomb Lady” of the U.S. Navy because in her late 30’s she was already made Director of one of the largest U.S. Navy Weapons Development programs. A product of the University of Maryland, she went into this field and oversaw the development of the thermobaric bomb which could blow people out of mountain caves—a very ingenious devise that helps to flush out terrorists like Al Qaeda.

Vietnamese, however, are not just simply inventors. They can also be at the forefront of environmental engineering, for instance. The case of Ngo Nhu Hung Viet, of Viet Ngo (in American terms) of Minnesota, is a case in point. Trained at UM (University of Minnesota), he developed water and waste treatment methods using natural processes instead of a great deal of polluting power and became an instant success with such energy-poor countries like China and Turkey. Several years back, in one year alone, Lemna, Inc., his company, got 2.4 billion dollars worth of contracts in about seven countries around the world. What is even more incredible about Viet Ngo is that his engineering is totally respectful of the people’s natural environment, which not only creates non-polluting technology but also aesthetically satisfactory projects. That is why he is featured as a Vietnamese American artist in the Smithsonian exhibit and catalogue An Ocean Apart, Contemporary Vietnamese Art from the United States and Vietnam (1995), in which I was one of the authors and the main translator.

In terms of management, Vietnamese women do not yield much to the men. A Vietnamese Canadian woman, for instance, is chief financial officer for the city of Montreal just as a Vietnamese American man, Long Pham, is chief financial officer for D.C., where Washington is located. But one can take also Julie Nguyen Brown, a Vietnamese American woman who is President of a multinational producing all sorts of plastic products for cars in the U.S. Her company, I understand, was deemed to be worth 850 million dollars as of last year.

Speaking of autos, one of the most glorious titles undoubtedly belongs to Thai Hau Tang, a Vietnamese American engineer who designed the model for the 2005 Mustang for Ford and subsequently was put in charge of producing that model. In a rather depressing auto industry, which had been overtaken by Japanese models, Thai Hau Tang was so successful with his model that sales of the 2005 Mustang jumped up 25 percent last year. No wonder that in a huge two-page spread in the Washington Post last year, Thai Hau Tang was compared to other great inventors like Thomas Edison and Walt Disney.

Conclusions

We could go on and on but our purpose here is not to brag about Vietnamese around the world. What is more important is that:

One, I hope that I have succeeded in showing that the Vietnamese model of integration into new societies around the world is one that is very harmonious (“di hoa vi quy”) and most respectful of the host countries that have been kind and gracious enough to take us in when we were most vulnerable due to circumstances of history beyond our control.

Two, that pitiful as we were when first taken in, Vietnamese around the world after a very short time became self-sufficient, standing on their two feet and becoming contributing members of the new societies in which they find themselves. Just to give one example, in the U.S. alone, the 1.2 million strong Vietnamese Americans have created over 98,000 businesses providing jobs to hundreds of thousands of not just Vietnamese but also non-Vietnamese people who either partner with them or are employed by them.

Three, that the economic success of overseas Vietnamese has allowed them to go into politics and elected public offices. This is the case of the Honorable Vu Khanh Thanh that we have right here in London, of State Senator like Nguyen Minh Sang in Australia, or Tran Thai Van, Republican Delegate in California, who has announced his intention to run for the State Senate, of Hubert Vo, Democratic Delegate in Texas, who ran a tough campaign and defeated his long-term Republican opponent by 51 votes. Not to be left out, of course, is a woman like Madison Nguyen who ran for City Council in San Jose, CA, the tenth-largest city in the U.S., and won handsomely; Janet Nguyen also ran and gained a seat in the Garden Grove City Council in Southern California, and so on and so forth.

Four, that the indisputable success of overseas Vietnamese represents a huge challenge to the communist system we still have back home in Vietnam. This is what they call “peaceful evolution” (“dien bien hoa binh”) which they do not cease to accuse the United States government of attempting to produce in Vietnam. But peaceful evolution will happen anyway, regardless of the intentions, hostile or otherwise, of the U.S. and for a very simple reason. The success of Vietnamese children in school in the West is a challenge to other students and their classmates, whether they like it or not. The higher education level attained by Vietnamese abroad, more than 300,000 world-class graduates of colleges and universities, is a direct challenge thrown to the universities of Vietnam. The work ethic and family solidarity values of the Vietnamese is an inspiration to us all. And the Vietnamese economic and financial success around the world is a constant reminder to Vietnamese back home that the question of “who is winning over whom” (“Ai thang ai?”), one of the crucial yardsticks that Hanoi has wanted to use in trying to persuade the people of the wisdom of Communism (or what is now “the market economy with socialist orientation”), is already a given. The Vietnamese succeed outside of Vietnam, not just in the U.S. but also in Great Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. This is about the most eloquent answer that Vietnamese abroad can give to the totalitarian regime in Hanoi that, because of its persecutions, forced us out of Vietnam.

Presented: University of Metropolitan London on March 22, 2006