Course content

1 section • 1 lecture • 20m total length

Vietnamese Americans20:58
Vietnamese Americans

OVERVIEW

Before 1970, only 3,788 Vietnamese had immigrated to the United States. The first real wave of Vietnamese immigration to the United States began on 30 April 1975 when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese communist forces. At least 65,000 South Vietnamese fled the country that same day. By the end of 1975, some 130,000 Vietnamese refugees had entered the United States. These early refugees tended to be well educated and wealthy; many were high-ranking military officers and government officials. With their high level of skills and education, they adapted quickly to American life and within 10 years were at an equal economic level with the average American citizen.

Because of its involvement in the Vietnam War, the U.S. government felt a responsibility toward the South Vietnamese refugees. Congress passed the Indochina Refugee Act in 1975, allowing up to 200,000 Southeast Asians to enter the United States under a special "parole" status. The U.S. government also allocated $405 million in resettlement aid to help South Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees start a new life in America. The refugees were moved to resettlement camps in the United States where their papers were processed and they were given English language classes. Private organizations matched each of them with a sponsor somewhere in the United States who would then help them resettle in the sponsor's community. Although most of these first refugees could only find low-paying jobs and many ended up on welfare, the U.S. government planned to phase out its aid program by 1977.

However, the situation in Vietnam worsened, and by 1978 thousands more refugees had fled the country. Some 85,000 climbed aboard overcrowded, flimsy boats and attempted to cross the sea to safety. These desperate folk came to be known as the "boat people." U.S. Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 to admit more Vietnamese refugees. In this second wave of Vietnamese immigration, 95,000 refugees entered the United States in 1980 and 86,000 in 1981. In contrast to the first wave, most of these refugees were poorly educated farmers and fishermen who had a much more difficult time adapting to life in the industrialized United States.

The Orderly Departure Program was put into effect in 1982 to reduce the number of people risking their lives in boats to escape Vietnam. Under this new program, 66,000 more Vietnamese entered the United States between 1983 and 1991. In 1987, Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act to help Amerasian teenagers (the children of Vietnamese women and American military men) and their families immigrate to the United States.

The 2000 U.S. Census counted 1,223,736 Vietnamese Americans (0.04% of the total U.S. population; about 10% of the total Asian American population). The total estimated population of Vietnamese Americans in 2006 had climbed to almost 1.5 million. According to the census, 73% of Vietnamese Americans in 2000 were foreign-born and 83% spoke only or mostly Vietnamese at home.

At first, Vietnamese refugees settled near their U.S. sponsors throughout the United States. The U.S. government hoped to spread out the impact so that no one community would be overly burdened by a sudden influx of newcomers. Most Vietnamese settled in California, with a large number in Texas and sizeable groups in Pennsylvania, Florida, Washington, Illinois, New York, and Louisiana.

However, family and kinship groups are very important to traditional Vietnamese, so they began a secondary migration within the United States to rejoin their families. They also moved from smaller towns and rural areas to cities where they would have better access to jobs and community and government services. Many also moved to warmer climates. California and Texas now host over half of all Vietnamese Americans; the original "Little Saigon," south of Los Angeles, is the center of the Vietnamese American community, with Houston's newly dubbed "Little Saigon" taking second place.

Acquiring English language proficiency is no easy task for Vietnamese Americans. The Vietnamese language differs from English in fundamental ways, making the shift from one to the other extremely difficult. American-born Vietnamese Americans, who have grown up speaking English, and those who came to the United States as small children, are easily bilingual. Older foreign-born Vietnamese Americans, however, still speak Vietnamese almost exclusively at home and among friends and family and struggle to speak English when necessary in non-Vietnamese society. Vietnamese Americans have not been in the United States long enough to have a significant population of third-generation immigrants (children born to American-born Vietnamese) who might begin to lose their fluency in Vietnamese.

Most Vietnamese Americans are Buddhist of the "Northern School," also known as Mahayana Buddhism. Vietnamese Buddhist temples exist throughout the United States. Other religions are also represented among Vietnamese Americans, including Confucianism (considered a philosophy rather than a religion by some), Taoism, Cao-Dai (a combination of Eastern belief systems), and Hoa-Hao (a meditative sect originating in the Mekong Delta in 1939). A small minority of Vietnamese Americans are either Muslim or Protestant.

Although Roman Catholics make up only 10% of the population of Vietnam, a third or more of Vietnamese Americans are Catholic. This is due both to the high percentage of Roman Catholics among the first wave of refugees, and the involvement of Roman Catholic organizations in refugee resettlement in the United States. Many Vietnamese refugees, in gratitude to their Roman Catholic U.S. sponsors, at least nominally converted to Roman Catholicism. One of the largest parishes is in New Orleans and played a significant role in relief efforts after hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005. Some 30,000 Vietnamese Americans were affected by the hurricanes, either evacuated to other cities and states or left homeless in New Orleans. Told that their parish would not be resettled, Father Vien Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church in New Orleans organized his parishioners to conduct a furious campaign of photos, petitions, and visits to the utility company Entergy to persuade them to reestablish electrical service to the parish. Entergy eventually agreed to restart services, allowing for the return of more Vietnamese Americans as well as others to the city.

Another Vietnamese American organization contributed greatly to relief and resettlement efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi after the 2005 hurricane disaster. First established in 1980 to aid Vietnamese "boat people," Boat People SOS (BPSOS) developed over the years into an agency that helps Vietnamese immigrants to the United States in many ways, including advocating for them with policy-makers in the U.S. government. When Katrina and Rita caused the flooding of New Orleans and the Mississippi coastline, BPSOS used its experience air-lifting boat people in the 1980s to rescue those stranded by the hurricanes. BPSOS continues to follow and assist Vietnamese Americans as they resettle either in their former homes or in communities to which they were relocated.

The most important holiday for Vietnamese Americans is Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Occurring sometime between mid-January and mid-February (based on the Chinese lunar calendar), it is a combination New Year, spring, family, and national festival. Traditionally, Tet lasts for seven days, but most Vietnamese Americans celebrate only the first three. As every Vietnamese has two birthdays, their personal birthday and Tet, Tet also becomes a community-wide birthday party. Other elements of Tet include the payment of debts, forgiveness of past wrongs, and vows of personal improvement.

First-wave Vietnamese Americans, who were generally well educated and had job skills relevant to the industrialized American work world, now enjoy living conditions comparable to or better than the national average. Second-wave refugees, however, have had a more difficult time succeeding in the United States. With less formal schooling and few relevant job skills, many second-wave refugees have either been stuck in low-paying blue-collar jobs or remain unemployed. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, almost 10% of all Vietnamese American families, and over 25% of families with a woman alone as head of the household, lived below the poverty level. Some 12% of individuals were also living below the poverty level.

Health problems common to recent refugees, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, and lowered immunities, plague the Vietnamese American community. Many Vietnamese Americans were also exposed to tuberculosis either in Vietnam or in refugee camps. Cultural attitudes and traditions contribute to health issues, particularly among Vietnamese American women. Modesty combined with the language barrier discourage many women from getting regular health screenings such as Pap smears and mammograms, resulting in a high fatality rate for cancers that remain undetected into advanced stages. In the late 1990s, the rate of cervical cancer among Vietnamese American women was higher than that of any other ethnic group and almost five times that of European American women.

Traditionally, the family is the center of Vietnamese culture. Most Vietnamese Americans continue to cling to the family as their source of support in their new home, as well as continuing to support those they left behind, sending money every month to family members in Vietnam and sponsoring their relatives to join them in the United States whenever possible.

Vietnamese Americans tend to eat traditional Vietnamese foods at home. A few cities with large Vietnamese American populations now boast Vietnamese restaurants where traditional foods are served. In 2007 Vietnamese American chef Hung Huynh won the Season 3 Top Chef competition on Bravo TV.

Young Vietnamese Americans, like other Asian American students, tend to be high achievers at school. Despite language and cultural barriers, they work hard and are eager to acquire the skills necessary to succeed in their American homeland. Many adult Vietnamese Americans attend adult education classes for English language and job skills training. Vietnamese Americans often describe themselves with the traditional Vietnamese phrase tran can cu, which expresses a combination of hard work, persistence, ambition, and patience. Their short history in the United States so far shows this to be an apt description.

In recent years, more Vietnamese Americans are becoming known outside the Vietnamese American community for their successes in various fields. The book, Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, published in 1998 by the Asian American Writers' Workshop (edited by Barbara Tran, Monique T. D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi), gathers together the works of a number of Vietnamese American writers, including novelists, short story writers, and poets. In sports, Catherine Mai Lan Fox is a gold medalist swimmer, Danny Graves has played baseball in the major and minor leagues, and Dat Nguyen plays football with the NFL. Hugely popular in the Vietnamese American community, musician and composer Pham Duy has yet to become well-known among the general American population.

Vietnamese Americans have found the most employment success in the area of small business ownership. Most are family run and serve primarily Vietnamese American customers. Typical Vietnamese American businesses include restaurants, specialty grocery stores, laundries and tailor shops, convenience stores, beauty salons, car repair garages, and real estate offices. The U.S. Census Bureau counted more than 147,000 Vietnamese American businesses throughout the United States in 2002, with combined receipts of over $15.5 billion.

Vietnamese Americans suffer from the same problem that all new immigrant communities face: the tension between foreign-born elders who continue to hold to traditional values and American-born young people who have been acculturated to American values. In the Vietnamese American community, this breakdown of traditional generational authority and respect has led to a particularly violent situation. Vietnamese American teenagers are bonding together in youth gangs to protect themselves from anti-Asian discrimination and to give each other the support they feel is lacking at home. Most often, gang violence is directed at other Vietnamese Americans. Much of it goes unreported because the victims do not trust the police, fear retaliation on the part of the gangs, and/or do not wish to give the Vietnamese American community a bad name.

There is also some tension between first-wave and second-wave Vietnamese Americans. The more educated and successful first-wave refugees criticize second-wave refugees for their lack of success and their dependence on welfare. Second-wave refugees, on the other hand, resent the privilege and snobbery of the first-wave refugees. For the most part, this tension is a continuation of class conflicts in Vietnam between the educated elite (the first wave of refugees) and less educated laborers (the second wave).

Vietnamese women have had a particularly difficult time in their journey to becoming Americans. Those who escaped Vietnam on boats were subjected to rape by pirates, and life in the refugee camps was likewise dangerous. Separated from family members and forced to survive on their own, they became both more independent than traditional Vietnamese culture allows for women, as well as deeply fearful of being without a man's support.

Traditional Vietnamese culture with its patriarchal structure promotes values of subordination and submission for women. The Four Virtues of womanhood are good work habits, good appearance, good speech, and good behavior. The Three Obediences command women to be subordinate to their fathers when young, to their husbands when married, and to their eldest sons when widowed. A man is allowed to beat his wife as long as he inflicts no lasting injuries, and women are expected to submit without complaint. These values come into direct conflict with American values of egalitarianism, as well as with U.S. laws prohibiting domestic violence. Some Vietnamese American women report that their husbands beat them less often since arriving in the United States for fear of being arrested. But traditional behaviors as well as the stress of relocation and dislocation contribute to an ongoing problem with domestic violence. Fear of bringing shame to the family, and a lack of knowledge about available services to help abuse victims, prevents many Vietnamese American women from reporting the abuse. Information about the extent of the problem comes from studies done within the population with those willing to speak out.

Gay and lesbian Vietnamese Americans also suffer from the rigid patriarchal structure of traditional Vietnamese culture. Such a heavy emphasis is laid on traditional gender roles, as well as on the importance of marriage and family, that many Vietnamese American lesbians and gays choose never to come out to their families rather than risk bringing shame to the family and/or being rejected by them.

Description

Vietnamese Americans

Explore related topics

Course content

Vietnamese Americans1 lecture • 21min

Description