As one of the Vietnam War’s final battles raged four decades ago, Quynh Pham lay with her mother in a field covered in a stranger’s blood. They survived only by pretending to be dead.
They were among an exodus of over a million South Vietnamese who fled oppression and uncertainty before and after US forces retreated and victorious North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon in April 1975, reuniting the two sides under communism.
Pham, 41, resettled in California and is now owner of an art gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, one of a stream of Vietnamese Americans who found their fortunes in a fast-changing Vietnam where capitalism is thriving under communist rule.
Photo: Reuters
Pham runs leading art house Galerie Quynh. In the 17 years she’s lived in Vietnam, her mother has refused to visit.
“When I moved back to Vietnam, she disowned me,” said Pham. “She said, ‘You’re not my daughter.’”
They’ve since buried the hatchet, but Pham’s mother has bitter memories and can’t understand why she returned.
Photo: Reuters
The war drove boatloads of Vietnamese to the US, which had more than 1.5 million citizens of Vietnamese origin in a 2010 census. Others resettled in Australia, Canada, Britain and France via refugee camps in Asia, surviving perilous voyages on crowded, rickety boats on which thousands starved or drowned.
CAPITALIST LURE
Now, many former refugees and their offspring are reaping the gains of Vietnam’s booming emerging market and middle-class growth, tapping a young consumer population that’s embracing Western culture.
The most notable is Henry Nguyen, a venture capitalist and former Goldman Sachs associate from Virginia who co-owns a Los Angeles soccer team and helped bring McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Forbes Magazine to Vietnam.
“Vietnam was in a certain place in its development and I was in a certain place in my life,” Nguyen told Reuters, referring to his return in 1995. “That was a good fit.”
He’s also famous for a marriage that brought together families on opposite sides of the war.
His wife, Phuong, is daughter of Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.
“It forced people who share common values and culture to pick sides,” Nguyen, 41, said of the war. “It’s kind of like a tragicomedy.”
Not all vietkieu, or overseas Vietnamese, can move on. Some are scarred by war and persecution.
But for many, time has drained away that bitterness. US-Vietnamese relations are warming rapidly too, with vietkieu among US diplomats involved in Washington’s moves to make its former foe its newest Asian ally. Vietnam will send its party chief to the US this year for the first time.
Though their role is often overlooked, the vietkieu have been a boon for Vietnam’s economy. Remittances are expected to reach US$13 to US$14 billion this year, central bank data shows, compared with US$12 billion in 2014, worth 8 percent of a GDP that’s grown more than 5 percent a year since 1999.
More than half are from the US.
HIGH VALUE
Vietkieu also bring know-how and capital vital to Vietnam’s trade and high-tech ambitions, contributions Nguyen said apparatchiks like his father-in-law recognize.
“He’s always been one of the more progressive politicians here,” Nguyen said of Dung. “I think all senior political leaders here realize the value of our Vietnamese community elsewhere.”
It’s a symbiotic relationship that presents vietkieu with opportunities they might not have in the US, like new careers or investments in growth areas from coffee shops and restaurant chains to property, fashion, record labels and the manufacturing sector.
Jenni Trang Le has made her mark in the Vietnamese film industry, producing 13 movies, including box office hits, De Mai Tinh 2 and Teo Em.
“It’s not like every movie I make here is Oscar-worthy, but just the fact it’s in Vietnam and it’s in Vietnamese already makes it worth it for me,” Le said.
It’s the kind of niche Andy Ho, managing director of asset firm Vinacapital, recommends vietkieu find to make their return easier. It’s common for Vietnamese Americans to feel anxiety about identity, in the US and in Vietnam.
“You’re not a foreigner, are you?” said Ho, who was raised in Denver. “Yet you’re not Vietnamese either. You’re somewhere in between.”
Dec. 9 to Dec. 15 When architect Lee Chung-yao (李重耀) heard that the Xinbeitou Train Station was to be demolished in 1988 for the MRT’s Tamsui line, he immediately reached out to the owner of Taiwan Folk Village (台灣民俗村). Lee had been advising Shih Chin-shan (施金山) on his pet project, a 52-hectare theme park in Changhua County that aimed to showcase traditional Taiwanese architecture, crafts and culture. Shih had wanted to build all the structures from scratch, but Lee convinced him to acquire historic properties and move them to the park grounds. Although the Cultural
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
The results of the 2024 US presidential election rattled the country and sent shockwaves across the world — or were cause for celebration, depending on who you ask. Is it any surprise then that the Merriam-Webster word of the year is “polarization?” “Polarization means division, but it’s a very specific kind of division,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview ahead of Monday’s announcement. “Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.” The election was so divisive, many American voters went to the polls with a feeling that the opposing candidate was
If you want to witness the last vestiges of human intellect swirling down the drain, hold your nose and type the words “skibidi toilet” into YouTube. The 11-second video features an animated human head protruding from a toilet bowl while singing the nonsensical lyrics “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes.” The clip has been viewed more than 215 million times, and spawned hundreds of millions of references on TikTok and other social media. Fitting, then, that the Oxford word of the year has just been announced as “brain rot.” As an abstract concept, brain rot is something we’re all vaguely aware
RSS