An Immigrant Story, Part 1: The New World

My family's immigration story from Vietnam to France to the United States, and the geopolitical context for the Vietnamese diaspora.

A while ago a close college friend suggested that I write a comprehensive story about my family’s immigrant experience. Over decades of friendship, he had heard episodes and seen anecdotes on social media, but I had not told anyone a comprehensive version, much less written about it. I’d get around to it eventually, went my thinking. Then, last year I finally sat down and wrote what I could recall and gather from my parents’ journals, many of which were not available to me until my mom’s death, in 2019. I shared the result with my friend and other interested folks, but until now I have thought that I would need to alter its form for a wider readership. As several friends have told me, “There’s at least one book here.” I’ll get around to that, too, eventually.

A few days ago, at a Sunday lunch in Livingston, Montana, I chatted with a stranger about her upbringing along the Gulf Coast of Texas. She said that during her elementary school years, the number of Vietnamese students grew from zero to 15 percent almost overnight. She became friends with many of them, she said, and she regretted not asking or knowing then how and why they and their families suddenly appeared. As an adult, she would learn enough to understand the geopolitical circumstances around their mass migration. 

As a child, she also heard among some of the adults around her about how these newcomers were competing against them in the crabbing and shrimping waters of the Gulf and disturbing their ways of life. Some expressed their concerns at town-hall meetings, and outsiders came to protest the flood of unwanted immigrants. In the small fishing village of Seadrift, not far south of where she grew up, the tension led to a shooting of a white man by a Vietnamese, who was later deemed by a jury to have acted in self-defense. Nonetheless, the incident brought the Ku Klux Klan to town, who arrived with white robes, assault rifles, and a declaration of war. The townspeople listened to the Klan’s statements in a community meeting, and then, as a group, voted to expel the extremist group. They could resolve their own conflicts, some of them argued. Remarkably, no further violence occurred and the Klan members left.¹

When I told the woman I met that my family had immigrated here when I was 10, she perked up with keen interest. Her curiosity encouraged me to share this written story with her. After reading it, she sent this reaction: “I can't tell you how many times I've lamented the fact that I was so clueless about my friends' experiences growing up. By the time I was able to understand what they had gone through, I'd lost touch with them. And now that I've read your piece, I realize they may not have wanted to discuss it at all, which is understandable.” She was right: If we had known each other as 10-year-olds, I would not have shared my family’s story. While for her the lack of information fueled a desire to learn, for others it could give room for the imagination to do its worst.

In the past few weeks the large number of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio has caught national attention. To me, the episode immediately looked and sounded familiar: A sudden increase of new arrivals has strained existing resources, a community struggles to adjust, and outsiders are reducing complex problems that need real solutions to soundbites that stir anger among extremist groups. In the middle of it all are the people who likely feel misunderstood, immigrants and long-time Springfield residents alike. 

This reflexive perspective that a mass influx of immigrants would cause harm to culture and livelihood is not new, nor is it particularly American. But in the United States, the land of immigrants, it reflects a particular contradiction that reaches back to before the birth of the nation. In 1753, future-Founding Father Benjamin Franklin—the son of an immigrant who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to escape religious persecution—warned in a letter to a friend of a mass migration of a people into the Pennsylvania Colony whom he viewed as “generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation.”² These refugees were fleeing from poverty and famine in their homeland—and they were German. Two years earlier, he had pondered in a widely distributed pamphlet whether they would “shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”³

Of course, the German immigrants would adopt both the language and customs, and they would contribute to the war to gain American independence. Many groups from many other places have since come here and not only adopted our language and customs, but also enriched both with their idioms, cuisines, and fashion. And they have filled the ranks of our military in every war since the Revolution. The threads of their narratives have been woven into the American tapestry, celebrating this nation as one founded on equal opportunity, which is what all newcomers have come here to seek.

That kitchen conversation and my new friend’s reaction have prompted me to share my family’s immigrant story now with all of you, and not wait to write a book. My hope is that it will generate greater curiosity about not just the Haitians in Springfield, but also any group whose migration in large numbers often allows others to reduce them to a stereotype or a convenient ideological tool. I’m sharing it in parts for easier reading:

• “An Immigrant Story, Part 1: The New World”

• “An Immigrant Story, Part 2: The Escape Attempts”

• “An Immigrant Story, Part 3: The Greatest Fear”

• “An Immigrant Story, Part 4: The Restless Ghosts”

An Immigrant Story, Part 1: The New World

The first friend I invited to my family’s home in the United States was also in the fifth grade at my school. He was another Vietnamese boy but much more Americanized than I. His name was Steve. I have forgotten his last name, and my class photo from that one year spent at Lampson Elementary, in Garden Grove, does not help recall. Steve and I were not in the same classroom, and mine accommodated a good number of us who were categorized as English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. In the photo, Mrs. Sandell’s was the only white face, framed with curly blonde hair. Seventeen of the 28 students had Vietnamese last names, along with eight with Hispanic ones. The remaining three were Cambodian, Hmong, and Japanese, or as I guessed based on their surnames. Garden Grove, a city in Southern California with a 90 percent white population in the early 1970s, became the geographical center of the Vietnamese diaspora by the decade’s end. At Lampson, Steve and I must have met on the playground during recess. Back then, we befriended one another while waiting in line for foursquare or tetherball, so two kids who were not in the same classroom could easily become fast friends. 

When that academic year began, in September of 1985, I had been in the country for less than two months. Our family emigrated from France in July and, after spending a summer sleeping on the floors and couches in the homes of relatives and friends, we moved into our first American apartment just a few days before the opening of school. My older siblings are one year apart, and they were headed together to Orange High School, my brother as a junior and my sister, a sophomore. Five years younger than my sister, I walked to the elementary school less than a mile from our apartment. Each day I would pass the iconic Crystal Cathedral, made famous by its founder, the televangelist Robert Schuller, who appeared at the pulpit on Sunday mornings on my family’s TV set when we were surveying the handful of channels for something to watch. I was wholly ignorant of Christianity at that point, but the images of those sermons and the sound of the massive pipe organ were among my first introductions to life in America.

Some of my Vietnamese American classmates were born here not long after their parents had successfully fled the Fall of Sài Gòn, in April of 1975. I am guessing now that the few in the class photo who went by American names—like Tony and John in my classroom, and my friend Steve—fell into that group. Others were infants among that same first wave of roughly 138,800 refugees who escaped the civil war’s end and quickly resettled in the United States. I was 40 days old when South Việt Nam surrendered, and our family also tried but failed to leave the country during those final days. (The victorious Communist government called this event Giải Phóng, or Liberation, while the expat Vietnamese named it Tháng Tư Đen, or Black April; I will refer to it as Reunification.) I could not tell now looking at the class photo, but, statistically speaking, some probably were slightly older when they came later as part of the United Nations’ Orderly Departure Program (ODP). Between 1980 and 1997, the United States accepted more than 450,000 Vietnamese political and economic refugees. Many of whom were former prisoners in the Communist gulags—labor camps aimed at “re-educating” former enemies—and their families. (More on the ODP later.) These figures likely represent an undercount, and they do not include the more than 200,000 ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese who also fled the country before the program. 

In September of 1985, I believe I was the only Vietnamese student in Mrs. Sandell’s classroom who was not born here and had not come directly from Việt Nam or a refugee camp elsewhere. I was the only Vietnamese who lacked any English skills but could speak another Western language. Still within the optimal language acquisition window, I had become fluent during our two-year stay in France. Most of my ethnically Vietnamese classmates also spoke our mother tongue, some more fluently than others. At school, I spoke mostly Vietnamese, even in the classroom. I enjoyed math and excelled at it, because math instruction in French schools was at least one grade level ahead of American ones. But I suffered from points deducted on homework assignments and tests because I would skip most of the word problems.

Incidentally, the only other student who struggled with English as much as I did was Alejandro, who joined our class midyear from Mexico and was seated near me. I remember feeling an immediate bond with him, but of course he could only talk to the other Hispanic students in class. No one else knew French. 

Not long ago I happened to see photos of my eleventh birthday celebration, where Steve was the only school friend invited. Staring at a photo with him, I was reminded how much my friend resembled a young River Phoenix, as much as a 10-year-old Vietnamese boy could resemble the actor. Of course, I did not think that at the time. Years later, the likeness struck me when I saw the movie Stand By Me. Steve and Phoenix’s character had similar mannerisms and exuded the same self-confidence. I was in the eighth or ninth grade by then. My family had moved twice more from the Garden Grove apartment, and my first American close friend and I had long lost touch with one another. 

In that old photo, Steve looked somewhat out of place, and not simply because he was the only person present who was not a member of my family. My aunt, uncle, and two cousins had come from Visalia for the weekend. Steve did not look like us. What I mean is, he did not appear a recent immigrant. My mom’s younger brother and his family also left Việt Nam in 1983, four months after we did, but they came straight here. Steve stood several inches taller than my same-age cousin and me, enough that in one group photo he easily rested an elbow on my shoulder. He also spoke English fluently and sounded native, while my cousins and I were struggling with our accent. Similar to his white doppelgänger in Stand By Me, Steve carried himself with a confidence that belonged to older kids, maybe even a middle-schooler. His concentrating face featured a faint vertical line between the eyebrows, a premature wrinkle that made him look beyond his age. 

Steve is in the blue shirt, with his elbow on my shoulder.

Steve was likely the only school friend I invited home all of that school year. I made friends easily—a skill honed by attending four schools within two years—but I was getting to the age of being self-aware and, therefore, self-conscious. Our American home was filled with used furniture bought at garage sales—as were most of my clothes—and we spread newspaper across our dining table instead of a tablecloth. For the better part of that first year, our TV sat on a cardboard box. I felt shame for appearing like the outsiders that we were.

One of the first things I learned about our new nation was that it prided itself on being “a melting pot.” While the then-popular phrase meant that United States comprised many ethnicities and cultural groups, newcomers felt the expectation to assimilate, and to do so expeditiously. One needed to fit in—to melt away the differences in language, dress, and behavior. Most American elementary school students did not learn a foreign language as a matter of course, and some were not required to do so until high school. I knew immediately that, to fit in, I needed to master my third language, especially the sound of it.

Like I had done with French, I absorbed the English language by watching TV. I measured my fluency by how comfortable I was with the dialogue, and so it might be fair to say that my earliest and most constant teachers were the after-school cartoons and, by the sixth grade, the reruns of Leave It to Beaver, Gilligan’s Island, and The Twilight Zone. As my taste in popular entertainment matured, so did the vocabulary and its usage by the characters. The childish shenanigans of “Beaver” Cleaver and slapstick humor of the marooned tourists and crew of the S.S. Minnow gave way, in middle school, to greater complexities in Silver Spoon, Diff’rent Strokes, and Family Ties. Of course, much of the “situation” of these sitcoms flew over my head because I lacked adequate cultural knowledge. 

Considering them now, I can see how these programs provided vague concepts of class, race, and political affiliation, although it would be years before I could decipher the meanings. The easiest concept for me to grasp viscerally at age ten was wealth. One early enduring image of American wealth came even before my family set foot here. While we were still in France, Uncle Trung—whose family was present for my eleventh birthday—sent a photograph of him, Aunt Nụ, and my two cousins standing in the driveway of their rented house in Visalia. At the time my family of six were packing ourselves into a small apartment in a Parisian suburb, where the idea of living in a house with grassy lawns sounded luxurious. They were standing in the driveway and leaning against a shiny bright blue car, another unimaginable possession. By then, I had been inside a car just a handful of times. Much later, I would laugh with my cousins at the fact that the car in the photo was a Ford Pinto, which they did not know then would become the shorthand for shoddy products. In France, as my siblings and parents passed around the photo and tried to envision our future lives in America, that automobile symbolized a distant dream.

American television captivated me, especially the laugh-track sitcoms that were ubiquitous in the 1980s. While I could not identify personally with Ricky Stratton, the millionaire’s son in Silver Spoons, I found kindred spirits in Willis and Arnold Jackson, the Black brothers adopted by a white millionaire in Diff’rent Strokes. In the show, they are akin to economic refugees, swooped up by the largess of Phillip Drummond, a widower who lives in a Park Avenue tower and who is a symbol of American prosperity. Their mother used to work for Drummond, and after her death he adopts the boys and “rescues” them from Harlem. The theme song’s lyrics summarize their identities: 

A man is born, he's a man of means.
Then along come two, they got nothing but their jeans.

In the opening credits, we see the boys abandoning a basketball game with other Black kids and running into Drummond’s outstretched arms and chauffeured limo. Minutes into the pilot episode, they appear at Drummond’s front door, Willis carrying one suitcase and Arnold cradling a small fish tank. They had left everything behind, except for a little more than just “their jeans,” and they would not need any of it, anyway. I intuitively understood the situation of their comedy because my family, too, had come to this land of opportunity with little more than the clothes on our bodies and the few belongings we could carry with our hands.

I remember the first time I recognized myself in a character on TV, mostly because it came unexpectedly. It happened sometime around 1987, probably. I would have been in the sixth or seventh grade then. By the mid-1980s, Hollywood had produced dozens of movies about the Vietnam War, but few about the Vietnamese experience and none about the lives of resettled refugees. Nothing on TV other than the news told their stories, which is to say that the refugees I saw rarely spoke. We only saw them, and they looked ragged and displaced—we still see refugees on our screens the same way today. I was startled when I saw a Vietnamese boy around my age on one of my favorite shows, set not in any of the hotspots for resettlement but in Columbus, Ohio.

Debuting in the fall of 1982, Family Ties is about a middle-class, white-collar family of five living in suburban middle America. The show reflected the political and cultural shifts of its time as the nation was adjusting to a new president whom, before the election two years earlier, many in his own party had deemed too old and not smart enough to challenge the highly intelligent incumbent Jimmy Carter. But Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood smile and masterful speaking skills quickly captured the hearts of a new generation that wanted to feel optimistic about their future. They were the children of parents who had gone to Việt Nam or protested against the war, or both. In the Keaton household of Family Ties, Steven and Elyse are former hippies-turned-urban professionals who find their values questioned and tested by the oldest of their three kids, Alex, a devoted Republican who hangs a poster of Richard Nixon in his bedroom and carries a briefcase to high school.

The episode, titled “I Gotta Be Ming,” first aired in February of 1983 and addressed a topic that Vietnamese everywhere at the time were following closely. By then, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had designated it “a grave crisis.”⁴ The mass exodus of boat refugees from Southeast Asia had infiltrated the American collective imagination, in the form of hundreds of thousands of strangers on U.S. soil, mostly Vietnamese, but also people from Cambodia and Laos. For some Americans these newcomers presented a chance to make up for having abandoned their allies in war; for others, they were unwelcome competitors for jobs and housing and a vague threat to the established way of life.

Just between July 1979 and July 1982, according to a U.N. report from 2000, the United States, Australia, France, and Canada together absorbed 623,800 refugees from Southeast Asia.⁵ A large number of them were resettled in the United States. In the Family Ties episode, the Keatons volunteer with a relocation organization and befriend a 10-year-old boy and his mother, members of this second wave of Vietnamese refugees. Like Ming, I also came here at 10 years old, but I was still in Việt Nam when it first aired. By the time I saw it in a rerun I was fluent enough in English to understand the story of Ming’s family. But I would take decades longer to comprehend the larger historical and political context for the Vietnamese diaspora, including why Ming’s name has Chinese roots. (The Vietnamese name Minh sounds identical to Ming, and so I was not aware of the Chinese variant used by the show until I rewatched the episode on YouTube not long ago.)

Four years after the end of the civil war to unite the two Việt Nams, 1979 seemed a breaking point for many Vietnamese, as widespread hunger squeezed the lives of nearly everyone from the elite to the peasant. A culmination of natural disasters and calamities caused by human decisions led to it. A severe drought in 1977, heavy floods in 1978, and a subsequent infestation by insects dwindled the production of rice, the main food source that accounted for 85 percent of daily calories. Việt Nam’s invasion of China-backed Cambodia in late 1978 and China’s retaliatory incursion into northern Việt Nam further depleted national resources and destroyed valuable farmlands. The Sino-Vietnamese War along the northern border lasted for just one month but caused an outsized ripple effect in the south, especially in and around Sài Gòn, where a large population of ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese had thrived for decades. (Although renamed Hồ Chí Minh City after Reunification, the former Southern capital still commonly goes by Sài Gòn.) The political turmoil between Việt Nam and China and a long standing xenophobia forced hundreds of thousands of Chinese Vietnamese to flee, beginning in the fall of 1978, using overland routes as well as escaping by sea. Instead of preventing the Chinese flight, local government officials encouraged it through a “half-official” policy that involved taking payments and turning a blind eye to the escapees. 

Many Southern Vietnamese who previously regarded fleeing by boat as too dangerous and expensive found inspiration in this exodus. Some of them forged Chinese identities and paid the bribes demanded by officials. My mom wrote in her journal about a popular saying at the time: “Nếu cột đèn biết đi, nó cũng đi thôi”—“If lampposts could walk, they too would go.” In 1979, my mom’s older brother Thế and his wife took to the sea with their six kids. Prior to the war’s end, he had been a civilian physician and trained in the United States, but he was still unemployed even after completing eight months of Communist “re-education” to earn a work permit. Following a brief stay in a refugee camp and then Guam for processing, his family came to the United States, joining a younger brother who had escaped Sài Gòn on the night before its surrender and was living in California. (More on these stories here.)

Later that year, Mom took the day-long journey to see Dad, who was also in “re-education,” and this was one of the few stories about that period she would later tell me. They were sitting at a wooden table during the supervised visit. A guard stood nearby and watched for any misconduct, such as the passing of a note or the whispering of any conspiratorial plans. By then, the prisoners (they were mostly men) and their wives had developed ways to sneak photographs or letters past the watchful eyes and codes to discuss certain topics. They decided together that she should leave the country with their children. Unlike Uncle Thế, my dad’s crime was his employment in South Việt Nam’s government. As such, his release seemed improbable, and life was quickly becoming impossible for her and three young children. She went home from that visit resolved to leave him behind, and he went to sleep that night with the conflicting hope that she would succeed—and therefore he might never see her again—and fear that his wife and children would perish at sea. It’s hard for me to imagine what either of them felt or thought, especially as they said what was possibly the final goodbye but could not betray their secret plans by saying the actual words. 

To be continued in “An Immigrant Story, Part 2: The Escape Attempts.”

1. The story of Seadrift was well reported then and more recently. I recommend the 2019 documentary, Seadrift, directed by Tim Tsai. The film does not use any voiceover and lets the people who lived the events speak for themselves, including the adult daughter of the man who was killed.

2. “From Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, 9 May 1753,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0173. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, July 1, 1750, through June 30, 1753, ed. Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, pp. 477–486.] Accessed 25 September 2024.

3. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751,” Founders Online, National Archives, version of January 18, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080. [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, July 1, 1750, through June 30, 1753, ed. Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, pp. 225–234.] Accessed 25 September 2024.

4. The State of The World's Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, “Chapter 4: Flight from Indochina.” UN Refugee Agency, January 1, 2000, https://www.unhcr.org/media/state-worlds-refugees-2000-fifty-years-humanitarian-action-chapter-4-flight-indochina. Accessed 25 September 2024.

5. Ibid.