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Vietnamese Diaspora return home to seek roots
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Nguyen Qui Duc, a Vietnamese refugee who became an American radio host and the author of the memoir “Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family,” has found an incarnation in his late-fifties: as a bar owner and art curator in Hanoi. Why would he come back to the country from which he once fled as a refugee?
“Home is where there’s a sense of connection, of family, of community,” he said after struggling to find a single answer. “And I found it here.”
Duc is one of at least 200,000 Viet Kieu who return to Vietnam yearly, many only to visit relatives and for tourism, especially during the Lunar New Year, but a small portion increasingly to work, invest, and retire.
Indeed, 38 years after the Vietnam War ended, the Vietnamese Diaspora is now falling slowly but surely back into Vietnam’s orbit.
Not long ago, a Vietnamese overseas had little more than nostalgic memories to keep cultural ties alive. During the Cold War, letters sent from the United States could take half a year to reach their recipients in Vietnam. Today, however, Hanoi is but a direct flight from Los Angeles, and Vietnamese at home and overseas chat online, text message one another, and video call on Skype.
Overseas Vietnamese play an important role in Vietnam’s economic life.
According to Vietnam’s Chamber of Commerce, in 2008, despite the slowdown in the world economy, Vietnam received overseas aid of more than US$7.4 billion. The Vietnamese government said that the diaspora is reducing poverty and spurring economic development. Official development assistance pledged to Vietnam in 2008 by international donors was US$5 billion, whereas the overseas Vietnamese contributed US$2.4 billion more.
In 2010, the total amount of remittances plus investment funds from the diaspora, according to the Vietnamese government, had reached US$20 billion, or 8 percent of Vietnam’s GDP. Hanoi, seeing the diaspora as a tremendous resource, is even considering granting dual citizenship to Viet Kieus (overseas Vietnamese) to spur further repatriation.
There’s another form of Viet Kieu contribution that is not so tangible, but arguably just as important: themselves.
Nguyen Qui Duc’s bar, Tadioto, an elegant place on Truong Han Sieu Street in Hanoi, has become a gathering place for artists, writers and intellectuals — expatriates and locals alike. “Public space is not yet what it should be in Vietnam,” Duc explained. Each week at Tadioto, Vietnamese American poets and writers share their experiences with their Vietnamese counterparts.
With the presence of so many vocal Viet Kieus in Vietnam, a complex narrative is being formed, one in which knowledge and ideas of the outside world permeate the local culture and society.
Andrew Lam is editor at New America Media and the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” and “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees on America’s West Coast, which won the Pen/Josephine Miles Literary award.
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