Vietnamese American Immigrant Experience [p.2]

While I waited, I worked diligently and managed to write several pages of interview summaries. I found myself a sunny little spot in the children’s section where the chairs are little and the nooks and crannies are filled with brightly illustrated books. I always like to sit in the children’s section of public libraries because it reminds me of my early days holed up in the library near our house in Orange County reading everything in sight.

A little after 2:30, a flood of children came into the library, the after-school rush. I didn’t mind their noise—the exchanges between friends about their homework assignments, parents helping their kids check out the week’s reading...I noticed the crowd was diverse: Latinos, Southeast Asians, white.

I heard familiar Vietnamese being spoken by a father and son sitting just behind me. The father is in his late 40s and his son is probably in the fourth or fifth grade. The father is working-class—I can tell from his appearance: the clothes wrinkled and mismatched, the hands work-worn and rough, the expression slightly jaded reminded me of my own father. He encouraged his son to study hard and to get good grades. I looked back at the pair several times and noticed the father was studying me as well. I must appear sorely out of place in their section of the library with my laptop and my sober expression. He probably wondered what I was up to, sitting there all self-important and tapping rapidly on my keyboard as though my life depended on getting the words down. I tried to ignore his piercing gaze and continued working.

While I was in the middle of a sentence I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see the father towering over me, papers in hand. His son was nowhere in sight. In a hesitant voice and with broken English, he asked me to check his son’s homework. I asked him respectfully, in Vietnamese, if he wanted me to look over the work and see if his son followed instructions correctly. He looked so relieved that I could speak Vietnamese. He said he thought I was Japanese.

After looking over the worksheet involving very elementary math, I found some errors and the father had his son come over to talk to me. I explained the problem and the boy promptly went back to his table and back to work. His father sat by him all the while not understanding any of the work, but supportive and encouraging. I never had that kind of help from my parents. I wonder if the boy knows to appreciate his father, or is he embarrassed that his father goes up to random strangers to ask for help? Before the boy and his father left the library, they came over to thank me and say good-bye.

Linda Vista still has such a large population of low-income Vietnamese families. I am glad that my sister’s outreach work is here. Had I chosen to go to the usual spots—Starbucks or Borders—to do work, I would not have met and helped the father and son. And although I know my help was very inconsequential in the broader picture, I was able to witness a father loving his son in the best way he could: by recognizing his own limitations as an immigrant parent with little English skills but not being shy about finding help for his son—a small gesture, but such a meaningful one for me.

As we began our Tet festival planning, I found myself in the role of mediator, mediating between the elders and the youth who are really working towards very similar goals—putting on a cultural celebration for the San Diego community during Tet. I don’t buy the generation gap as a catch-all explanation for the lack of cooperation between old and young in the Vietnamese community, but there’s some currency in that idea.

Here’s what I see happening. The old want to train the young to take over community work so that in due time, they will have enough perspective and awareness about what it means to be Vietnamese. The young want to take over now, without the perceived outmoded, nostalgic practices of their elders. The old want to sustain a Vietnamese culture in diaspora, they want continuity in Vietnamese language, they want later generations to remember the reasons for their exile from Viet Nam. They do not want to be forgotten. The young want to move on from nostalgia, do things more like “Americans,” be more efficient, and create their new version of Vietnamese American culture. Where’s the middle ground?

As a nearly second-generation Vietnamese American, I work for a first-generation organization that can’t seem to recruit the young, can’t seem to touch them, can’t get them to care for the same issues. The elders profess to me the desire to build and sustain a Vietnamese American community for posterity’s sake. But they also cling to a framework of organizing they have depended on for years—the familiar familial way. Many of the elders are unrelenting about formalities. Respect. I’ve had to learn all about this as I learned to work with these men and women who remind me of my own parents.