Vietnamese American Immigrant Experience [p.3]

I am friends with the young, the ones who are impatient, the ones who want to make change happen at a pace more suitable to their drive and ambition. They are in college. They are college graduates. Some may have grown up in San Diego and intend to stay, but others are only here for a while on their way to bigger and better places. Patience for their elders is what they lack. They don’t have patience for how elders place “tinh cam” before profit. Community organizing is put into corporate, capitalistic terms for the young. Elders approach community organizing in terms of building a cohesive family—a Vietnamese family with all its strengths and dysfunctions.

People predict that once this first generation (the exile generation) is gone, the gap will be less strained by a politics of the homeland and by a divisive anti-communism. Will this really be the case? I find that the young are also “anti-communist,” not in the same way, but I hear it in the narratives they tell me during my interviews these past months. Some describe themselves that way, others are uncomfortable with the label. But the young know why their parents crossed oceans and continents to get here, perhaps not concretely, but they know.

If only the old and young could share their sentiments. Where can we find the space for this to happen? Even the young feel nostalgic at times. Even the young feel displaced. They may feel a connection to Viet Nam that is as real (although intangible) as their connection to America. But can the young understand why respect and tinh cam are so important to their elders? What does it really mean to respect your elders?

I’ve learned that it’s really not the formalities. It’s about understanding that the elders have lived much longer, have lived through war even. Sure, we are ambitious, we are talented, we may hold degrees in organizational behavior or do biomedical research for our day jobs. We are young and the horizon seems vast, endless with possibility. But the elders were young once. Many of the elders I work with hold degrees from another time, another place—engineers, doctors, lawyers, poets...Some have multiple degrees from here and Viet Nam. There’s no shortage of talent or wisdom from the elders. Perhaps each can learn a thing or two from the other.

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Thuy Vo Dang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. She received her B.A. in English and Asian American Studies at Scripps College and completed her M.A. in Ethnic Studies at UCSD in 2003. Currently, Thuy is working on her dissertation which explores the cultural politics of anti-communism among first-generation Vietnamese Americans in San Diego. In the last several years, her volunteer work for a Vietnamese American organization has inspired her to do ethnographic research in this community. She is particularly interested in exploring ways to bridge the community-academy divide and work for a more flexible notion of a Vietnamese American Diaspora. Portions of this piece appeared on her Live Journal blog.