ABOUT US
Except for Native Americans, we are all immigrants. In most cases, we or our ancestors came to this country to pursue the “American Dream”: freedom, opportunity, prosperity.But for Vietnamese Americans, it was a different story.They didn’t choose a future in America; in a sense, it chose them. In the days leading up to the fall of Saigon in late April, 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled their homeland, fearing brutal reprisals from the advancing communist North Vietnamese army. In the late 70’s another massive wave of refugees fled the new regime’s program of forced resettlement, “re-education”and virtual slavery. The refugees faced unimaginable hardship. Some scrambled for spaces on the last U.S.helicopters and ships to pull out;many walked hundreds of miles through the jungle; and hundreds of thousands jammed onto anything that would float.These “Boat People”, with only meager rations to last sometimes for weeks, could only trust their fate to the sea. Virtually helpless, they were not just at the mercy of nature.They were subjected to almost daily raids by brutal pirates who raped and killed as they went. Some neighboring countries turned them away. Estimates of the number who died or were lost at sea range as high as 500,000. The survivors, along with a continuous flow of additional refugees after 1980, eventually settled in countries around the world, some 850,000 of them in the United States, where immigration policy, as well as the immigrants’ own preferences, placed them in hundreds of communities around the country. In the mere 32 years since the first Vietnamese refugees landed in America, this remarkable people has overcome the further obstacles of language, culture and discrimination to make a home for themselves in a strange land.With one foot in each of two vastly different cultures, they have attained an amazing balance between assimilating and maintaining their cherished cultural traditions and values. Vietnamese Americans, today numbering more than 1.5 million, are contributing substantially to their communities and to our country in virtually every field of endeavor, with impressive rates of education, household income, home ownership and business ownership. Though not seeking it, the Vietnamese in the USA have truly, in the span of just two generations, begun to realize the American dream.And they have earned it.