Business Opportunities Draw Viet Kieu Back to Vietnam
By Tini Tran/AP

Steve Lee learned just how hard it is to go home again. After he returned to Vietnam for the first time in 1992 with his father to look for business opportunities in the newly reopened country, they returned to California—and a blatantly hostile Vietnamese American community.

“It was very controversial. They would get on [Vietnamese-language] radio and call my dad a communist,” Lee said. “It made me realize how deeply people felt about it.”

It wasn’t enough to change his mind, though. Six years ago, he moved to Ho Chi Minh City to set up Vietnam’s first Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop.

Lee, 32, is part of a growing vanguard in renewing ties between bitterly anti-communist Viet kieu—overseas Vietnamese—and their socialist homeland.

Three-quarters of the estimated 2.5 million Vietnamese outside the country live in the United States, Canada or France. The vast majority are refugees who fled after U.S.-backed South Vietnam fell to the communist North on April 30, 1975.

Resentment and anger among the Viet kieu over their suffering and losses linger as a final legacy from the war.

In California’s Orange County, home to the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam, the antagonism remains so fierce that many who visit or do business here are reluctant to admit it publicly for fear of being ostracized. There is no greater insult there than to be labeled a “communist.”

Yet ties clearly are deepening with the homeland.

Vietnamese Government statistics say about 280,000 Viet kieu returned for tourism or business last year—more than triple the 87,000 who came in 1992. Only 8,000 visited in 1988.

Cash sent from overseas through official channels totaled more than $1.1 billion in 1999, equal to just under 4 percent of the value of Vietnam’s economic output. Unofficial channels like relatives carrying cash in could easily double the amount, the government says—a fourfold increase from 1997.

Money transfer services see business triple or quadruple before Tet, when Viet kieu flock home to celebrate Vietnam’s biggest holiday. A record 125,000-plus came this year.

Viet kieu business investments totaled $300 million last year, a small but growing part of all foreign direct investment. Officials speculate the figure is even higher from Viet kieu using the names of relatives here to do business.

“It’s a very complicated relationship,” said Nguyen Manh Hung, director of the Indochina program at George Mason University in Virginia.

“Most Vietnamese are still fundamentally anti-communist. So on one hand, they feel they need to show their public disapproval. That means opposing all forms of contact with Vietnam. On the other hand, in private, they say they understand the value of opening up Vietnam to the rest of the world.”

The change has come since Vietnam began opening up, starting with market-oriented economic reforms in 1986. In 1995, the United States re-established diplomatic relations with its former enemy, sparking an investment rush.

The government’s view of its former citizens remains wary, although the official policy is reconciliation. Viet kieu are considered “an integral part of Vietnam,” said Nguyen Phu Binh, vice chairman of the National Committee on Overseas Vietnamese.

Those who return to Vietnam often complain they are treated as outsiders, subject to even more scrutiny than foreigners and routinely charged double or more for services like hotels, airfares and tours.

Binh acknowledges “disadvantages” for Viet kieu, but says the country is trying to ease them, recently introducing a one-fare system and working to create a better business and investment environment.

Vietnamese Americans view their former country with equal suspicion, sometimes militantly. The arrival in the United States of political prisoners released from Vietnam’s re-education camps in the 1990s re-stoked the anti-communist fires.

Still, longtime observers say the attitude toward Vietnam is changing. Even among the most militant, passionate rhetoric has eased as Washington continues down the path of rapprochement.

“The older people die off and the younger people don’t buy into it. Like any bad memory, it will fade with each generation,” said Douglas Pike, director of research at the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University.