Half a World Away, Vietnamese Build Lives on the American Bayou

The capture of Saigon by communist forces in 1975 prompted a massive exodus from South Vietnam; 15-year-old Dung Nguyen and his family were among the “boat people” who headed out to sea that year in search of permanent rescue. An American military ship found them within a day. Nguyen watched as the family fishing boat drifted off, empty.

“In Vietnam the (Viet Cong) – everything belonged to them. No freedom…” Nguyen recalls. “That’s why we had to leave. Only one thing. Freedom.”

After a few months in Guam, a flight to the United States brought Nguyen, his eight siblings and their parents to Eglin Air Force Base in north Florida, one of four military facilities that processed the early wave of refugees. Some 760,000 more would arrive over the next decade from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, fleeing the conflicts in their homelands.

Gulf Coast states resettled about 15 percent of the 130,000 Southeast Asians in 1975. From Florida and Alabama, to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, about 20,000 refugees found a new home in the area, often with help from churches.

The transition to American life wasn’t flawless. Beers in hand, locals in the bayou will tell stories about knife fights in the early days after the refugees arrived. In 1981, members of the Ku Klux Klan white supremacist group burned the boats of Vietnamese-American fishermen in Texas’ Galveston Bay. A lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of the refugees cut the terror campaign short with a court order.

In the racially tense South, “tensions… never rose to the point of the KKK with African-Americans,” says Le of BPSOS. But Gaillard, a university instructor who lives near Bayou La Batre, says that decades later, “If you want to find bigotry down there, you can find it.”

“There have been scattered acts of discrimination, but on the whole, it’s home,” he says. “It’s the place where they found sanctuary and safety.”

The Next Generation

The Little Andrew heads into the Gulf of Mexico, Alabama, August 2015. (VOA/Arash Arabasadi)

The next generation may not even have the choice.

Devastating weather like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2010 BP oil spill, and the boom in shrimp imports from overseas – including, ironically, Vietnam – leave a question mark hanging over towns like Bayou la Batre. The U.S. has increasingly relied on seafood imports, leading to an annual seafood trade deficit of more than $10.4 billion, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. Shrimp imports increased 12 percent to almost 568,000 metric tons from 2013 to 2014, by the agency’s statistics.

More shrimp, especially farmed products, drive down earnings for American business owners. In the heyday of shrimping 50 years ago. “You weren’t going to get rich, but you were your own boss,” says John Williams of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. It makes sense that parents wouldn’t want their children to be a part of what is now a struggling industry.

Despite efforts to diversify Bayou La Batre’s economy, like a renewed focus on ship-building, not even the city’s new mayor feels confident in its future.

“I do agree that there is a shift going on,” Annette Johnson says. “A lot of it is that our young people… do not like working in the seafood production. They would rather do other things. And so they leave our community.”

On Wintzell Avenue, a notary public advertises in multiple languages across the street from an Asian grocer and a shuttered Vietnamese pool hall. Bayou la Batre, Alabama, August 31, 2015. (VOA Photo/Victoria Macchi)

Not every parent working on the water wants a different life for their children. One shrimp boat captain lets his son work as a deckhand during summer vacation. Another bayou native, George Earl Bosarge, builds commercial docks. He says he’d be happy for his offspring to follow his lead.

“It’s our life, that’s who we are, to work on the water, be on the water,” says Bosarge, a member of one of Bayou La Batre’s founding families. “We take jobs where you get up in the morning and you open the door and it’s water. That’s what we like to do. We love it.”

And not every child wants to leave.

Von Larson grew up in the bayou. Born in Laos, her family fled to a Thai refugee camp. When she was 3, they went to Port Arthur, Texas, and eventually, to south Alabama for work. For years during high school, Larson says she worked inside Bayou La Batre’s seafood processing plants on weekends and during summer vacation.

“I just made sure I picked (crab) really fast,” she remembers. But Larson also asked a lot of questions, and paid attention to how her bosses ran the shops because, she says, “I knew I wanted to be on the other side.”

So with money saved, she and a business partner bought a company on Shell Belt Road, across from the docks and processors, and started to sell seafood. When Hurricane Katrina wiped out her building and devastated businesses throughout the bayou, she began translating for insurance agencies that needed to communicate with immigrant families in the area. A few years ago, she changed careers again.

The restaurant she now runs with the help of her husband, brother and parents, was successful enough to expand in September to a second location in nearby Mobile. They serve Southern cooking and southeast Asian dishes, in a style that is less about fusing the two cuisines, and more about giving diners both options. At Von’s, a hungry customer can chase a steaming bowl of Vietnamese pho with a rich, dark seafood gumbo (and have a local patron correct you when you call it “soup.”)

“The American dream is attainable, you just have to organize yourself to get all of it,” says Larson, her Southern upbringing clear in her heavy drawl.

“It’s not going to come to you, you just have to strategize and be like, ‘hey this is going to work; this is not going to work’… Failure’s part of it.”

If you ask to go slightly off-menu, Von will fry up Gulf shrimp to serve atop a sweet-and-sour rice dish she says fuses Asian heritage and American life.

“Alabama definitely is my cornerstone of where I want to be.”