Vietnam's refugees 25 years on
By Steve Waldon and Chloe Saltau

'How can you tell when you've been burgled by a Vietnamese? Apart from all your goods being stolen, your children's homework is done!'

Phong Nguyen — who could not be more animated if he were drawn by the Disney team — almost slides off his chair, cackling at the irony: a Vietnamese Australian telling jokes about Vietnamese stereotypes.

Reflecting on the 25 years of Vietnamese in Australia, Nguyen recovers his breath and says that the punchline has a significance well beyond humour.

It's to do with the importance placed on educating their children, and how the experience of Vietnamese migrants to these shores ranges from a daily struggle, to quiet achievement, to public success. ...

The Asian emphasis on education, Nguyen says, is born of the necessity that comes from being raised in countries with vast populations. 'It's the only way you can surface above the mass,' he say...

With 22 years experience as a refugee and community leader, Nguyen describes himself as a fossilised Vietnamese, who retains his culture mostly by memory and hopes that his children can combine the best of both cultures. ...

But anyone with doubts about the progress of assimilation would need only to see the unlikely figure of Phong Nguyen behind the stumps in the Footscray Cricket Association, his face shadowed beneath the brim of an umpire's hat. The sight was not lost on one player, who wondered aloud what kind of affinity a Vietnamese could have with the famously confusing laws of cricket. 'You'll know when you see my bloody finger go up,' was Nguyen's mischievous response.

Nguyen was the son of a general in the South Vietnamese army. He and his mother, his two sisters and his brother left ... in 1978, pretending to be Chinese, after his father was imprisoned under the new communist regime. It was not until last year that the two men were reunited, when Nguyen's father visited Melbourne seven years after his release.

Nguyen's mother, who had not needed to work in Vietnam, found a job in a Melbourne factory and toiled away until she collapsed on the factory floor, and had to have part of her lung removed.

Despite that, there is a tendency in Australian society to see the Vietnamese community as closed and defensive. That stereotype was tackled by lecturer and author Nancy Viviani, whose 1996 book The Indochinese in Australia 1975–85: From Burnt Boats to Barbecues concludes that it is fallacious. She says that Vietnamese make up less than 1 per cent of Australia's population, yet seem to represent 'a symbol for several Australian anxieties about the vulnerability of their island continent to peaceful invasion'...

Yet statistical and analytical data suggests that the Vietnamese experience in Australia is more assimilating than threatening. The most recent figures show that only 8.3 per cent of brides and 11.8 per cent of grooms from a Vietnamese background were marrying partners from within the Vietnamese community.

Trung Doan was only 18 and Saigon was still free when he flew to Australia in 1973. Christmas Eve, to be exact.

'I remember on the plane, we were approaching Sydney, and I was amazed — there were so many houses with little blue rectangles behind them. Swimming pools. It was the first time I'd seen something like that.' …

He intended to get his degree and return to Vietnam to find a good job, but with the fall of South Vietnam to the communists in 1975, the young second-year engineering student had to alter his plans. …

Trung arrived in Australia alone and succeeded, but he knows not all his fellow Vietnamese are immune from the temptations and consequences of crime and gambling. 'Like any group, you have problems, and the Vietnamese community is no different.'

Nancy Viviani says: 'The 1996 census indicates that residential concentrations of Vietnam-born Australian citizens have stabilised. Public concerns about these concentrations (ghettoes) have been exaggerated. …

Dealing with the tendency of the Vietnamese to cluster, Viviani accepts their circumstances are different. 'Unlike other Asian groups and like most Greeks and Italians, they arrived poor, unskilled and did not speak English.

'Other migrants from Asia and Europe bring capital and skills. This means the Vietnamese had to find cheap housing close to unskilled jobs.' But Viviani agrees with Phong Nguyen that at least one trend is evident: as Vietnamese gain education, decent employment and settled family lives, they are spreading from enclaves into middle–class areas. …

Today in Sydney a festival will celebrate 25 years of Vietnamese Australian history. The events embrace the colour and culture of a land far away, while simultaneously acknowledging the absorption into Australian society of some of that land's people.

As they juggle their ethnic past and their 'Aussie' future, it is fair to wonder how different will be the symbiosis in another 25 years.

What will the 50th anniversary of a Vietnamese Australia reveal? How will Trung Doan's children regard themselves in another 25 years? Trung married a Vietnamese refugee and they have three children.

'They're well and truly Australian', he says with a smile.

Extract source: 'Vietnam's refugees 25 years on' by Steve Waldon and Chloe Saltau, The Age, 4 November 2000
© The Age. Reproduced by permission.

1. Identify examples of rights and responsibilities from both parties in this article.

2. How has immigration affected:

• the immigrants
• the host nation?

3. Research a definition of 'multiculturalism'. Do you think this article shows true multiculturalism?

4. Research the history of an ethnic group in Australia. To what extent has it, and the host nation, shown the same sorts of rights and responsibilities as in this example?

5. Imagine this Vietnamese family 20 years on. How might their situation have changed?