Viet Thanh Nguyen on Growing Up at His Parents’ Grocery Store in San José

Long before Viet Thanh Nguyen became a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, he was one of thousands of Vietnamese refugee kids who grew up in San José during the 1970s and ’80s. On evenings and weekends, he’d help out at his parents’ grocery store in downtown San José, where his family moved in 1978 when he was seven years old. It was reportedly the second-ever Vietnamese grocery store in the city, and Nguyen’s experiences there helped inform his debut novel, The Sympathizer, and subsequent works.

A few weeks before the anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, KQED met with Nguyen — who now lives in Southern California — at the site of his parents’ old shop, currently occupied by an upscale apartment building across the street from City Hall. He reflected on the impact of his family’s store, his favorite childhood treats, and his memories of those early years for San José’s burgeoning Vietnamese community — decades before the flashy all-Vietnamese mega-malls and nationally recognized food scene the city is known for today.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KQED: Can you tell us about a little bit about your parents’ store in San José?

Running a grocery store was not easy. My parents were working 12- to 14-hour days almost every day of the year, except for the Catholic holidays. They were shot in that store on Christmas Eve. It was a hard life. And so the last thing I wanted to do was to work in a grocery store. And one way that we actually deviated from stereotype is that my parents didn’t make my brother and me work in the store very much. What I did is that after they got home from their long day, after dinner, I would help them do the accounting. I would stamp the checks, count the money, stamp the food stamps and the Aid to Families with Dependent Children coupons. This is how I knew that life was hard for the Vietnamese in San José because I think half my parents’ revenue was from food stamps. Vietnamese people really needed the social welfare.

My way of coping with this was to go to the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library, and I just read a lot. That was how I escaped from the pressures of refugee life.

KQED: Do you have any favorite memories of the store from when you were a kid?

Nguyen: The grocery store sold all kinds of things. Obviously it sold nuoc mam. There was a butcher in the back, so there was meat and fish. There were all kinds of canned goods, like canned lychees, and every kind of ingredient you would need to make Vietnamese food. Lots of rice — 20-pound sacks, 50-pound sacks of rice. We also had baked goods, Vietnamese pastries and lots of candy. Being the son of a grocery store owner, what that meant is I could eat all that as much as I wanted. So some of my best memories were ladyfinger cookies, Lu Petit Ecolier chocolate biscuits and, especially, chocolate-covered cherries.

KQED: How would you say Vietnamese refugees like your parents change San José and America as a whole?

Nguyen: You can drive through many streets here, see the Vietnamese businesses, and see how the Vietnamese have made themselves into a part of San José. And this is how immigrants and refugees stake their claim to this country: They buy property and they put their name on it, so that people know there are people of a particular group here. My parents, when they opened their store, they had a big sign [that said] “Sàigòn Mới.” But they never translated that, which I never understood. Why didn’t they just call it the New Saigon?

I think they called it the Sàigòn Mới because they weren’t trying to appeal to other Americans. They were trying to create a Vietnamese community — but because they and others created that Vietnamese community, they also created a Vietnamese American community. I’m not sure that was their ambition, but that’s what happened.

KQED: During those early years for San José’s Vietnamese community, were there Vietnamese restaurants in the city that you would go to with your family?

There was a whole Vietnamese restaurant scene in San José. Every Sunday we would go to Vietnamese Sunday mass at St. Patrick’s Church right down the street on Santa Clara Street, and then we’d go to Phở Hòa. This was a very important part of being Vietnamese. I learned how to use chopsticks and eat phở with both hands and all this kind of stuff.

Only later would I hear the rumors that Phở Hòa was supposedly part of this international phở chain where the profits were being used to support efforts to take Vietnam back through military measures. I have no idea if it was true, but this was the rumor, and I put it into my novel, The Sympathizer.

KQED: Besides the pho, was there a favorite treat that you remember from when you were little that you would crave and that you seek out in the city?

The sweet treats were the chè and flan. Vietnamese flan is different from Mexican flan or Spanish flan. There’s no butter or cheese or goat’s milk or anything like that — just eggs and sugar. It was really, really sweet. My cousin would make some terrific flan.

And my parents would make chè at home. Unfortunately, they made the kinds I didn’t like because there are many different varieties. But going to the restaurants, you could get stuff like sương sa hạt lựu, which was my favorite chè. That was our version of Baskin-Robbins’ 31 flavors, except we had maybe seven or eight.

KQED: What else do you think is important for people to know or remember about your family’s experiences as Vietnamese refugees living in San José?

I have a very personal relationship to this area of downtown San José because I grew up here. And so I remember the way it was in the 1970s and the 1980s. Vietnamese Americans today, if they were born after that time period, won’t know that. So you can come here as a Vietnamese American, and you can see City Hall, you see Starbucks, you see this big apartment complex, and that’s just the way things are for you. But I can see what used to be here. And so, for me, there’s a personal sense of loss of what used to be that was where I spent my childhood, where my parents had worked and suffered so much, along with so many other Vietnamese people.

Every country, including the United States, goes through historical change, goes through gentrification, and we are all stricken in different ways with amnesia. But for those of us who remember the way things used to be, I think there is an obligation to remember, to tell stories about that, to try to make sure other people know the history. And so that’s not just about the Sàigòn Mới, but it’s a metaphor for our relationship to history in general. If you grew up here as a Vietnamese American in San José, you may not have a sense of what your parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents went through to provide you with this opportunity to go shopping in these sleek Vietnamese malls and to have a good time in Vietnamese cafes, but there was a lot of turmoil, a lot of suffering, a lot of angst and melancholy that goes into the making of the Vietnamese community, all of which has faded and is fading away.

That’s why it’s so crucial for those of us who were there to hang onto those feelings and to continue telling those stories for future generations.

@kqednewsLong before Viet Thanh Nguyen became a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, he was one of thousands of Vietnamese refugee kids who grew up in San Jose during the 1970s and ’80s. On evenings and weekends, he’d help out at his parents’ grocery store in downtown San Jose, the second-ever Vietnamese grocery store in the city. Nguyen’s experiences there helped inform his debut novel, The Sympathizer, and subsequent works.♬ original sound – KQED News