‘Beginning of Our Identity’: How San José Became Home for Betty Duong and Vietnamese Americans

Betty Duong said that everyone she speaks with in her Vietnamese American community has a different feeling about April 30, 1975, when American soldiers pulled out of South Vietnam and the war officially ended. But they all agree on its significance.

Just two years after that day, Duong’s recently married mother fled Vietnam in the middle of the night with her husband on a fishing boat packed with people. She watched helplessly as her brother, who was on board a different vessel, was captured by pirates. Their survival was uncertain.

“It’s still a very painful part of time in their lives, that I don’t know if they’ve completely gotten past or processed fully,” Duong, 44, said of her family.

For her parents’ generation, that day marks the loss of their home country and a day of mourning. Duong’s peers see it somewhat differently.

“When I talk to my second-generation colleagues and counterparts, they say it was the beginning of our identity as a diaspora,” she said. “It’s how we end up here in America.”

Today, Duong stands as an example of the growth and influence of the Vietnamese American diaspora in San José. Beginning with the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees in the years after the war, the community has grown, along with its political power, spurred by a need for cultural understanding and by critical events, like the police killing of a Vietnamese American mother.

Duong grew up in the city and attended local schools before going on to UC Berkeley and Davis. After graduating, she became an attorney and then began work in the public sector for the county.

Last November, she became the first Vietnamese American elected to the office of Santa Clara County Supervisor. Her success, some say, is rooted in her ability to connect with varied voting groups, developed through her own upbringing in the community and her reliance on public services.

Duong was born in San José after her parents arrived here with the help of Santa Clara County’s refugee resettlement program; her uncle, after escaping from the pirates, eventually ended up in Australia.

She learned English in school, picking it up faster than her parents, and she often found herself translating for them at parent-teacher conferences, medical appointments and the DMV, an experience children of many immigrants and refugees are familiar with.

“This was also during the time when police officers and first responders didn’t have a language line or language access, so when 911 was called, I was also volunteered to help translate these very serious situations,” Duong said, something she feels a child should never have to do.

Growing up in Section 8 housing in downtown San José, Duong thought the whole world looked like the five-block radius around her, made up largely of Vietnamese and Latino families, with doors left open all day in the warmer months for lack of air conditioning. Many families were reliant on county services to help make ends meet, put food on the table and access medical care.

Duong sings the praises of the county for welcoming Vietnamese refugees with open arms and offering support to her family at a critical time.

However, her work in public service has been shaped by her family’s experience with poorly implemented or culturally insensitive safety net programs that didn’t consider the different ways people might need assistance.

“It always kind of fell short, and it always added a sense of chaos to the world,” she said of the services she received. “It was always somebody else’s call what we were going to eat, how we were going to eat, where we were going to live, how are we going to live and what that entailed.”

Today, Vietnamese American culture helps define San José and the region, and politicians have understood for many years the value of the group as a coveted voting bloc. About 122,000 residents identify as Vietnamese American, representing more than 10% of the city’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But Vietnamese Americans had to make major strides to overcome ignorance, racism, systemic exclusion and cultural and language access barriers along the way.

“We weren’t wanted”

When Duong was growing up, her family experienced blunt racism and bigotry, with people directing slurs at her parents, or telling her father to learn English or go back to his country.

Vietnamese refugees arrived in America at a fraught time. The country was in an economic recession, and the war itself was causing division, according to Hien Duc Do, a professor of sociology and Asian American studies at San José State University.

“There were people who were happy with the refugees. There were people who weren’t happy with refugees,” said Do, who has written extensively about Vietnamese Americans. “ You have about 100,000 people or so coming from a war-torn country and a lot of them came literally without anything but the clothes on their backs. So for them, it was a very traumatic experience.”

President Gerald Ford, in his attempt to avoid “ghettoism,” ordered the initial waves of refugees from Vietnam to be dispersed into different areas in the U.S.

Do said that broke apart networks of extended families and people who had come to know each other in refugee camps, making it harder for them to find stability. Ford’s plan didn’t last long, as groups of refugees eventually coalesced around warm weather areas such as Orange County, the Bay Area, and Texas, according to the Immigration Policy Center.

“There are all these laws that were passed against people like us when we first came, because we weren’t wanted, in the same way that every community had gone through that,” Do said. “And sometimes people tend to forget that. Sometimes, success breeds this idea that America is this land of meritocracy, it’s this open society, when in fact it is not. It could be, but it’s not quite there yet.”

Government cheese

Duong recalls how she and other low-income families received so-called “government cheese” from food banks. “But for a population that’s like 90% lactose intolerant, that was just not a viable option,” Duong said of her family and other Vietnamese Americans.

It’s just one example of the sometimes ham-fisted approaches to public welfare that she experienced growing up. She learned that building effective safety net programs requires collective input and designing empathetically for the unique needs of people with different backgrounds and experiences.

To receive health care, her mother often had to make elaborate public transit plans, seeing a primary doctor in one area of San José and then being sent to see a specialist across the city.

She wasn’t alone. Decades later, a 2012 county study showed that Vietnamese Americans still faced physical and mental health challenges, as well as intergenerational conflict and difficulty in navigating county services, according to the county.

To help address those needs, former Santa Clara County Supervisors Dave Cortese and Cindy Chavez, for whom Duong served as chief of staff, helped spearhead the opening of the Vietnamese American Services Center in 2021 on Senter Road, close to Vietnamese American neighborhoods and businesses.

The center is meant to be a one-stop shop, with culturally competent services for mental and behavioral health, a general health center, dental clinic, pharmacy, social services and nutrition programs for older adults. Duong was the project’s lead for the county.

“Why does it take this long for us to have this?” Duong said of equitable services and centers.

“There needs to be more Vietnamese representation. There needs to be more Latino representation. There needs to be more South Asian representation. Our elected bodies don’t look like our communities yet, quite yet,” she said.

For Duong and so much of the Vietnamese American community, the need for that representation became more urgent about two decades ago.

Police killing of Bich Cau Thi Tran

In the summer of 2003, Duong was attending De Anza College when she, like many others in the community, was shaken by the fatal police shooting of a Vietnamese American woman who was experiencing a mental health crisis in her San José home.

Bich Cau Thi Tran was a small woman weighing less than 100 pounds, and a mother of two young boys who struggled with her mental health. She was killed by San José Police Officer Chad Marshall when he responded to a call about a domestic concern at Tran’s apartment in the Northside neighborhood.

Tran was holding a Vietnamese-style vegetable peeler, known as a dao bào. Marshall said later he thought it was a knife, and he thought she was going to kill him. Seconds after confronting Tran, he shot her in the chest, and she died on her kitchen floor.

“When the story first broke, we were hearing on TV that this woman attacked the officer with a butcher knife,” Duong said. It was only through testimony in a rare open grand jury proceeding that more details were revealed.

“And then, when we saw that it was the same vegetable peeler that’s in every single Asian household … it was just really heartbreaking,” Duong said.

The killing touched off protests, marches and a reckoning within the community about how police treat residents in American communities. It helped propel Madison Nguyen into a San José City Council seat in 2005, becoming the first Vietnamese American person elected in the city.

Tam Nguyen, a 45-year resident of San José, attorney and former council member, said before Tran’s killing, the Vietnamese American community was less engaged in local politics, and often treated as an afterthought by power brokers and the establishment in City Hall.

“Because we were poor, we were busy earning a living, we didn’t know about politics or civic engagement. So out of ignorance, out of economic and cultural disadvantage, and also because of the system and how it was designed, to keep Asian people quiet,” Nguyen said. “That was the mentality, and how things were going during the 80s and 90s.”

He recalls being on Mayor Tom McEnery’s Advisory Group on Minority Affairs, which amounted to monthly meetings where the mayor told the group things were going well, but didn’t seek their input.

In the 1990s, Nguyen said the community began clamoring about the lack of Vietnamese American representation on the city council and in city staffing ranks, and the lack of a clear path to apply for city contracts or grants. In response, a city hall emissary was sent to tell the community they were being heard, but not to “burden yourself” by putting up a Vietnamese American candidate for office, and not to confuse “equal rights for equal representation,” Nguyen said.

“It’s always been that things don’t change until people speak out, get together and act with their votes,” he said. Tran’s killing “woke people up, that we need to stand up, we need to raise our voice, we need to get our act together, get our votes together.”

Richard Konda, the executive director of the Asian Law Alliance, also helped form the Coalition for Justice and Accountability in the wake of Tran’s killing, calling for greater cultural sensitivity in San José’s policing.

Konda said the shooting shifted the sole focus of many in the Vietnamese American community in San José away from the issues in their home country, which were still looming large in the collective consciousness.

“For many of them, they weren’t really looking inward in terms of the politics of local or state government,” Konda said. “This may have been, I don’t know if you want to call it a triggering point, but something that maybe caused some people to kind of think about, ‘Hey, we need to maybe get more involved locally.’”

Duong called Tran’s death a “defining moment” for herself and her community, and she still becomes emotional when speaking about her.

“Ms. Tran’s killing — that was the first time that we were faced with this reality that, as a whole, as a community, it was really undeniable at that point that there is a problem, a challenge. There is a rift between police and community in this country,” she said.

Duong, who translated for her community in police interactions as a child, said those experiences inspired her to help develop language access policies in 2014. The county built on that, establishing a dedicated language access unit in 2020.

She said it was a rare moment that she and her father saw eye to eye on law enforcement during that time.

“My dad has been very, very, very pro-police, very pro-law and order,” Duong said. However, as more details emerged about the killing, “he and I really agreed that significant missteps, inherent biases, camouflaged racism — these were all at play.”

More representation

Since then, the community has grown in power and influence, and for decades now, politicians and city and county officials have courted Vietnamese American voters. They often show up to celebrations or events near the Grand Century Mall and the Vietnam Town shopping center in Little Saigon to talk with residents. Some wear traditional Vietnamese clothing known as an ao dai, or carry the flag of South Vietnam, and learn short phrases in Vietnamese to show solidarity.

But having a seat at the table is a recent accomplishment.

Only five Vietnamese Americans have been elected to the San José City Council in 50 years, and Duong is the first to become a county supervisor.

Do, the San José State professor, credits Duong’s election victory to her ability to appeal to the common humanity across many different constituencies, not just Vietnamese Americans, which he said represents a maturation for politicians from the community.

“She was able to build this coalition that she’s not only seen as this great, amazing, young politician, but one that really understands how to work the system to benefit all of us, not just her own Vietnamese American community, because that would not have been enough to elect her,” he said. “She really can bridge a lot of these amazing stories from different communities.”

Looking forward, looking back

This year marks half a century as a Vietnamese American community for so many in San José. As the culture continues to change, newer generations keep the memories and feelings of their elders close at heart, but also hold different concerns, like how to best honor the past.

Duong, like so many Vietnamese Americans, said she faces a “constant negotiation” about how to share her Vietnamese American identity with her young, third-generation daughter, and what to reinforce and what to let go.

“Our ancestors, our heritage, why we eat certain foods, why we do certain things, our cultural traditions and ceremonies — that originated in a country called Vietnam,” she said, as she tells her daughter.

“I hope that my daughter will learn as much as possible, know as much as I do about her grandparents’ journey to America and how that translates to why we need to take care of each other in community,” Duong said.

Do noted that over the decades, as groups hold annual remembrances for the Fall of Saigon, there has at times been tension between the generations, or a disconnect about what they experienced. He attributed that to a lack of education in American schools about the war, and that elders may sometimes be hesitant to share details about their trauma, guilt and memories because they want to protect youth from it.

So many Vietnamese refugees who ended up in San José were forced to start over professionally, facing major setbacks. Even if they were business professionals, educators or high-ranking military officers in Vietnam, in America, some had to learn new skills to become engineers or assembly line workers, others became janitors and dishwashers, while some opened restaurants and grocery stores, some of which proliferated widely, like Lee’s Sandwiches.

The remembrances are important, especially for older generations, “to renew their friendship, to be in community together, to eat together, to cry together, to just to be in a space where they don’t have to explain to people how and why they feel the way that they feel,” Do said.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor who grew up in San José after fleeing Vietnam with his parents at a young age, also spoke of the difficulties Vietnamese Americans face in trying to ensure younger generations know the history of their elders and the war, while allowing them enough freedom from horrific experiences to create their own paths.

He drew inspiration from the conclusion of Toni Morrison’s novel about slavery, Beloved, in which she wrote, “This is not a story to pass on.”

“This is not a story that we should avoid, but it’s also not a story that we should pass on to another generation. These two things are contradictory, but they exist simultaneously because we haven’t escaped from history yet,” Nguyen said. “And I think that’s true for the Vietnam War. It’s something that we should remember, but it’s also something that we shouldn’t pass on. How do we do that?” he said. “That’s a balancing act that I think is part of our challenge.”

What is undeniable is the growth of the Vietnamese American community in Santa Clara County in political and cultural prominence, which may have been tough to see in the beginning years after the Fall of Saigon.

“From my childhood to my adulthood, something shifted at some point where now we were welcomed,” Duong said.

“It’s night and day. I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that this world gets better, it changes. This life becomes more integrated and surrounded with joy and you would be proud to be Vietnamese American,” she said.