Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:34] Joseph Geha is a South Bay reporter for KQED.
Joseph Geha [00:01:41] San Jose has become one of the main loci of Vietnamese-Americans in the country. The latest U.S. Census five-year American Community Survey data, we’re looking at about 122,000 people in San Jose proper that identify as Vietnamese-American or of Vietnamese descent. And within the Santa Clara County as a whole, about 150,000 plus.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:08] As you’ve just been talking about, Joseph, that wasn’t always the case. And Wednesday marked 50 years since the fall of Saigon. How did that moment begin to lay the groundwork for the community that exists in the South Bay now?
Joseph Geha [00:02:26] Yeah, I mean, it was a very intense time. You had an initial drawdown of American troops happening already in Vietnam in the years before 1975 through the Paris Peace Accords. But on April 30th, 1975, that was the last American military presence to be removed out of Vietnam or being pulled out of Vietnam.
Joseph Geha [00:02:54] And that is when Northern Vietnamese communist forces took Saigon, and that kind of represented the formal ending of the war. So you’ve got an untold number, really, but at least 130,000 some odd Vietnamese refugees who were concerned that their anti-communist sentiments and work potentially with U.S. Forces would get them into severe trouble, possibly even injured or killed, put into like a reeducation camp by the communist forces if they were to stay. And so those people, with some assistance from the U.S. And other forces, were able to get airlifted out of Vietnam right at the fall of Saigon or shortly thereafter. Their journey was not a simple one. They were often put at different military bases in the Southern Pacific and different island nations where the US had military bases and then eventually transferred to America and dispersed there. There was a lot of steps along the way. Santa Clara County was one of the first places to kind of establish at the county level a formal refugee resettlement program.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:58] And one of the families who arrived to Santa Clara County under this resettlement program was the family of Betty Duong, the first Vietnamese American county supervisor in Santa Clara. What is her family’s immigration story? And also, why did you wanna talk with her?
Joseph Geha [00:04:19] Yeah, well, as you noted, she is the first Vietnamese-American supervisor in Santa Clara County. She was just elected in last year’s election. I felt that she has a very good perspective to share with people because she grew up in San Jose, because her parents fled Vietnam, and because she has a daughter that she’s raising in San José.
Betty Duong [00:04:37] I feel a huge sense of pride that our families are so much part of the fabric of this community.
Joseph Geha [00:04:49] So her parents had recently been married. They were living in Saigon, and they fled the country in 1977, just a couple years after the fall of Saigon. And her mother at the time was only 22 years old.
Betty Duong [00:05:04] They left in the middle of the night, they pushed off on a fishing boat, and then they were out at sea.
Joseph Geha [00:05:12] And just nearby on like another boat, she was able to see her brother, you know, this is Betty Duong’s uncle.
Betty Duong [00:05:19] And she saw the boat that her brother was on be taken by pirates. So for years, for years she didn’t know what happened to her brother.
Joseph Geha [00:05:31] He ended up surviving, but her family didn’t know that until years later.
Betty Duong [00:05:37] On day three or four, the boat ran out of gas. It’s now just floating on the open seas. And then on day five…
Joseph Geha [00:05:45] A container ship picks up the people on that boat with Betty Duong’s parents and takes them to an island nation before they are resettled in the U.S. And eventually San Jose, where Betty Duong was born a short time later.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:04] So Santa Clara County is one of the few places to open its doors to refugees like Betty Duong’s family. Where does she grow up and did her family feel welcomed where they were?
Joseph Geha [00:06:19] Betty Duong grew up in and around downtown San Jose. She said she lived in section eight housing for a time right across from San Jose State University. And she kind of believed as a young girl that the whole world looked like the five block radius around her apartment, right? With lots of Vietnamese and Latino families living side by side.
Betty Duong [00:06:40] The door was always left open because no one had air conditioning, music, Vietnamese music was blasting like from 7 a.m. In the morning throughout the whole weekend, and that’s where we grew up relying on county services.
Joseph Geha [00:06:55] But as far as feeling welcome, I mean, her family experienced a lot of racism and a lot of bigotry here.
Betty Duong [00:07:02] In my childhood, it was very normal for someone to shout at us on the street, like go back home to your country ch***.
Joseph Geha [00:07:09] People were berating them for not knowing English, her parents, at medical appointments or even out in public and at restaurants.
Betty Duong [00:07:19] It just kind of always made you feel like your identity was under attack or that your family was under attack.
Joseph Geha [00:07:26] Certainly there was, you know, at a very generous interpretation, a mixed feeling about refugees here even in Santa Clara County, and her parents experienced that firsthand, and so did she.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:45] Yeah, I mean, what was the political context in the US at this time, especially around immigrants and immigration?
Joseph Geha [00:07:53] First of all, the U.S. and its residents were very divided about the war in Vietnam, right? Whether it was a good or bad war to be fighting is a very simple way of saying it, whether or not we needed to be there or should have been there. And also very divided over whether to accept refugees. Just the year before the fall of Saigon, you had President Richard Nixon leaving office over the Watergate scandal. And all of this is kind of laid on top of this background of skyrocketing on unemployment and inflation and kind of an economic crisis. So it was a very fraught time when Vietnamese refugees started arriving in waves to America.
Professor Hien Duc Do [00:08:34] Vietnamese refugees came at a time when it was pretty contradictory or conflicting.
Joseph Geha [00:08:41] I also spoke to Professor Hien Duc Do, and he’s a professor of sociology and Asian-American studies at San Jose State University. He’s essentially saying that these refugees were arriving at a time that was very difficult for Americans already. And the question of whether to accept refugees from this, you know, very controversial war effort that America had gotten itself involved in was a tough one.
Professor Hien Duc Do [00:09:09] A lot of them came literally without anything but the clothes on their backs and you know as a young teenager it’s very it was very uncertain times right it’s just as it was for a lot of people.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:25] I mean, that said, how does Betty Duong describe life as a child of refugees growing up in San Jose and Santa Clara County?
Joseph Geha [00:09:35] She has a lot of gratitude for the county welcoming her family and others like her family here, but there were a lot challenges for her family, and others here. The county services that her family relied on, they weren’t always implemented in a very culturally appropriate way, or they were implemented in ways that just didn’t really understand or consider the daily realities for people like her parents.
Betty Duong [00:10:01] It always kind of felt short and it always added like a sense of chaos. It seemed like it was always someone else’s decision. It was always somebody else’s call. What we were going to eat, how we were gonna eat, where we were gonna live, how are we gonna live.
Joseph Geha [00:10:15] People like her family and others who live nearby receive food assistance boxes from food banks in the county, and a lot of times it would include a large block or several rations of what’s known as government cheese.
Betty Duong [00:10:28] People lovingly reference government cheese, right? But for a population that’s like 90% lactose intolerant, that was just not a viable option. It’s not part of the culture. It’s not part of culture.
Joseph Geha [00:10:39] Also things like health care. Her mother and father needed health care appointments like everybody else, and sometimes she’d have to go with her mom to these medical appointments or consultations, and they’re spread out around the city, and her mom was using public transit, so she’d be taking several different bus trips around different parts of the city or the county to get from one appointment to the next. So there just wasn’t this consideration of how difficult that might be for somebody without a lot of money or resources or a daily car to use.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:11:05] And she’s joining them because as a child, she’s also translating for her parents, right? Which as I know is a very common experience for many children of immigrants in the US.
Joseph Geha [00:11:16] Yeah, children of immigrants, children of refugees, this is a common experience, exactly. And Betty Duong was learning English at the same time as her parents. She was growing up in public schools in San Jose and learning English, but she had also learned Vietnamese at home. So English was technically a second language for her.
Betty Duong [00:11:33] Neighbors would come over with their kids’ enrollment papers, like, can your daughter help me out with this? Or new prospective tenants were coming to try to rent an apartment, and if they spoke only Vietnamese, the landlord asked my mom if I could help.
Joseph Geha [00:11:50] And she even talked about serious situations, like if the police showed up on her block and needed to talk to somebody in her apartment building, she might have to translate through a police officer. And that’s something, you know, she reflects on now is something that no child should ever have to go through.
Betty Duong [00:12:05] There’s many little memories of just good policy, but with bad implementation, right? Or good intentions, government programs, or support programs, but it just kind of fell short because it didn’t take into account what is it that folks were really challenged with. And I felt that really defined my childhood.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:47] I mean, it sounds like throughout her childhood, Betty Duong is really picking up on all the ways that the systems in place were sort of failing Vietnamese refugees like our family, despite being open to them. And then I feel like this knowledge and this feeling really comes to a head in the summer of 2003, what happened?
Joseph Geha [00:13:12] Yeah, in July 2003, there was a fatal police shooting of a young Vietnamese-American woman, Bich Cau Thi Tran. She’s a young, Vietnamese- American woman with two boys, and she had struggled with her mental health. And she was fatally shot by San Jose police officer Chad Marshall. Essentially, police got called out by a neighbor who was worried about, like, a domestic issue at the apartment complex there where Ms. Tran lived. And when the officers arrived you know, they found her in the kitchen and she was holding a Vietnamese style vegetable peeler, which the officer would later say he thought was a large knife and he thought, you know he was going to be killed by Ms. Tran and he shot her.
Betty Duong [00:13:53] When the story first broke, we were hearing on TV that this woman attacked the officer with a butcher knife. And then when we saw there was the same vegetable peeler that’s in every single Asian household, right? It was just some really heartbreaking that this woman, she was killed by a police officer in front of her children.
Joseph Geha [00:14:20] So this shooting happened in July of 2003, and it really shook up the community. Betty Duong said she was at community college at the time, but she remembers it vividly. I mean, the moment I asked her about this woman in this shooting, she immediately became emotional, because even 22 years later, she said it was a defining moment for her in her life and in the community
Betty Duong [00:14:44] One of the rare times that my very Republican, very conservative dad and I, like, had full agreement, right, that something was wrong. And this is where he and I really agreed that significant missteps, that inherent biases, camouflaged racism, like these were all at play.
Joseph Geha [00:15:03] And, you know, that killing really, really motivated the community to organize.
Tam Nguyen [00:15:13] That woke people up, that we need to stand up. We need to raise our voice.
Joseph Geha [00:15:17] We had spoken to Tam Nguyen. He’s a former city council member who was elected in 2014. He’s also an attorney and a community advocate. And he essentially told us that this was a wake-up call.
Tam Nguyen [00:15:30] We need to get our act together, get our votes together, so people learn that the power, the political, and then resource and benefit come through your votes.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:42] What are some of the things that the Vietnamese American community really pushes for and also wins in the years since the shooting in 2003?
Joseph Geha [00:15:51] There were desires for more cultural sensitivity training for police officers and language training, right? To avoid this horrible outcome from happening again, but also there, in the years following that and since then, there have been bigger asks for continued increases in representation, for language access across a series of services and programs, not just at the county level, but at the city level for small business programs, for council meetings. The protests, the marches, the demonstrations, and the demands for better representation. You know, it helped propel Madison Nguyen, who would be the very first person elected to San Jose City Council of this community. It helped propels her into that seat. As many immigrant and refugee communities in the South Bay have also advocated for, the Vietnamese-American community also wanted to see more opportunities for business owners to get a piece of the pie in the South Bay, right? San Jose’s a large city with a big budget. And we’ve heard from people like Tam Nguyen and others that there still isn’t really enough representation of business owners getting contracts in San Jose and the South Bay.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:17:01] So it sounds like this is like the beginning of not just the sort of existence of Vietnamese Americans in the South Bay, but really like the integration of them into the fabric of the community as business owners, as people who are politically active and engaged.
Joseph Geha [00:17:18] Absolutely, and for, you know, for working continually as so many people in the South Bay are to erase the structures of the past that have put communities of color lower in the rankings for a variety of services, opportunities, etc.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:17:39] And of course, we’re talking about all this, Joseph, because Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and I feel like so much of this story is about how this moment in time has really shaped San Jose as we know it today. I mean, how is the community reflecting on this moment? Like, what have you seen in San Jose?
Joseph Geha [00:18:05] When I spoke with Betty Duong about this, she told us that, you know, for her parents’ generation, it’s essentially a day of national mourning.
Betty Duong [00:18:14] When I talk to my elders, they say it’s the day we lost our country. It’s the we lost home. It’s a day of national regret.
Joseph Geha [00:18:21] But for people of her generation, they’re still very connected to their parents’ stories and to that first generation’s stories. But as second-generation people here in the county and in the city of San Jose, they are working to kind of create a new and better future here in the South Bay. And they’re also raising their kids, their third generation, like Betty Duong’s kids, and they have to decide, as many immigrants or refugee families do, how to raise their kids and what to teach them and what emphasize and what kind of hold back on. So that the traumas of the past are a lesson that will be learned and absorbed, but also that they, you know, so that they don’t affect too harshly the path of these future generations.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:19:08] Well Joseph, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us, I appreciate it.
