Houston’s Vietnamese community born of pain and loss
Whenever Bao-Long Chu looks at the Vietnam War Memorial on Bellaire Boulevard in Houston’s Little Saigon, he sees a rewriting of history. A dissonant celebration of defeat.
The memorial, a 27-foot copper rendering of two soldiers, a South Vietnamese and an American, fighting side by side, steely-eyed with rifles in their clutches, is meant to honor those who gave their lives to the cause of maintaining the independence of South Vietnam from the encroachment of the communist North Vietnamese.
Yet for Chu, a celebrated poet and essayist who was born in Saigon two years after the first U.S. combat troops entered Vietnam in 1965, the statue embodies a mythic tale of American liberation. It’s a story handed down by generations of proud South Vietnamese who — much like his own family — were forced to flee their homeland by a tyrannical military regime, in search of a better life in cities such as Houston. The three flags standing tall behind the statue — American, Texan and South Vietnamese — are symbols of patriotism, of an appreciation for their adopted homeland, but also of a lost nation that the U.S. catastrophically failed to protect.
“We are hoping to tell a different story, but that memorial is a memorial of loss,” Chu told the editorial board. “I don’t know if it’s a memorial of honor, because these are Southern Vietnamese soldiers who were vanquished. And it was a shameful moment for America.”
The word “shameful” needs some unpacking. In the decades since the Vietnam War ended, its legacy as an unjust conflict has crystallized. Successive presidential administrations from Kennedy through Nixon sold the public a muscular, jingoistic image of America as the defenders of democracy at all borders, using the fear that if one country fell under the influence of communism that surrounding countries would inevitably follow, all the while privately acknowledging the conflict was doomed to fail. Nearly 60,000 American soldiers and an astonishing 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers lost their lives fighting under these pretenses. The more than 700,000 Vietnam veterans still alive today, who fought in an impossible jungle war we were illprepared for, deserve to be honored in perpetuity.
The promise of the accord signed by American, North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese officials in Paris 50 years ago on Jan. 27, 1973, was to, in the words of President Richard Nixon, “end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.” That statement was only half true. While the cease-fire mercifully closed the chapter on a bloody, decade-long war that had become wildly unpopular here at home, it effectively meant abandoning the South Vietnamese people.
The refugees who escaped helped build our city’s, and the nation’s, thriving Vietnamese communities, but that success was born through great pain.
While Americans officially laid down their arms that day, paving the way for the remaining 24,000 troops and roughly 600 prisoners to return home, for the Vietnamese it simply marked a new phase in the struggle to control their country. The weakened South Vietnamese army was now uniquely vulnerable to the North Vietnamese. Fighting in the wartorn nation resumed almost immediately after the accord was signed.
As a child, Chu, whose uncle was the communications director for South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, would hear the distant sounds of war from his home in Saigon, percussive thuds of bombing and explosions that, his grandparents would reassure him, were too far away to be of imminent danger.
Yet in April 1975, two years after “peace,” the North Vietnamese army seized Saigon, imprisoning and eventually “reeducating” South Vietnamese soldiers in an effort to break the spirits of dissidents. Chu recalled the day the North Vietnamese arrived, his sister running through the halls of his Catholic school frantically looking for him so they could go back to their grandparents’ house and quickly pack. They were then taken to the airport in Saigon — his parents, six siblings, two aunts and his grandparents packed into a military plane with dozens of others, and flown to Guam to begin the resettlement process. Had they not moved with such urgency, they might not have made it out.
“Two days later was when Saigon fell and North Vietnamese bombed the airport so no planes could leave,” Chu said.
Chu’s family was part of the first wave of a mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees, more than 1.6 million of whom would resettle across the United States over the next 20 years. Houston, with its humid climate reminiscent of Vietnam, ample jobs and cheap cost of living, was designated by the federal government as a choice destination.
This first wave of refugees received a warm welcome.
Many were educated — Chu’s father, for instance, was a physician — and spoke some English. But by the time the second wave began to arrive in 1978, public opinion had shifted. A front page Chronicle headline in June 1979 noted the arrival of “boat people” — many of whom were fishermen and working-class laborers — who faced language barriers and medical issues from a far more harrowing journey. The nation had plunged into a recession and refugees were seen by much of the public as an economic burden.
In Houston, racial tensions erupted. Vietnamese shrimpers in Seabrook and Galveston clashed with white fishermen, and a Ku Klux Klan group threatened them. A deadly confrontation in which a Vietnamese fisherman in Seadrift allegedly killed a white fisherman in self-defense led to a posse setting fire to Vietnamese homes and boats.
Yet through that strife, the seeds of Vietnamese “villages” across Houston sprouted into hubs of commerce. By the late 1980s, a downtown business district, the original “Little Saigon,” had developed on Milam. Chu’s father opened one of the first Vietnamese clinics in the
St. Joseph Medical Center, treating newly arrived refugees, and accepting payments in their catch of the day. This is the Houston that Chu grew to adore, where once-small pho restaurants and fabric shops grew into expansive enterprises, where a young man could feed his sense of adventure by exploring the city’s downtown tunnels and the public library.
Today, Little Saigon occupies a 4-mile stretch of Bellaire Boulevard in southwest Houston’s Asiatown. Our city has the second-largest Vietnamese population in the nation. Vietnamese supermarkets abound. Catholic Vietnamese churches and Buddhist temples anchor the neighborhood. Noodle shops as tasty as any you would find in Saigon attract tourists from all over the country. This evolution is heartening, a reminder of the resilience of the immigrant spirit.
Still, Chu, notes that, in some ways, history is repeating itself. He said he “felt a kind of PTSD” as he watched Afghans crowding airports in Kabul, storming tarmacs and clinging to planes, some falling to their death after President Joe Biden ordered
U.S. troops to pull out in August 2021. While a majority of Americans supported resettling Afghan refugees, there was still a distinct backlash among some far-right commentators who referred to the resettlement as an “invasion,” much like the response that many Vietnamese refugees received.
Houston, however, with our rich mosaic of immigrant communities, gives Chu hope that it can be a beacon for Afghans and any future refugees seeking a new home.
“A landscape that can absorb differences, and sort of turn them into a kind of newness,” Chu said. “That is very Houston.”