Houston Oi! Oh, It's South Vietnam
Nha Magazine, News Feature, Kevin Southwick, Posted: Mar 09, 2005
“I’m a born-again Texan.” - Lan Cao
The aroma of pho ga, the murmuring of a pop song from Viet Nam, the comings and goings of Vietnamese families in and out of stores and restaurants chattering in Vietnamese. A sultry, shifty, humid sky, rice fields and oceans not an hour away…No, my friend, you’re not in Sai Gon. You’re in Houston, Texas! Make yourself at home with the thousands of Vietnamese Houstonians!
And what a home: the oil and gas capital of the U.S., the largest medical center in the world, the NASA Space Center, a thriving arts culture, and the second largest population of Vietnamese people in America outside of Los Angeles. The unofficial count is now over 100,000 in a metropolitan area of five million, the population of Sai Gon.
It has three Vietnamese radio stations and one cable TV station, several bookstores, uncountable restaurants, and two major international airports from which you can hop back to Viet Nam on almost any day of the year. Many here do.
And most recently, plans are brewing for an official designation of part of Midtown as “Little Saigon.” Yes, the Vietnamese have indeed arrived.
Just how did this come to be?
The Cradle of Midtown
“I’m a born-again Texan,” says Nicole Cao, a banking officer who arrived here in 1976 with bittersweet memories of her homeland.
“I did not just lose a country and scores of relatives. I lost my identity.” But with hard work, she made a new one. In 1979, she and her new husband, a budding pharmacist, managed to buy a large, old, vacant building and open a pharmacy. The deserted area of town was largely abandoned by businesses. Asian gangs were a problem.
To create a customer base, she and her husband gave free office space to doctors whose customers then began to buy from Cao’s Milam Pharmacy. Meanwhile, the first Midtown Vietnamese grocery store attracted more Vietnamese from outside the area. Holy Rosary Catholic Church had already begun offering two Vietnamese masses every Sunday, drawing many to the area.
“I went to the owners of nearby properties and they laughed when I told them we should work together to fight crime.” They underestimated Nicole Cao. She joined efforts with several business owners who also wanted security. And with Steve Bancroft, pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church on Main Street, she formed the Midtown Redevelopment Association, which helped raise money and awareness in the community.
Several small Vietnamese shopping centers sprung up. The city council took notice and had Vietnamese street signs put up in the area: Nguyen Hue, Hai Ba Trung, Tu Do, Phan Thanh Gian. A huge real estate revival took off in 1999 and trendy town homes soon popped up all around Midtown.
But Cao isn’t stopping there. Based on a remake of Kelly Park in San Jose, California, she’s promoting a redesign of Elizabeth Baldwin Park. “It’ll have jogging and walking trails,” she says, pointing to an artistic rendering, “and a small focal point of Vietnamese interest.” Parts of the park will pay tribute to other ethnic groups as well.
And of being a Viet-Houstonian, Cao says, “Houstonians welcome you as someone interesting. They’re accustomed to seeing and living near people from different cultures.”
Down the Southwest Corridor
But Midtown was just the beginning. The Vietnamese population began following many of the Chinese businesses to the southwest along a corridor defined by Bellaire Boulevard and the Southwest Freeway which lead 25 miles out towards Sugarland, a middle-class enclave with a 23 percent Asian population.
“This is a big city and it’s getting bigger,” says Pierre Nguyen, who owns two video rental stores catering to Vietnamese-only speakers. Customers come and go from his store with not one or two, but whole bags of rented videos. He opened the first store in Mekong Center, a small Midtown shopping center, then followed the Vietnamese market to Bellaire Boulevard with a second store across from the landmark Hong Kong Mall. The Vietnamese center of gravity was shifting dramatically to the southwest.
Pierre says that Vietnamese investments have cycled upwards from convenience stores, cleaners, and small shops to real estate, shopping centers, and pharmaceuticals. “Vietnamese people are moving here from the northern U.S. and California. Houston is still affordable, but who knows what real estate values will be in five years. It’s a good place to invest. In the next five years the Vietnamese community will be huge,” says Nguyen proudly.
“Here, the new Vietnamese immigrants can follow the same path as us: work, save, start a business, study English.”
“My family received no government help at all. Now we own office buildings, a pharmaceutical products company, an immigration service company, and other small businesses.”
And the culture is being preserved. “The older generation was thinking ahead by teaching their children Vietnamese language and culture at home, at churches and temples. I speak Vietnamese to my six-year-old son. He’ll pick up English at school,” says Nguyen.
Woman Warrior
“I have no fear,” says business owner Pamela Ngo Tranpark. Her dauntless spunk and business acumen are the modern equivalent of those women warriors of Vietnamese folklore.
“I was six when my family left Viet Nam and I remember the boat trip where we almost didn’t make it.” At the depths of the ordeal, she said, her father prayed and pledged to build a temple in the U.S. if they survived.
“When we came to Houston, my parents worked at menial jobs in a dangerous part of town to support six children. I organized my siblings to run the household. When our parents came home we would have them sit, massage their feet, feed them and clean up after dinner. And they said our job was to make straight A’s. Our family valued education.”
That was years ago. Now Tranpark’s parents own a shopping center in Midtown. She’s a thirty-something successful realtor and mortgage broker and Midtown booster. Tranpark is instrumental in the current push for an official “Little Saigon” designation of part of Midtown. “I want a tangible community symbol of our culture, the Vietnamese culture I know and grew up in. That was the only thing I could hold on to. It’s my roots. And I want it to continue for my children.”
Tranpark’s business is a family effort. Her father and siblings work with her. “My father has always reminded us of our family motto: If we’re one chopstick, anybody can break us, but if we’re two chopsticks nobody can break us.”
And that temple? It’s one of the largest Buddhist temples in the U.S.
The Object of Academia
Steve Kleinberg, a prominent sociologist at Houston’s Rice University, has been tracking Houston demographics for several years with a special eye on the growing Asian community and its interesting effect on the city.
“Houston’s Anglos are now a minority population. The city has become a land of immigrants for the first time since 1914.”
He recognizes the challenges of Vietnamese in Houston in a high-tech economy.
“The Greeks, Polish and Italians who came with fifth-grade educations could follow a path to a professional job, though it may have taken three generations. Today the Vietnamese don’t have an (national) economy that allows them to step up. It’s a tremendous challenge in education and they know it. Not all of them make it.”
“Now in the second generation you see successful hardworking Vietnamese with all the pressure and sacrifices from the first generation.”
Are Vietnamese accepted more today among Americans? “There are positive stereotypes that Americans have that the Vietnamese are a model minority. That can be a hindrance.”
“The Vietnamese today come into a Vietnamese community that can help them. They’ve all come from battling communism, just like the Cubans. They reach out to each other, pay attention to each other’s kids. Now there are many social economic resources available, a lot of social capital.”
Cultural Survival
While making slow but steady economic progress, there is also a pointed effort on many fronts to preserve Vietnamese culture by providing social, educational, and community services: the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, the Vietnamese Culture and Science Association (see the March/April 2004 issue of NHA Magazine) Research Development Institute and several budding political action committees.
The Asian Pacific American Heritage Association addresses the same concerns for a wider group of Asians and has within it a Vietnamese group.
Home is Where the Heart is
The Vietnamese came to the U.S. with much the same disposition as that fabled Thy Kieu, in search not only of home but of heart and soul. Houston Vietnamese have not merely survived but have prospered. The city feels their cultural and economic impact, their love for homeland, freedom, and their American brethren.
Quintessentially American, yet still Vietnamese in language, manner and pride, in Houston they have reached a critical mass where a collective heart abounds, tying each to each, sister to brother, parent to child, to make Houston more than just a mere place of refuge, more than a home. It’s a staging ground for bringing the future to the thriving new generations in their homeland.
For this is Houston. In the future, anything can happen.
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