So how does this stuff work? Is the Vietnamese American community actually divided into several distinct groups with some of them being affluent and their kids top students while others being poor and having youth gang problems? Or did the young people from essentially nice middle class homes all of a sudden started turning into youth delinquents?
Oh hell yeah they are divided. With only a handful of exceptions, none of them have been here more than 35 years, and they continue to arrive currently. The earliest arrivals were war refugees, and not all of them came straight to the US. They didn’t come here for economic reasons. The later arrivals more so, but there are political divides. Not all of the original refugees have assimilated, particularly the older ones never will. The older men tend to not have forgotten the war, and they feel in large part that they will be marching back to Saigon someday.
I have been to some pretty surreal protests in San Jose, and was invited to interview the leader who was on a hunger strike in front of City Hall. San Jose and Vietnamese politics are pretty interesting, similarly in Orange County, but the two groups are not always of same mind.
In the end, this is probably pretty much the trajectory of every group of immigrants. On the whole, they are assimilating as rapidly as can be expected, particularly considering the circumstances of their arrival. But they are not all one group, and there are issues with some of them.
Decades ago, some Jewish immigrants’ kids were flocking to Harvard to study physics or medicine, others were becoming gangsters (Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schulz, Meyer Lansky). Some Irish immigrants’ kids were becoming cops, others were becoming robbers. Some Italian immigrants founded the Bank of America, others founded the Mafia.
Why would you expect the Vietnamese to be any different?
Vietnamese gang thugs from Houston show up in the U.S. Marshal’s most wanted list and (IIRC) America’s Most Wanted with some regularity. I think a couple may have made it to Tex. or La. death row.
When I was still teaching HS here in Salt Lake (it was a public alternative school) we had occasional faculty meetings to give us background on the various gangs active in the SLC area.
The cops who would brief us said that the Vietnamese and Laotian gangs were violent in ways that the Tongan and Mexican (the two largest gang-related ethnic groups in our area) would never dream of.
In the 6 years I was teaching, I only had a handful Vietnamese students though…
I grew up next to one of the largest little Vietnams in the US, the area around Eden Center in Falls Church. I later worked closely with the Fairfax County police and we talked a bit about this. I don’t know which kids are drawn to the gangs, but the crimes are largely comitted by Vietnamese against Vietnamese which leads to lower publicity.
There are endless gambling rackets, extortion schemes and all the usual organized crime, but it is unlikely to get much press until it bleeds beyond the immigrant community.
A couple years ago, my college decided to put on a Chinese New Years celebration, and wanted to hire someone to do the “dragon dance” thing. As it turned out, there were two outfits in town that performed the dance, both consisted of young Vietnamese Americans. We called around for references for the two groups, and it turned out that whenever someone hired one of the groups, the other group would vandalize the property of the person doing the hiring. In the end, we decided to just scrap the whole thing, rather then get tied up in some weird turf war.
But to second what others have said, my gf is part of a large Vietnamese family (like 40 people) that came here in the late 80’s. While there is a lot of truth in the stereotypes, they’re very driven to succeed and hard workers, they also showed up here with little education, no English and no money. Some have done well and are engineers or business owners, but many of them are stuck in poverty and lower middle class.
Also, while, as I said, there’s some truth to the stereotype of Asian Americans being pushed by their families to excel in academics and business, it also has a dark side. I know several Vietnamese Americans who got caught up in shady business deals, because they’d rather take the risk of getting involved in criminal activities then be seen by their families as not being successful.
were either the Jewish or the Italian crime organizations that you bring up youth gangs? When adults go into illegal business it’s one thing, when young people start behaving like morons that’s something else entirely. Also, both the Jewish and Italian gangsters came from relatively poor working class families.
ETA: ok, so basically lots of people in Vietnamese community are basically not all that affluent nowadays. Got it.
The definitions of youth blur ( as many of the Vietnamese gang members aren’t teens, either ), but yes. Groups like the Five Point Gang and Eastman Gang competed with each other and Irish rivals, eventually blending into the more organized crime factions of the Mafia et al.