Vietnamese Americans form a unique segment of the new U.S. immigrant population. Uprooted from their homeland and often thrust into poor urban neighborhoods, these newcomers have nevertheless managed to establish strong communities in a short space of time. Most remarkably, their children often perform at high academic levels despite difficult circumstances. Growing Up American tells the story of Vietnamese children and sheds light on how they are negotiating the difficult passage into American society. Min Zhou and Carl Bankston draw on research and insights from many sources, including the U.S. census, survey data, and their own observations and in-depth interviews. Focusing on the Versailles Village enclave in New Orleans, one of many newly established Vietnamese communities in the United States, the authors examine the complex skein of family, community, and school influences that shape these children's lives. With no ties to existing ethnic communities, Vietnamese refugees had little control over where they were settled and no economic or social networks to plug into. Growing Up American describes the process of building communities that were not simply transplants but distinctive outgrowths of the environment in which the Vietnamese found themselves. Family and social organizations re-formed in new ways, blending economic necessity with cultural tradition. These reconstructed communities create a particular form of social capital that helps disadvantaged families overcome the problems associated with poverty and ghettoization. Outside these enclaves, Vietnamese children faced a daunting school experience due to language difficulties, racial inequality, deteriorating educational services, and exposure to an often adversarial youth subculture. How have the children of Vietnamese refugees managed to overcome these challenges? Growing Up American offers important evidence that community solidarity, cultural values, and a refugee sensibility have provided them with the resources needed to get ahead in American society. Zhou and Bankston also document the price exacted by the process of adaptation, as the struggle to define a personal identity and to decide what it means to be American sometimes leads children into conflict with their tight-knit communities. Growing Up American is the first comprehensive study of the unique experiences of Vietnamese immigrant children. It sets the agenda for future research on second generation immigrants and their entry into American society.

The contributors to this volume probe systematically and in depth the adaptation patterns and trajectories of concrete ethnic groups. They provide a close look at this rising second generation by focusing on youth of diverse national origins—Mexican, Cuban, Nicaraguan, Filipino, Vietnamese, Haitian, Jamaican and other West Indian—coming of age in immigrant families on both coasts of the United States. Their analyses draw on the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, the largest research project of its kind to date. Ethnicities demonstrates that, while some of the ethnic groups being created by the new immigration are in a clear upward path, moving into society's mainstream in record time, others are headed toward a path of blocked aspirations and downward mobility. The book concludes with an essay summarizing the main findings, discussing their implications, and identifying specific lessons for theory and policy.

Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022, Association for Asian American Studies After the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time? From Guam to Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong, In Camps is the first major work on Vietnamese refugee policy to pay close attention to host territories and to explore Vietnamese activism in the camps and the diaspora. This book explains how Vietnamese were transformed from de facto refugees to individual asylum seekers to repatriates. Ambitiously covering people on the ground—local governments, teachers, and corrections officers—as well as powerful players such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, Jana Lipman shows that the local politics of first asylum sites often drove international refugee policy. Unsettling most accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US, In Camps instead emphasizes the contingencies inherent in refugee policy and experiences.

“Beautiful and heartrending” fiction set in Vietnam and America from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker) In these powerful stories, written over a period of twenty years and set in both Vietnam and America, Viet Thanh Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experiences of people leading lives between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. This incisive collection by the National Book Award finalist and celebrated author of The Committed gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family that accompany relocation. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her with a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of migration. “Terrific.” —Chicago Tribune “An important and incisive book.” —The Washington Post “An urgent, wonderful collection.” —NPR

A young girl and her family arrive in an airport in a new country. They are refugees, migrants who have travelled across the world to find safety. Strangers greet them, and one of them gives the little girl a doll. Decades later, that little girl is grown up and she has the chance to welcome a group of refugees who are newly arrived in her adopted country. To the youngest of them, a little girl, she gives a doll, knowing it will help make her feel welcome. Inspired by real events.

Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

On April 30, 1975, the Hanoi government of North Vietnam took control over the South. South Vietnamese, particularly "intellectuals" and those thought to have been associated with the previous regime, underwent terrible punishment, persecution and "re-education." Seeking their freedom, thousands of South Vietnamese took to the sea in rickety boats, often with few supplies, and faced the dangers of nature, pirates, and starvation. While the sea and its danger claimed many lives, those who made it to the refugee camps still faced struggle and hardships in their quest for freedom. Here are collected the narratives of nineteen men and women who survived the ordeal of escape by sea. Today, they live in the United States as students, professors, entrepreneurs, scientists, and craftspeople who have chosen to tell the stories of their struggles and their triumph. Each narrative is accompanied by biographical information. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.