#vietnamese-americans

[wazafam]

By BY SABRINA TAVERNISE from U.S. in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/us/georgia-asian-population.html?partner=IFTTT The killing of eight people in Atlanta and suburban Cherokee County has come amid a rising tide of anti-Asian incidents nationwide. The Growing Power of Asian-Americans in Georgia Now Comes With Fear New York Times

[heythao]

Our Vietnam War Never Ended

For an immigrant group, a painful 40th anniversary.

I'm late to this article (made even later by only discovering it at very end of The Sympathizer) but it was a revelatory observation (to me) on immigrants, war and the American dream. 

As a child of Vietnamese immigrants, I identified with the feeling of how both Vietnamese culture in America and Viet Nam itself could be so close, yet so foreign to me. And much like Viet Thanh Nguyen so subtly suggests, one may not have any options but to plant roots in that foreign soil. 

But if anything, this article was both a forceful reminder of our participation in the military-industrial complex and a reassurance that I may be able to know the Vietnam that Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about with such familiarity. 

[solacekames]

Vietnamese-Americans Are No Longer A Lock For The Republican Party

Graphics by Ella Koeze The future of American politics may look a lot like Lan Diep. As a recent TED talk pointed out, he’s the son of political refugees from Vietnam who over the summer ret…

[...]

Vietnamese-Americans, who number nearly 2 million, with especially large concentrations in California and Texas, are part of the larger narrative of Asian-Americans who have switched party affiliations and votes from Republican to Democratic. In 1992, Republicans won among Asian-Americans by a 22-point margin in the presidential election, according to exit polls; in 2012, Asian-Americans voted Democratic by 47 points, which was nearly double the margin in 2008.

In 2016, according to the National Asian American Survey (NAAS), there are far more undecided voters, but the Democratic ticket still leads among Asian-Americans by 43 points. As NPR political demographics reporter Asma Khalid said in a recent FiveThirtyEight podcast accompanying this series on voters, “Within the span of two decades, you can see that Hillary Clinton will potentially be able to win an overwhelming majority of Asian-Americans, the very voters who overwhelmingly did not vote for her husband two decades ago.” She calls it the “most rapid realignment” of any racial or ethnic demographic in the country.

But the Vietnamese-American transition in party affiliation and voting has a twist. Like Cuban-Americans, the first Vietnamese-Americans who came to the U.S. in significant numbers were fleeing a communist government. People who arrived in the years after the Indochina and Migration and Refugee Act of 1975, in particular, forged strong ties to the Republican Party. (The act, which set up a settlement assistance program for refugees from Southeast Asia, was signed into law by President Gerald Ford.)

“For a long time, this [Vietnamese-American community] was the most heavily Republican group of Asian voters,” said Taeku Lee, a professor of political science and law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a principal investigator on the NAAS report. “Then, in 2008 and 2012, they began to turn Democratic and a key driver of this shift has been a growing generational gap.” He said the gap was similar to that of Cuban-Americans, with older voters supporting Republicans. But Lee added that even that is changing. “In 2012, about 58 percent of Vietnamese-American registered voters over 50 voted Democratic,” he said.

[...]

One reason for Nguyen’s choice and that of many other Vietnamese- and Asian-Americans may be concern about Trump’s rhetoric on immigration. Over the last four years, the NAAS found a fivefold increase in Asian-Americans who cited race or racism as the country’s most important problem, from 2 percent to 10 percent. Lee, of UC Berkeley, sees 2016 as a chance for Democrats to solidify their bonds to Vietnamese-Americans and other Asian-Americans as part of a multiracial coalition forged in the Obama years, but there’s no guarantee that will happen. While the demographic changes in the American electorate are “inexorable,” Lee said the GOP could switch gears and follow the recommendations of its 2014“Growth and Opportunity Project,” which aimed to woo voters of color. Or, he said, the Democratic party could fail to deliver on issues of importance to the community.

In other words, Asian-Americans, while trending heavily Democratic, are not what political scientist Paul Frymer calls a “captured group” bound to one party, as black Americans have become. Asian-Americans and black Americans have sometimes been stereotyped as antagonists, the “model minority” versus a problem minority. But Nguyen made a point of expounding at length on the contributions black Americans had made to immigrant life. “Freedom is not free,” he said. “You pay with your blood.” He cited the contributions that black Americans made to fighting for political rights that allowed “a new immigrant like us to come over here to enjoy the fruit” of black political organizing.

Diep too sees politics through the lens of coalition building, something he learned when he was a Nevada staffer for the 2012 Obama campaign, which he praised as “the best political organizing team that American politics has seen to date.” When he takes office in January, barring any unforeseen developments, he will help guide a multiracial city in a region where Vietnamese-Americans are both numerous and powerful. Santa Clara County, the Silicon Valley region including San Jose, where he is now a city councilman, is 35 percent Asian-American and 7 percent Vietnamese-American. Though the first Vietnamese-American council member was elected 11 years ago, Diep’s win didn’t come easy. Manh Nguyen, the incumbent unseated by Diep, later sued him, claiming the vote-counting was mishandled.

“My campaign represents a passing of the torch for the Vietnamese community,” Diep said, referring to the rise of younger generations into maturity and of the children of Vietnamese refugees reshaping the community’s power base. “I think that my campaign was a balm to cynicism, at least in San Jose. So many people wrote me off.”

[dreowyn]

Texas apartment complex calls U.S. flag a threat to Muslims

Texas apartment complex calls U.S. flag a threat to Muslims

Duy Tran (l) and his flag at the Lodge on El Dorado apartment complex

Alice Barr reports for KHOU 11 News, June 18, 2014, that Duy Tran, a resident at an apartment complex in Webster, Texas, says the complex’s manager ordered him to take down his his American flag because it was a “threat to the Muslim community.”

After Tran moved into the Lodge on El Dorado just a few days ago, he proudly put up…

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[jane-eyesore]

I was convinced that entire rooms changed once I'd stepped out of them, like a turning stage that twirled one living room forward, with the same actors in place but in changed costumes and changed characters, which meant an entirely different was about to unfold.

Lê Thị Diễm Thúy

[ardenstreet-blog]

An article that finally answers the question: "Why are so many nail salons run by Vietnamese women?" Interesting.