Vietnamese Immigrants to the US
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When Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants to the US consisted mainly of the residue of South Vietnam's elite bureaucracy, chiefly political in their orientation. The second wave, coming 1979 and the early 1980s, comprised what were called boat people, refugees from the North Vietnamese communist crackdown against disloyal citizens and a war with the People's Republic of China, and settling in a variety of locales around the country. The second wave of Vietnamese immigrants proved to be more entrepreneurial in focus. Indeed, the determination of South Vietnamese immigrants and their families to find a way to make money in the US put them in sometimes dangerous competition with established American businesses; indeed, American hostility to Vietnamese shrimpers at the Texas Gulf sometimes spilled over into violence. One view of the Vietnamese determination to succeed in the US is that the dislocation of war obliged them "to part somewhat from native ways and take on the languages and affectations of alien peoples. Only later . . . has life meant rediscovering roots and national identity" (Fox 5). This was the case for Vietnamese whose roots were in Buddhist or French Catholic practice, the two dominant religious traditions in modern Vietnam.For many Vietnamese Buddhists, embracing economic challenges meant in part setting aside certain religious values. The difficulty can be appreciated given the Four Noble Truths that are common
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which would have been strictly monastic, was in the US slightly transformed. At any rate, some Buddhist temples in the US became the locus of community service: a psychoemotional therapeutic platform enabling either formal or informal networks of information, interfamily support, new-culture education, the sharing and acknowledgment of family status, and help with problems in adjusting to the new culture (Ebaugh and Chalfetz 600ff).
As most first- and second-generation immigrants with roots in Vietnamese Buddhism know, religious institutions, customs, and events focused around a temple in Vietnam have historically been the province of the Buddhist clergy, with virtually no involvement of the Buddhist laity. The influx of Vietnamese into the US after 1975 was marked by the fact that Buddhist temples by and large were organized around lay people who came together, in their numbers as a minority relative to the American mainstream, "to reproduce their cultural and religious heritage" (Ebaugh and Chalfetz 599). The reproduction was not exact, but this points up the importance of the sangha as the focus of experience.
Research has shown that even after the hurdles of acculturation, social life of Vietnamese is often organized around
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Approximate Word count = 2222
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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