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 to all strands of Buddhism: 1) Sorrow (suffering) is the basic fact of all life at all times of life; 2) The cause of all suffering is craving, desire, or grasping; 3) Suffering can only be stopped if grasping and/or craving is stopped; 4) The third truth can be accomplished only by careful conduct, its code contained in the Eightfold Noble Path (Abe 75). The fourth truth implies the need to reject acquisitiveness implicit in scrambling for survival in a new cul...