title: “You Can Go Home Again” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “Michelle Mahraun”
Overseas Vietnamese–known as “Viet kieu” –have always been a secret boon to the Vietnamese economy. More than 2 million people fled the South after the war, and in the quarter-century since, they have sent billions of dollars to the relatives they left behind. But now, encouraged by a gradual economic opening, thousands of Viet kieu–mostly young men and women who left when they were children–are returning to look for business opportunities themselves. Armed with cash, advanced degrees and cultural connections, many of the returnees have been able to thrive in a half-open economy that has frustrated local businessmen and foreign investors alike. In the process they are helping transform Vietnam–and themselves. “The Viet kieu are filling the gap,” says Tran. “We are a cultural bridge.”
Not long ago Hanoi distrusted the Viet kieu. They are, after all, the capitalist sons and daughters of families that fled the communist invasion. But “now the government is thinking of us not just as quick cash or as interpreters, but as a source of capital and experience,” says Nguyen Huu Le. He left a lucrative job at Canada’s Nortel to run Paragon Solutions Vietnam, a fast-growing software-development firm in Ho Chi Minh City. These days the government offers Viet kieu a range of incentives, from tax breaks to direct ownership of homes and businesses. Nguyen lost two brothers in the war and has no love for the Communist Party. Still he was thrilled when legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap dropped by his office earlier this year to show support.
But it’s not easy balancing two different worlds. Cang Mai, a 31-year-old engineer from Chicago, is using Western management ideas in his latest venture–a Viet kieu-friendly Web site called Vietnam.com. But he says he has suffered “culture shock” adjusting to the Vietnamese system, which requires him to be polite, deferential and patriotic. “I figured that I was Vietnamese, that it was enough to have it inside of me. But it’s a daily process of becoming Vietnamese.” And for Vietnam, thanks to the Viet kieu, a daily process of becoming more American.
title: “You Can Go Home Again” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-31” author: “Jerry Peyatt”
Irena, who has lived in France since Soviet forces crushed the Prague Spring of 1968, and Josef, who briefly met her before he immigrated to Denmark, embark on separate visits to their homeland. Sylvie, Irena’s French friend, insists that this will be “your great return.” But the reader knows from Kundera’s tone that the return will be more disappointing than great, more disorienting than satisfying. In the parallel stories of Irena and Josef–which intersect only at the end–he illuminates every detail and every emotion. His greatest accomplishment is to make even the most sedentary reader see the world through emigre eyes.
The most telling, discomforting moments are when Irena and Josef encounter friends and family who stayed behind. Irena invites a group of women to a restaurant, hoping to show them how she has matured in her years abroad. She sets up bottles of Bordeaux, but the women order beer. “Rejecting the wine was rejecting her,” she realizes, or at least the Irena who lived a different life in Paris. Whenever she tries to tell them something about her experiences, they aren’t interested. Instead, they check to see if she remembers the same things from their youth, trying to consign the last 20 years of her life to oblivion “as if they were amputating her calves and joining her feet to her knees.”
Josef stumbles through his first meeting with his brother and sister-in-law, who are mainly worried about whether he will seek to reclaim any of his old possessions. He feels like “a dead man emerging from his tomb after twenty years.” When he tries to ask an old friend, a committed communist who had enough courage to defend him, about what he thinks of his old convictions now, Josef gets no response. His questions are “not so much indiscreet as outdated,” he realizes, since Czechs who stayed are long past the stage when they might have scrutinized themselves. The disconnects are everywhere, even in the jarring change in the music of the language. “Josef was listening to an unknown language whose every word he understood,” Kundera writes. The author’s own language in this slim but elegant volume is nothing short of masterful.
