After the war: First-generation Vietnamese Americans thriving in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — Nini Nguyen’s kitchen is cramped and chaotic on a recent January night.

Nguyen, 36, lives in Uptown New Orleans, where the city’s notorious unruliness resolves itself into plotted blocks and rows of prim houses edged with lacy fretwork. She has half of a “double,” what most of America calls a duplex, and her small kitchen was not built to fit her and the two fellow chefs she enlisted to prepare dishes that would be photographed the next day for her first cookbook.

Her cookbook will be called “Dac Biet,” which means — more or less —“with everything.” Order a banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwich, “dac biet” and it comes with all the fillings.

For Nguyen’s generation of Vietnamese Americans in New Orleans, the first group born in the U.S. after their parents fled when Saigon, South Vietnam's capital, fell in 1975, dac biet is also a personality. It means to “be extra” or over the top.

Nguyen, her nails painted like shards of Chinese porcelain, a tattooed jellyfish’s tentacles draping down her right arm, considers herself dac biet. The photos in her book will vibrate with saturated colors. And it will be unapologetically Vietnamese, filled with the food she and her friends eat, the dishes’ names not translated into English. 

She hesitates for a moment, thinking about how to interpret the lessons her parents implicitly taught her.

“This is maybe just an opinion, but growing up my parents really wanted to assimilate,” she said. “They were like, 'Don’t make any waves. Do what everybody else is doing.'”

Nini Nguyen knows how to make waves.

In college, she decided to cook. Instead of graduating from culinary school, she dropped out after a semester to learn in commercial kitchens. Eventually she became a pastry chef at Eleven Madison Park, one of five New York City restaurants that holds three Michelin stars.

Twice she appeared on Bravo’s “Top Chef,” first in the 2018-19 season filmed in Kentucky and again for the following “All Star” season, which aired at the start of COVID-19 pandemic.

“‘Top Chef’ really helped me hone in my Vietnamese identity," she said, "because that’s what made me so different from the other contestants."

“Dac Biet,” will be published by the prestigious house Knopf, which also published Julia Child.

The Vietnamese have become part of New Orleans’ culture. Pho, Vietnam’s steaming beef soup, ranks not far behind po'boys and chargrilled oysters for local eaters. During Mardi Gras season, when gatherings often include king cakes decorated in purple, green and gold, one of the most sought after is baked at Dong Phuong, where the menu also includes sesame candies and pia bean cakes. The first Vietnamese American member of the U.S. Congress, one-term Rep. Joseph Cao, grew up in New Orleans after immigrating from Vietnam.

New Orleans does not have the largest Vietnamese community in the United States, but it may be the most close-knit. When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, roughly 7,000 Vietnamese lived within a mile of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church that serves the remote eastern New Orleans neighborhood known as Versailles. Another large group of Vietnamese settled on the West Bank, a suburb across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter.

Now, nearly a half century since the fall of Saigon, a generation often with no memory of the country their parents and grandparents fled is figuring out what it means to be Vietnamese in New Orleans and the United States.

Making a new home

New Orleans’ embrace of Vietnamese refugees would help restore America’s pride after its bitter military defeat. President Gerald Ford made that prediction to the graduating class of Tulane University on April 23, 1975.

“New Orleans is more, as I see it, than weathered bricks and cast-iron balconies,” Ford said. “It is a state of mind, a melting pot that represents the very, very best of America’s evolution, an example of retention of a very special culture in a progressive environment of modern change.”

A week later, Communist forces overtook Saigon, and what could have been an orderly flow of refugees out of South Vietnam became a desperate flood.

The Ford administration sent Vietnamese refugees to four camps in Florida, California, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. The U.S. government’s policy was to find sponsors and disperse them throughout the country to encourage assimilation and spread the burden.

In New Orleans, the Catholic Church had other plans.

Refugees would be kept together, clustered wherever the church discovered vacant property. Most Vietnamese were Buddhist, but the country always had a large Catholic population.

New Orleans considers itself a city of migrants, a port city where cultures fused to create Creole food, Carnival parades and jazz. And once that was true.

Between 1837 and the Civil War, only New York City attracted more immigrants, according to Tulane geographer Richard Campanella in his book "Geographies of New Orleans."

Then America largely shut the door to migration from the 1920s until the 1965 Immigration Act.

“After 1965, when immigration increased steadily, there were few compelling reasons to come to New Orleans,” Campanella said.

On May 26, 1975, the New Orleans Catholic Church welcomed its first group of 19 Vietnamese refugees at the Trailways bus station. Two years later, 5,100 Vietnamese would call New Orleans home.

The Vietnamese found a warm climate that reminded them of home. They planted gardens with taro, ginger, melons and turmeric. They discovered waters where they could continue fishing, as many had in Vietnam. Roughly one in 10 of the men would find work in the fishing industry, working the Gulf of Mexico's waters for shrimp and black drum. And most importantly, they formed a community of fellow refugees where they could live together, speaking Vietnamese.

Katrina changes everything

On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana.

New Orleans was largely spared from a natural disaster. The city, however, was devastated by a human disaster when the shoddy levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers failed. Eventually 80% of the city flooded, including the Versailles community in New Orleans East, where 7,000 Vietnamese lived.

On Oct. 9, six weeks after Katrina made landfall, Father Vien Nguyen, the pastor of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, celebrated Mass in New Orleans East. Three hundred people attended. The next Sunday, 800 people. The following week, the Archbishop attended when 2,000 worshipers, both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese, showed up. (Vien Nguyen is not related to chef Nini Nguyen. The surname Nguyen, pronounced "n'win," is held by nearly 40% of the current population of Vietnam.)

“I believe that we were the ones that turned on the light in the city of New Orleans. And we kept the light on,” said Cyndi Nguyen, 52. When New Orleans flooded, she ran Viet Aid, a social services organization. Then in 2017, she become the first Asian American elected to the New Orleans City Council, despite the fact that the district she represented in New Orleans East is about 15% Vietnamese and 80% African American.

The Vietnamese returned to New Orleans in greater numbers than the rest of the city's population. Younger Vietnamese, the ones who lived between the insular community of migrants and the wider world of New Orleans, had once been seen as a problem by their elders. These children had grown away from their parents, picking up the culture of their peers and losing their fluency in Vietnamese.

Now these children, who lived between two worlds, took the lead.

When FEMA and the city ignored the Vietnamese community, the young people spoke up. When the Bring Back New Orleans Commission, which directed rebuilding, proposed that large swaths of the East be left empty for drainage, they protested and joined forces with the middle class African Americans in the neighborhood. When Mayor Ray Nagin allowed a dump to open a mile from Versailles for storm debris, threatening the water that fed the gardens, the young Vietnamese became political and founded action groups like VAYLA, the Vietnamese American Young Leader Association.

What does it mean to be Vietnamese

“Asian Americans in the South, we’re backdrops,” said Jacqueline Thanh, 34, the executive director of VAYLA. "We’re servers. We make the food. We give you pedicures. We clean hotel rooms. Or we’re entrepreneurs. It’s this hyper juxtaposition.”

Thanh, who is part of an ethnically Chinese population that long lived in Vietnam, wants young Vietnamese Americans to imagine more possibilities.

“You’re telling me at 20 you want to be a pharmacist? You, the child of fishermen and my nail lady, you want to be behind a CVS counter giving me my meds for the rest of my life,” she asked rhetorically. “There are certain roles that you take or don’t take because of the war.”

Thanh, who grew up in California, studied Chaucer at University of California, Berkeley. Then she became a trauma therapist.

“You don’t become a social worker like me for fun,” she said. “Growing up with two parents who survived war and being on boats, I was always a trauma therapist. I just get paid for it now.”

Thuc Nguyen, 47, thinks a lot about roles Vietnamese Americans can play. She is a writer, and much of her works these days are screenplays that feature Vietnamese characters. That was not always the case.

“It sounds terrible, but I wrote colorblind roles,” she said.

Now all her protagonists, whether a start-up founder or a vampire, are Vietnamese.

Thuc Nguyen, who grew up in North Carolina and lived many years in Los Angeles, recently moved to New Orleans. The city is the first place she has lived, including Los Angeles, where everyone knows how to pronounce her last name.

She moved to New Orleans to oversee the filming of her script for “Scent of the Delta,” which was a semifinalist in the 2020 Sundance Film Institute competition.

The movie tells the story of a Vietnamese American woman in her 30s who returns to New Orleans to find her identity. “Scent of the Delta,” according to Deadline, the Hollywood news organization, will be the first English-language film since Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth,” released 30 years ago, to feature a Vietnamese American woman as the protagonist.

And chef Nini Nguyen decided her first cookbook, “Dac Biet,” will be about more than food. She wants it to show how Vietnamese contributed to America culture.

"It’s time for that story to be told," she said.

She wants people to know that the Vietnamese are now integral to New Orleans' 300-year history. They catch the shrimp and shuck the oysters that fill the city's tables. They turned painting nails, a job many took out of necessity, into art.

When Nini Nguyen thinks about all that she has done in America, she often remembers an Uber driver who once drove her to the airport in New York, where she lived before returning to New Orleans in 2021. The driver had friends who fought and died in the Vietnam War. He had a question for her.

“Do you like your life,” he asked sincerely. “Was it worth it, losing my friends? Was it worth it to bring your people here?”

Todd A. Price writes about culture and food across the South for the USA Today Network. He can be reached at taprice@gannett.com.