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Posted on Mon, Aug. 28, 2006; Copyright 2006 San Jose Mercury News

HURRICANE KATRINA | A YEAR LATER

Vietnamese neighborhood falls back on survival skills

By Kim Vo
Mercury News

BILOXI, Miss. - ``Pho 777 opening soon,'' promises the banner at Howard and Oak streets. Restaurant owner Dung Trinh recently moved here from North Carolina, spotting opportunity in the fevered casino reconstruction along the hurricane-damaged waterfront. Workers, Trinh reasoned, need to eat.

Hang Nguyen, who lives down the street, sees a different kind of opportunity in casinos: Perhaps they'll buy the land where his white FEMA trailer now sits. He says it's his best chance of getting a new house.

Henry Huong Le, whose family owns the San Jose-based Lee's Sandwiches chain, predicts a building boom where owners of waterfront real estate -- like Le -- will prosper, while the fishing industry that first drew Vietnamese immigrants here sinks.

``Those people are at the end right now,'' said Le, who came to Biloxi in 1985, when his father invested in a seafood packing plant.

In addition to wind and water, Hurricane Katrina blew mixed fortunes into Point Cadet, forever altering this community in eastern Biloxi where the bulk of Mississippi's 6,000 Vietnamese-Americans had lived since arriving as refugees in the 1970s.

The storm crippled the seafood industry that employs many of the Vietnamese here, and the community faces daunting challenges as it tries to rebuild. Many don't have money to fix their boats or homes, and speculation abounds that their neighborhood, which is now in a redevelopment zone, will be dominated by casinos, condos and a new city park.

``It's going to be different,'' said Minh Ly, who's planning to reduce the 50 brands of ramen he stocks in his market to make room for the tortillas that construction workers are requesting.

Many families are moving 10 minutes north to D'Iberville, where there's a new Vietnamese restaurant and where Ly wants to open another market. Shrimpers who no longer have a place to dock are commuting an hour east to Bayou La Batre, Ala.

Industry `is dead'

Others are weighing their limited options, unsure where they'll find money to rebuild their homes, boats and lives.

``Everyone is waiting,'' Nguyen said recently while enjoying a lunch of freshly caught squid and shrimp with friends. They sat in a small room of corrugated tin, an add-on to the white trailer where Nguyen, 40, has lived since Katrina with his foster parents. Outside is the oak tree he clung to for hours during the storm, as he watched their home splinter and blow away.

His fellow shrimpers predict a dark future.

``The seafood industry is dead,'' said Lien Van Nguyen, no relation, who lost one of his three boats in the storm. There's no firm estimate of how many boats were destroyed, but port officials say 100 people -- about 20 percent -- have given up their boat slips.

The industry was already struggling with high gas prices and competition from such places as Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam. A few years ago, fuel for Lien Nguyen's boats cost 80 cents a gallon, and small shrimp were selling for $1.60 a pound. Today, fuel is $2.35, and the same pound of shrimp brings in 75 cents.

There are new expenses, too. In addition to repairing boats -- which can run $5,000 to $50,000 depending on the damage -- nets are constantly torn as they snag on storm-tossed refrigerators and beer kegs. Lien Nguyen has started carrying a small saw to trim the tree branches he keeps hauling up.

Still, he and his wife remain on their boats, selling directly to customers who know the crustaceans taste even sweeter coming straight out of the water. At age 52, Nguyen has children to put through college and few options for a new career.

``Before, I worked and could save,'' he said. ``Now I work just to pay bills.''

Backbone of the industry

It was the shrimping industry that drew Vietnamese to Mississippi after the Vietnam War and helped them flourish.

Along the Gulf of Mexico, they found an ideal adopted home. Houses at the time cost in the tens -- not hundreds -- of thousands. Chili peppers, squash and herbs flourished in fertile backyard gardens. There was a village atmosphere, where one would bump into friends at the noodle house, the market, the video store.

Plus, there was the sea, whose generous waters afforded food and work, as it had back home. Vietnamese-Americans became integral to the shrimping community, working at processing plants and eventually buying their own boats.

``The Vietnamese community is the backbone of our seafood industry,'' said Vincent Creel, Biloxi's public-affairs manager.

The community built a Buddhist temple here, next to the Catholic Church of the Vietnamese Martyrs. The storm-damaged buildings have been repaired, and hundreds attend Sunday services. People say those buildings will keep drawing the Vietnamese back, even if fewer eventually live there.

Many ``do want to stay, but they're feeling a lot of pressure,'' said Uyen Le, with the National Alliance of Vietnamese American Service Agencies, a Maryland-based advocacy group. In community forums, a common refrain is that people don't have the resources to rebuild.

Katrina's aftermath has produced a new phenomenon: trucks and vans parked along the highway selling shrimp from coolers. Before the storm took out processing plants and markets, people say, such tactics were unnecessary.

Le Ly, a mother of four, pays $400 a month to park her truck in a gravel parking lot, selling shrimp out of coolers from morning to dusk. After paying the shrimpers, she earns about $50 a day, money she needs to buy food and pay back loans she took out to fix her house.

``It's harder,'' she said, a floppy flowered hat protecting her from the sun. She and her competitors divvy up the territory ``so we all make enough to eat.''

Some Vietnamese communities along the gulf are faring better. In the New Orleans neighborhood of Versailles, 47 of the 50-something Vietnamese businesses have reopened, said the Rev. Vien Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church.

He credits the relatively quick recovery to that community's unique history. Most of the neighborhood's families go back generations to three provinces in northern Vietnam. They migrated to South Vietnam in 1954, then headed to the United States after the war ended in 1975. Strong ties -- and a built-in hierarchy within the heavily Catholic community -- kept people together, Nguyen said.

Starting over

In the wake of Katrina, fellow expatriates throughout the country sent food, money and volunteers to the gulf. People also reached back for strategies that had helped them when they first came to the United States: Families doubled up in their homes and exchanged tips on helpful service agencies.

``We've been through war and scavenging on the boats,'' said Henry Le, the sandwich chain owner who splits his time between San Jose and Biloxi, where he hopes to retire. He started a non-profit organization, the Renew Hope Project, to help people rebuild in the Gulf Coast. The group has elicited support from Vietnamese communities throughout the country, such as the Viet Heritage Society in San Jose.

Non-profits are retraining people for office jobs or casino work. Those with strong English skills are angling for jobs as card dealers, while non-English-speakers might work in housecleaning or the kitchens.

There's still a long way to go.

Chau Ly, 40, recently returned to Mississippi after living in Virginia for the past year after her family's home was destroyed. Now she's searching near Biloxi for an apartment, which these days cost at least $1,000, well above pre-Katrina levels.

For now, she, her husband and their seven children are living with her cousin's large family in nearby Ocean Springs. It's like those first years in the United States, she said with a wan smile.

``We begin again.''

Copyright 2006 San Jose Mercury News