By ANDREW LAM, Pacific News Service
EDITOR'S NOTE: Anti-technology feelings are running high these days, not just in the sentiments expressed by the Unabomber but among many ordinary Americans who believe technological progress means more lonely, isolated people. But Vietnamese Americans offer a different experience. For them, high tech has fused the future with the past. PNS editor Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese American reporter and short story writer living in the Bay Area.
San Jose, California In his high tech lair full of humming computers and lilting modems, a Vietnamese American friend prophesizes my future. "You will become a workaholic and have tragic romances." he sighs as he contemplates the stars and comets swirling around the hour and date of my birth. "On the other hand, you will always be surrounded by great and intelligent friends."
Coming from a Ph.D. from MIT who in his off-hours designs software programs for horoscopes, who was I to argue? My friend works as a computer scientist in Silicon Valley, but he finds no contradiction between his daytime occupation and nighttime hobby. In fact to him, and to many Vietnamese immigrants in America, they mesh.
While many native-born Americans blame technology - the ATM, automated gas pumps, the home shopping network- for breaking down community and family ties, many Asian immigrants will tell you it has had the reverse effect on their lives. Not long ago the ocean was vast, homesickness was an incurable malady, and the immigrant had little more than memories to keep cultural ties alive. Today jumbo jets have shrunk the ocean; the camcorder shows grandma back home what life is like in America; and the newly arrived needs only the fax machine and a satellite dish pointed skyward to keep abreast of developments back home.
David Tran, a young Vietnamese American from Orange County, is something of an expert on East Asian mythology. A third year law student with a six year old�s memory of Vietnam, David owes his knowledge of his heritage to the VCR. It was the VCR, he reminds me, that created the US. market for kung fu videos from Hong Kong as well as for Vietnamese pop music from Paris. The tapes, dubbed in eloquent Vietnamese, have made him proficient in his mother tongue and given him a sense of Confucian ethics. They have also inspired an avid interest in East Asian history, culture and mythology.
Without the VCR, Tran concludes, he might still be a Stallone fan.
In the 20 years since the Vietnamese diaspora began, Vietnamese Americans have immersed themselves in the hard sciences in colleges and universities. Today they are reaping the rewards. It is no accident that the largest Vietnamese population living overseas now shares its home in Orange County where Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas are headquartered. Nor is it mere chance that the second largest Vietnamese overseas population resides 300 miles north in Silicon Valley, birthplace of the microchip.
Named by President Clinton as 1994 Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Sean Nguyen was once a vice farmer. When the war ended he fled with his father and brother to America where he worked in a factory assembling modems and studied English at night. Today he runs a family-owned multi million dollar corporation assembling computer circuit boards. He has returned to Vietnam several times and plans to open a factory in the province where he once lived.
Vietnamese immigrants have found success by combining a strong ethnic identity with an open mind to change" particularly technology. Of my many "great and intelligent" Vietnamese American friends who now work in high tech, one has designed Vietnamese alphabet fonts with all the accent marks for a word processing program. This means Vietnamese can now be written on the computer screen and used for desk top publishing. Another is creating CD-ROM�s for classical Vietnamese poetry, history, traditional cuisine, geography, language lessons, essays and short stories. A Vietnamese child born in America can now click on an icon depicting a zither or a flute and hear ancient dirge-like music echo mournfully from the computer. Click on the icon and the past returns.
"Technology is just a tool," my friend the horoscope reader shrugs. "It�s up to you to bring your passions to it." From a certain angle, the microchip with its tiny grits that store parochial memories resembles the sacred rice field writ small.