Migrants back for business

Tiffany Nguyen sauntered down Dong Khoi street, swatting mosquitoes in the sticky heat. Wearing 3-inch black heels, she plunged through a crush of motorbikes spewing smoke and blasting horns, dashing towards a nearby restaurant to meet a friend.

Nguyen, 28, grew up around 12,000 kilometres from Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City, in a Southern California suburb. But for the last year, she has worked along this boulevard known as the Fifth Avenue of Vietnam, where boutiques crowd against old Parisian hotels.

For years entrepreneurs stayed away from Vietnam, a poor country with scant business prospects, where visas were hard to get.

No more. Vietnam has flung open its doors and billions of dollars of foreign investment have poured in, clearing the way for a new generation of Vietnamese Americans who are finding both opportunity and adventure in the communist country their parents fled.

“Viet kieu'', as overseas Vietnamese are known, are so pervasive in Ho Chi Minh City that California State University, Fullerton, formed a Ho Chi Minh City alumni chapter.

Nguyen is a member. A friend of hers is creating a guide for the city's growing number of restaurants.

Vietnamese expatriates are considered an important part of Vietnam's future, said Trung Nguyen, counsellor of overseas Vietnamese affairs in the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.

Once viewed with suspicion by the Vietnamese government, overseas Vietnamese are now being wooed back with relaxed business laws and promises of less red tape. Overseas Vietnamese can now own land and get visa exemptions.

Nguyen's family fled this city when she was 9.

Her parents never looked back.

For a time, neither did their daughter.

“Never in my life,'' she said, “had I planned on going back to Vietnam.''

Growing up in Fullerton, California, Nguyen quickly became Americanised. She changed her first name from Thao to Tiffany and had few Vietnamese friends.

“I was kind of whitewashed in high school,'' she said.

Nguyen stayed near friends and family, taking a job with the American Automobile Association and returning to the university in Fullerton to earn a masters degree in business administration.

But a yearning for adventure prompted a trip to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, two years ago.

Amid the rampant poverty, she saw thriving night scenes and swanky apartments. She was captivated by the energy of the country's largest metropolis, a place of 10 million people.

Two days after graduation from business school, she moved to HoChi Minh City, settling in a charming hardwood studio on the edge of District 1, where neon lights lure people into posh clubs and restaurants.

In doing so, she became part of an influential trend.

There are no precise statistics for how many Vietnamese expatriates are returning to live in Ho Chi Minh City.

But the number of overseas Vietnamese visiting for business or tourism have shot up — about 270,000 last year, according to the Vietnamese government, triple the number that visited in 1990.

Government officials say many of those people, such as Nguyen, are deciding to stay.

The reverse migration of young Vietnamese Americans would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.

Their parents who escaped the communist government after Saigon fell in 1975 still harboured deep bitterness.

In Little Saigon, in California's Orange County, where many rebuilt their lives, merchants still display the South Vietnamese flag.

Nguyen did not know what to expect when she arrived in Ho Chi Minh City.

Her parents, who had escaped from Vietnam after concluding it held no future for them, warned her not to go.

But she argued that the country had drastically changed. Her parents relented.

Nguyen was thrilled by the city and the electricity it radiated, where mopeds whizzed at all hours.

She could walk outside and buy furry orange rambutan fruit from sidewalk peddlers.

She spent weekends in nearby Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand.

The job she found in the booming real estate industry was fast-paced and the money was comparable to the salary she earned in the United States.

She met a large network of overseas Vietnamese and business people who introduced her to even more opportunities.

After less than a year, Nguyen jumped into the fashion industry, becoming the chief operating officer of one of Vietnam's leading fashion retailers, Maison, which imports brands such as Mango and Versace.

She is considered a ranking corporate executive and travels frequently, to showrooms in Milan, Italy, and Barcelona, Spain, and manages 250 employees.

Such an opportunity, she said, would probably have been out of reach in the US.

Nguyen called her work for Maison a “dream job'', but the dream of picking up life in an exotic, vibrant place doesn't always last.

Earlier this year, Nguyen decided to return to Orange County. Much like her parents, she decided to leave her ancestral homeland for the country they adopted nearly 20 years ago. That is where she feels at home.

“I miss driving,'' she said. “And a good piece of rib-eye steak.''