Seven-year-old Vương Ngọc Lan ascended from a pit of fish guts and human waste inside a 50-foot dinghy to a 935-foot tanker named after the Virgo constellation. She was one of 2 million “boat people” who fled Vietnam by sea after the fall of Saigon to Communist forces on April 30, 1975, remembered as Tháng Tư Đen — Black April.

As the exodus continued into the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of the refugees perished in transit or were slaughtered by pirates.

Of those who survived, many resettled in San Jose, now home to the largest Vietnamese population in a single city outside Vietnam. One in 10 San Jose residents and more than 150,000 in Santa Clara County claim some Vietnamese ethnicity.

This April, 50 years after the loss of their homeland, Vietnamese refugees and their descendants who helped shape San Jose and Silicon Valley are pondering their legacy and what it means to be Vietnamese American moving forward. For Vương, who goes by Lauren Vuong and now lives in San Francisco, this includes illuminating what became of those left behind after the U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War.

“Ken Burns documented 8 hours of the Vietnam War, and there wasn’t anything about this group of people,” she said. “Going forward, can we just get a footnote?”

While the U.S. assisted refugees who fled Vietnam and a 20-year war that killed at least 2 million Vietnamese civilians, they were largely on their own to reach this country.

Vương’s ethnically Chinese third-generation Vietnamese father, an artillery captain of the U.S.-allied anti-Communist Army of the Republic of Vietnam, was imprisoned in a re-education camp for years after 1975. Her mother generated money for the family’s exit in 1980 by selling Western goods on the black market.

When they were aboard their escape dinghy, Thắng Lợi (Victory), a storm blew them adrift of their target in the Philippines. The crew of the LNG Virgo saved Vương and 61 others from certain death, and after a stopover in Singapore, her family reached San Jose the day after Thanksgiving, crowding into one room in an apartment in “the roughest slum” on Carnelian Drive.

During the children’s first days in school, a boy whose uncle had died fighting in Vietnam waited to beat up the Vương girls after class. Their brother defended them, taking the blows.

By that time, 11,717 Vietnamese refugees lived in what was a combination of farmland and a crime-riddled downtown drag where City Hall now stands.

Building and Thriving

Lap Tang took advantage of cheap commercial vacancies in San Jose and set up shop dubbing Korean and Chinese entertainment into Vietnamese.

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A former police captain who left Vietnam with his wife and daughter in 1975, Tang moved to the city from Southern California in the late 1970s, when refugees were filling manufacturing jobs in a nascent Silicon Valley.

A Little Saigon neighborhood of Vietnamese businesses sprouted and expanded eastward to the Lion Plaza Mall at Tully and King roads.

In 1998, Tang bought a shuttered Costco in a dead zone on Story Road and opened it in 2000 as the Grand Century Shopping Mall with 105 shops. In 2011, he added Vietnam Town, selling all 265 condo units to Vietnamese entrepreneurs — nail salon owners, jewelry dealers, áo dài dress retailers, and dealers of medicinal herbs and seafood jerkies.

“We had to do whatever it takes to build a home right here so we can see that this city here is our city,” Tang said recently, gazing out a window at his plaza.

What he has built a world away from old Saigon is the expression of what he lost and missed — and a symbol of the Vietnamese influence in San Jose.

Leading and Diverging

“The one thing they were lacking was a political voice,” recalled Madison Nguyen, the first person of Vietnamese descent to hold political office in San Jose, as the District 7 city councilmember in 2005 at the age of 30.

One of nine children who left Vietnam by boat with their parents, Nguyen, a toddler at the time, and her family eventually moved to Modesto to labor in the fruit fields.

She vividly remembers her first trip to the San Jose fairgrounds for Tết, the festivities surrounding Lunar New Year, when she was 10.

“It was the first time I actually got to experience the lively cultural aspects of my own community,” she said. Years later, she moved there to research San Jose’s Vietnamese while pursuing her Ph.D. in sociology at UC Santa Cruz.

They christened her the “golden child” of the city until the saga about her suggestion to rename Little Saigon. She prevailed through recall attempts by some refugees and became the first Vietnamese vice mayor of the city.

“In this country, anything is possible,” said Nguyen, now 50. She said the America to which her family arrived was one in which someone of her humble background could become an elected official.

Madison Nguyen, candidate for California’s 27th Assembly District, thanks her supporters and bids them a good night as her election night party winds down without a result Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, in San Jose, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group) 

Vietnamese American Dream

In 2017, at age 32, American-born Lân Diệp became one of several Vietnamese Americans who followed Nguyen as a councilmember, for District 4.

Diệp was shocked when, at age 14, he moved in the 1990s from a then-sparse Vietnamese community in Houston to the “spectrum of Vietnamese America” in San Jose.

“For the first time in my life, people would say my name right,” he said. Lân, short for Thế Lân, rhymes with “fun.”

“My parents had the mindset that Vietnam was our homeland, and we’re living in America now because they couldn’t accept an authoritarian regime. We’re living in America in exile, and one glorious day when Communism falls in Vietnam, we’ll go back,” he said. 

Now 41 and still waiting for that day, Diệp sympathizes with the refugees and former political prisoners who others may view as unrelatable, stuck and even extreme. 

“These are the guys you see walking up and down Story Road in military fatigues. They’re proud of their service — brothers in arms, and all that stuff. In a way, it’s beautiful. They refuse to let the dream die,” he said.

That dream, he insisted, “is not bitterness, hatred, or inability to get over the past. It’s optimism about what Vietnam could be, if only.”

Not so long ago, the community used to lobby heartily for the rights of people suffering political persecution in Vietnam, he said.

“The complexities of homeland affairs and identity — that still gets talked about a lot. But it happens in Vietnamese,” he said, citing generational loss of language as a key reason for the deterioration of a unifying principle within his community.

San Jose City Councilmember Lan Diep, speaks to the attendees of a community event commemorating the 44th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 2019, in San Jose City Hall Rotunda. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group) 

Serving and Healing

Last year, Betty Duong became the first person of Vietnamese ethnicity and the first Asian American woman elected to a Santa Clara County supervisor seat, representing District 2.

“Vietnamese is synonymous with San Jose, now,” said the 44-year-old Duong, exulting in the community’s growing presence in commerce, government and society.

But she worries that continued inclusion and economic success are becoming unattainable for younger generations because of the “astronomical” cost of living. Born to and raised by refugee parents in San Jose, Duong said her parents could not have made ends meet if they arrived here today. Houses in what used to be the poorest parts of the city now fetch over a million dollars.

And the long-term work of community healing remains — normalizing mental health care conversations to mend families living with half a century of bottled up trauma and pain.

The Vietnamese American Services Center, a county-funded social services and community programming center for all residents, provides a safe place for this ongoing project. Senior manager HaNhi Tran shifted to her role after working as a prosecutor for 12 years to avenge the lack of safety she witnessed while growing up in poverty in Southern California with refugee parents.

“To serve the community I actually come from is healing in many ways,” she said.

Santa Clara Board of Supervisors Betty Duong, District 2, center, stands with Sunnyvale Police Chief Phan S. Ngo, left, while posing for a photograph with South Vietnam veterans during a ceremony remembering the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon held at the James P. McEntee, Sr. Plaza in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, April 7, 2025. During the ceremony the Vietnamese Heritage and Freedom Flag was raised and then lowered to half mast where it will fly at the Santa Clara County Government Center all month long. About 100 people attended the event. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group) 

Progressing, Not Forgetting

Artist and community engagement activist Trinh Mai, host of an arts and culture workshop at the Vietnamese American Services Center, was born in Pennsylvania and raised by extended family until she was 2 years old and her parents collected her after situating themselves in San Jose.

Her husband, Hiền Văn Thạch, left Vietnam at age 3 and arrived in Stockton via a refugee camp in Cambodia. The couple, who first met in college, promotes the “gentle advocacy” of art. They share their personal experiences and family histories in interactive sessions to humanize immigrants, refugees, the poor, the oppressed and the displaced.

Artist Trinh Mai talks about the needles holding up teabags with family photographs in her exhibit titled “Begins with Tea” for the “Made of Memory” exhibit at the New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) in Los Gatos, Calif., on Sunday, March 9, 2025. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group) 

Mai’s work is laborious. Drying teabags collected during conversations with her late grandmother and filling them with spices and seeds from her pantry. Hand drawing a family onto a muslin tent and coaching passers-by to sew words that remind them of home onto delicate cheesecloth.

“I’m a steward of these stories — I want to do it myself and struggle,” she said.

Mai’s art is on display in a City Hall exhibition, Hidden Heritages: San José’s Vietnamese Community. Next month, her immigrant art student mentees will show their work at the unveiling of a San Jose Community College library collection.

One of the students, from Vietnam, confided to Mai that she had been called a Communist by local elders for using post-1975 language, all she ever knew.

“This is what war does to us, to those we love, and to those we don’t even know,” Mai said. “We are a Vietnamese people who are divided, just as we are Americans who are divided.”

Philip Nguyen, executive director of the nonprofit Vietnamese American Roundtable and a professor at San Francisco State, thinks political acrimony, differing waves of immigration and experiential incongruities across generations can lead to apathy around history and activism.

“Vietnamese community and identity are inherently political but everything doesn’t always have to be about politics,” he said. With the Roundtable, he lures youth in with social occasions like citywide Lunar New Year celebrations and “V-pop” listening parties, then “backloads them with history and information.”

Passing the Baton

He doesn’t blame elders who are not ready to pass the baton of community identity.

“For a lot of them, this is the first time they’ve felt remembered or seen,” he said.

Tang, the man who literally built the flourishing Little Saigon, knows well that change is inevitable. But if there’s one note he wants the youngbloods to take down, it’s to stick together and cooperate. “We can’t do it alone,” he said.

Diệp is quick to tout Vietnamese success in San Jose and beyond, but dreads hearing profuse expressions of gratitude to elders for their sacrifices without any mention of persisting human rights challenges in Vietnam.

“Black April is not a time for glorifying successes and contributions to America. This is about why do we exist in America at all? It’s because we rejected Communism. That reason still exists and we should be calling the world’s attention to it,” he said.

Vương said: “I left Vietnam; it never left me. I’m very happy that my countrymen know peace. I just wish they knew the price of peace.”

Flags Up

“It’s become our own burden to write our history,” said Vương, the self-deprecating “unsexy government lawyer and regular mom” who created a documentary, Finding The Virgo (2018), about seeking her rescuers.

“If I can change one mind and open one door for another family, I will consider it my life’s greatest accomplishment,” she said.

“The branch of refugee history is withering, and it’s in danger of breaking off and going into extinction,” said Diệp, who anxiously hopes that younger Vietnamese Americans can reverse the tides. “On the offhand chance they can’t, we’ve enshrined it in law,” he said.

The flag of South Vietnam is bright yellow, with three horizontal red stripes signifying the shared blood of the people of the Northern, Central and Southern parts of the country. By law, San Jose, Milpitas and Santa Clara County only recognize this flag, not Vietnam’s national flag.

South Vietnam veterans salute as they present the colors of the flag during a ceremony remembering the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon held at the James P. McEntee, Sr. Plaza in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, April 7, 2025. During the ceremony the Vietnamese Heritage and Freedom Flag was raised and then lowered to half mast where it will fly at the Santa Clara County Government Center all month long. About 100 people attended the event. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group) 

On Monday, April 7, after morning rains cleared, Santa Clara County flew the flag in its government center for the first time, proclaiming April the memorial month for Vietnamese Americans.

In a black velvet áo dài, Duong declared,  “This flag is not just a symbol of freedom; it is proof of our continued existence.”

After the county acknowledged the Vietnamese refugee community as a pillar of American values and vowed to help shoulder its collective history, guests dispersed from the square until only the last refugees remained in the liminal realm where Saigon never fell.