HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — 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 toward a nearby restaurant to meet a friend.
Nguyen, 28, grew up 7,800 miles from here in an Orange County 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 investments 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 here that Cal State Fullerton formed a Ho Chi Minh City alumni chapter. Nguyen is a member. A friend of hers is creating a Zagat-like guide for the city's growing number of restaurants.
Vietnamese expatriates are considered an important part of Vietnam's future, said Trung Nguyen, counselor 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.
Tiffany 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, Nguyen quickly became Americanized. 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 for college, enrolling at Cal State Fullerton, taking a job with the American Automobile Assn., returning to Fullerton to earn a master's in business administration.
An adventure
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.
