Ethnic Web Weaves Real Sense of Family

Vietnamese immigration into California has been a topic of lasting fascination for me, a story of courage and achievement replete with all the worries about starting over and deciding how and whether to assimilate.

The Vietnam exodus is a generation old, though the departure remains a searing experience. Many still feel the sting of ethnic mocking in the adopted culture, or struggle against too homogenized an existence, or lament the lack of links to the ideas and sounds of their homeland. Even for those born in America, there is internal conflict between the desire to identify with tradition and the comfort of blending in.

Stir technology into this emotional caldron, and an interesting question presents itself: Can the World Wide Web serve a useful purpose in bridging a psychic and geographic gap?

That was the question I asked in dialing up Real Saigon (https://www.realsaigon.com), an Anaheim-produced site that is one entryway into the Vietnamese experience in California. Here is an electronic gathering place (in English characters or in Vietnamese) where visitors can partake of Vietnamese music, gossip and poetry, scan Vietnamese-related news reports and even check out folk tales that have made the transition from oral tradition.

It is a well-ordered and easy-to-navigate site that makes it simple to listen, comment and learn. And stops like the “Whispered in a Coffee Shop� section provide a peep into individual tales of emotional adjustment. Typically, the Whispered items are from students seeking social advice. And they get it from their peers.

This is only one of dozens of such sites devoted to the Vietnamese experience. A similar site, VietGATE, at https://www.saigon.com, operates from San Jose, offering links to Vietnamese activities and businesses throughout the state, particularly in Northern California. (I did try looking for Vietnamese restaurants in Los Angeles and was surprised that none were returned in search results.)

An online magazine called VietNet offers articles, photographs, multimedia CDs and other goods. There is the Official Pho Page (https://www.wam.umd.edu/~andrewb/pho.html) with entertaining ways to enjoy a traditional Vietnamese food.

Through the Saigon and Real Saigon sites, one can find links to such areas as the Vietnamese Professional Society, Vietnam Pictures Collection, Miss Vietnam Tet Pageant 1996, Little Saigon Net, Vietnam Democracy Newsletter and others.

Real Saigon Editor David Jiles, 43, suggests a bit of caution among some sites that, he believes, take on a political bias.

“We are aware through our tracking that there are political groups who are watching what we do. We take care to offer timely information but to ensure that it is balanced and accurate,� he said.

“What you see happening on the Net is a reaching out to the world of ‘community.’ What we’ve found is that although people say they have many interests, they generally come back to a few.� His site “is trying to attract the Vietkieu,� those who live far from Vietnam but maintain emotional ties, a sort of community in exile.

About a quarter of the users of Real Saigon ask to use Vietnamese fonts, Jiles says.

The site is anything but complete. There is a map of Westminster, the Orange County city at the heart of the area known as Little Saigon, but no guide for finding local businesses--though that is in the works.

Jiles acknowledges that the effort is incomplete and hopes that the pending addition of online Vietnamese language courses and a “lost and found� feature allowing relatives to look for one another will help prove the true utility of Real Saigon.

These sites reflect little money-making effort at the moment. VietGATE sells access to the Web as an Internet Service Provider company. Real Saigon earns some money from the sale of music CDs, but there is little advertising yet.

Rather than offering comment on response times or design of the site, the letters to Real Saigon display a definite pride in being Vietnamese and being able to link to other Vietnamese--and an appreciation for the site’s existence.

At VietGATE, I could also get information about Vietnamese-related community services and activities.

(There is an Asian American Network, a subsidiary of Asian Business Co-op, at https://www.aan.net, offering information services to all Asian communities, including news, job listings, cultural events and other services.)

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It was easy to get the feeling traveling among these sites that I was part of an extended family. Rather than the kind of knowledge about the Vietnamese experience that one might seek for a term paper, these sites offered a rich taste of daily life, a sensation of entering a family discussion in mid-sentence. These were people, many of them young, who wanted to learn more about their heritage and share ethnic survival techniques.

If anything, this is the kind of site that makes me wish for a more surrounding technology that would offer a realistic virtual visit. And for those who long to maintain special ethnic ties in a multicultural but assimilated world, there is a lesson to learn here about how the online experience can help provide that link.

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Terry Schwadron is deputy managing editor of The Times and oversees latimes.com, its Web site. He can reached via e-mail at [email protected]