Communications Professor
Chronicles the Development of Little Saigon
Comm professor and former reporter plays
an active role in chronicling life in the Vietnamese-American
community.
September 29, 2005
By Valerie Orleans
The media weren’t paying too
much attention to Vietnamese refugees when Jeffrey Brody moved
to Orange County in the early 1980s.
As a reporter for the Orange County Register,
he certainly was aware of the refugees but admittedly knew
“next to nothing” about the resettlement.
Today, Brody, a professor of communications
and member of the Asian American Studies Program Council,
is a fixture in Little Saigon and plays an active role in
chronicling life in the Vietnamese community.
“The story of the Vietnamese people is
impressive,” Brody explains. “Rising from a defeated
South Vietnam, they turned a lagging commercial district into
Little Saigon, a thriving metropolis of some 2,000 stores
and businesses, serving the largest Vietnamese community in
the world outside of Vietnam.”
To date, Brody has visited Vietnam three times
and written more than 400 articles about Southeast Asian refugees.
It was a chance encounter that turned Brody
into one of Little Saigon’s most devoted chroniclers.
While researching a story, Brody and his photographer
stopped by a liquor store to grab a soda. Suddenly, the photographer
began taking pictures of the clerk behind the counter.
The “clerk” was Nguyen Cao Ky,
the former premier from South Vietnam, who now owned the store.
The encounter stayed with Brody — how
does one go from meeting with presidents and living in a palace
to selling Jack Daniels from behind a liquor store counter?
So he did what any good journalist would do:
wrote a story. He wondered how somebody with so much power
ended up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood.
After his story appeared in the Orange County Register,
it was picked up by the Associated Press and dispatched around
the world.
Of course, controversy soon followed. Columnist
Jack Anderson alleged gang connections that Ky denied. Mike
Wallace of CBS News came in to defend Ky — his old buddy.
When the national press finished, Brody picked
up the story where others had left off.
“Media coverage of the Vietnamese in
the United States was haphazard at best,” he says. “Yet
the country was undergoing an incredible transformation. I
began covering the Vietnamese community in a way I had never
covered a community before.”
Soon Brody was meeting families in homes, visiting
Vietnamese-owned businesses, community centers, resettlement
agencies, schools and temples.
Brody learned patience when dealing with the media-wary members
of this new community. Telephone interviews — the mainstay
of daily journalism — were out of the question. Only
face-to-face meetings would do.
And while he was meeting community members,
Brody developed a love and respect for people who had endured
so much, traveled so far and were compelled to start all over.
When he joined academia, he didn’t leave
behind the people and culture he had grown to love. Since
arriving at Cal State Fullerton in 1992, he has completed
two major studies on the Vietnamese-American experience. He
helped produce two documentary films about Little Saigon,
made dozens of scholarly presentations and teaches a course
on the Vietnamese community for the Asian American Studies
Program.
“I had always wanted to teach,”
he notes. “As a journalist covering the Vietnamese culture,
I always felt I was part writer, anthropologist, historian,
political scientist, sociologist and film maker. Teaching
allowed me to incorporate myself in the community even more
fully and study, in more depth, the lives of these people.”
In 1984, he became close friends with Yen Do,
publisher and founder of Nguoi Viet, the daily newspaper
for the Vietnamese community. In fact, Brody recently published
“Yen Do and the Story of Nguoi Viet” and is completing
an oral history of Do’s life.
“Journalism in Vietnam is very different
than journalism here,” he says. “For many Vietnamese,
it is difficult to understand that American journalists present
both sides of a story. When you have come from a country where
only one version — the official government version —
is presented as truth, it is difficult to understand why American
journalists want to present a more balanced point of view.”
Working with Do and journalists for Nguoi
Viet provided Brody with insight into their culture while,
at the same time, he helped them understand the expectations
of American journalists.
‘As a journalist covering the Vietnamese
culture, I always felt I was part writer, anthropologist,
historian, political scientist, sociologist and film maker.’“Little
Saigon is a blending of cultures — a mix of old and
new,” he says. “As new generations are born here,
you see more clashes. Many members of the new generation speak
little or no Vietnamese. They prefer hamburgers to pho. [Vietnamese-American]
students in my class remind me that I have often spent more
time in Vietnam than they have, and they complain that they
are tired of hearing ‘war stories’ from their
parents.
“The contrast between the East and West
is also apparent in the business community,” he continues.
“Physicians prescribe antibiotics and administer chemotherapy
near herbal medicine shops that sell dried snakes and ginseng.
Markets sell white bread, wheat bread and 100 kinds of noodles.
Ketchup is stocked on a shelf that has 25 varieties of soy
sauce. One storekeeper uses a calculator; another uses an
abacus.”
And Brody wouldn’t have missed it for
the world.
“It has been a great honor to learn more
about the Vietnamese people and to call them my friends,”
he said. “Over the next few years, I hope to focus on
the social history of Little Saigon. Their story is far from
over.”
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