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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