Photograph by Audra Melton
About 30 pairs of shoes are perched on a rack outside the door at Chùa Quang Minh, Georgia’s oldest Vietnamese Buddhist temple, taken off as a gesture of respect. Devotees sit on floor cushions inside the hall for an evening meditation session. Carved golden dragons with pearls in their mouths wind around red wooden pillars at the front of the room, and offerings of fruit and flowers adorn each altar. The hall is quiet while the session is underway, but visually vibrant.
The meditation leader breaks the silence.
“Visualize any pain deep in your heart as smoke,” he says. “Then take a deep breath—and release. Take a deep breath—and release. Take a deep breath—and release.”
People have gathered at Chùa Quang Minh to pray, learn, and socialize since the temple opened just south of Grant Park in 1983. The congregation is more diverse today than ever before, but it has always included survivors of the war in Vietnam and their children. As they meditate, some of them are visualizing the release of the pain from that time that lingers deep in their hearts.
Lam Ngo is the president of the temple’s board. He thinks the teachings from tonight’s meditation are relevant to everyone, and that forgiveness is valuable because it brings peace to the person who forgives. At the same time, releasing the pain of the past can be particularly difficult for some who suffered the trauma of the Vietnam War.
“Some people have lost their whole family, all their dear ones, their home, their brothers and siblings,” Ngo says. “Or imagine you spend your youth in a reeducation camp, and you work like a slave. People are not going to forget that easily.”
This spring marks 50 years since the fall of Saigon—an event many refugees call “the day we lost the country.” A turbulent postwar era followed, with South Vietnamese people suffering imprisonment and persecution by the Communist regime. At that time, there was hardly a Vietnamese presence in Georgia. But in the decades since, metro Atlanta’s Vietnamese population has grown immensely and now ranks as the ninth-largest Viet community in the United States.
“We cannot change the past,” Ngo says. “But we can change the present and the future, if we understand the history.”
Photograph by Audra Melton
North Vietnam took control of Saigon on April 30, 1975, resulting in the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. It marked the end of a 20-year civil war that pitted Communist North Vietnam and its allies against the U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam.
The United States, which had been embroiled in the conflict on the ground since 1965, executed a chaotic evacuation of its soldiers from Saigon, along with thousands of South Vietnamese civilians and orphans, and third-country nationals. Additional evacuation efforts were led by the South Vietnamese.
The first Vietnamese evacuees to resettle in Atlanta arrived here just a few weeks later. By the autumn of 1975, there were about 400 Vietnamese refugees in the Atlanta area, and within two years, that number almost doubled. Local nonprofit organizations such as Villa International and Catholic Social Services of Atlanta (now Catholic Charities Atlanta) helped them resettle.
In the late 1970s and especially the 1980s, the U.S. Vietnamese population increased dramatically as refugees known as “boat people” desperately fled South Vietnam—often by whatever means possible. The journey at sea was risky, with pirates, storms, and small leaky boats, and hundreds of thousands of boat people did not survive. But those who made it to refugee camps in other regions of Southeast Asia, and then ultimately to the U.S., formed new Vietnamese enclaves in Atlanta and other cities.
Several social agencies’ offices were in the Buford Highway area at that time. Plus, that area was accessible by public transit and had many low-cost housing options. The thoroughfare quickly became an anchor for Vietnamese refugees and other immigrant communities.
The Center for Pan Asian Community Services has served the Buford Highway area since 1980. John Nguyen, who now teaches classes at the center, was only a child when his parents put him on a boat with some other relatives, not knowing if they would ever see him again. They hoped he would find a safer, better life in the West.
After more than a year in refugee camps in Malaysia and the Philippines, Nguyen arrived in Atlanta when he was 13. The International Rescue Committee helped Nguyen find his brother, who had arrived in Atlanta on his own a while earlier. As teenagers with no other relatives in town, they lived in their own apartment together near Buford Highway.
“I wanted to go to school, but I couldn’t because of the language barrier,” Nguyen says. “So I just found odd jobs here and there and, at the same time, studied for the GED.”
During Nguyen’s early days in Atlanta, there weren’t many ways to reconnect with Vietnamese culture. There was only one restaurant that served Vietnamese food, and he says it wasn’t an authentic taste of home. But as more and more refugees settled into life in Atlanta and sponsored their family members to immigrate in the 1990s, Vietnamese supermarkets, bookstores, video stores, restaurants, and services popped up along Buford Highway.
To Nguyen, it felt a little like Saigon.
Photograph by Audra Melton
Photograph by Audra Melton
In the early 2000s, Vietnamese immigrants and other Asian American communities started shifting north, from DeKalb County into Gwinnett County. The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority launched bus service to Gwinnett in 2001, improving accessibility. Plus, Gwinnett offered newer, bigger homes, and after a few decades in the U.S., many immigrants had accumulated the wealth to buy them.
Entrepreneurship was, and still is, one of the most effective ways for immigrants to build capital when they cannot pursue the same kind of work in the U.S. that they did in their home countries.
Boat People SOS, an international social services organization with a branch office in Norcross, has a small-business support program that helps about 50 to 100 immigrant-owned businesses every year. “[Vietnamese immigrants] normally start their business by saving up money, or they just borrow money from relatives,” says Trinh Pham, who was a refugee herself and is now the organization’s executive director in Atlanta. “But there are so many other assistance opportunities from the government that they don’t know how to access.”
Boat People SOS helps immigrants access those financial resources for their businesses, and assists with other needs such as licenses and documents, marketing, new technology tools, and education about occupational hazards.
Nail salons, restaurants, boba (tea) shops, and snack shops are some of the most common choices for Vietnamese entrepreneurs, Pham says.
The organization’s office is next to a shopping plaza anchored by Hong Kong Supermarket, one of the largest and oldest Vietnamese-owned businesses in the Atlanta metro area. The plaza is home to restaurants, jewelers, hair salons, medical offices, gift shops, and more. Most of them are Vietnamese-owned. Vietnamese customers from out of state—Florida, Tennessee, the Carolinas—make day trips on weekends to eat, shop, and get services here.
Tommy Nguyen and his family opened Wow Banh Mi & Pho in the Hong Kong Supermarket plaza in 2022, replacing a seafood restaurant they had operated in the same spot. They are set to open a second Wow Banh Mi location this summer in Midtown.
In addition to working at the restaurants, Nguyen is a real-estate agent. “I’m a businessman,” he says. “I see anything we can do to make a living, and I do it.”
The restaurant gets all kinds of customers. Nguyen thinks non-Vietnamese Americans are drawn to Vietnamese cuisine because healthy eating has become a priority for them, and many Vietnamese dishes, with plenty of vegetables but little oil, are seen as good choices.
Nguyen has seen other Vietnamese entrepreneurs embrace the recent boom in boba tea shops, a Taiwanese export that’s become popular across the West. But he sees boba shops as a trend that could come and go. So his family’s strategy has been to open restaurants, which he thinks will be more sustainable. “If you could only afford one, will you get your food or your drink?” he says.
According to 2021 census data, at least 48,000 self-identified Vietnamese people live in metro Atlanta, and more than half of them reside in Gwinnett County. Pham says this is probably a low estimate.
“We are never happy with the number on the census, because most of them
don’t respond,” she says. “In reality, some people say we could be double or triple that number.”
Georgia’s Vietnamese population has been growing as immigrants relocate here from other states and newcomers still arrive directly from Vietnam. Some have waited their entire lives for a relative in the U.S. to be able to sponsor their immigration by taking temporary financial responsibility for them until they get on their feet.
On a Saturday morning in February, five students ranging from 36 to 59 years old are seated in a classroom at the Center for Pan Asian Community Services office, each equipped with a textbook, a notebook, and pens. For brain fuel, a tall plastic jar in the middle of the table is filled with caffeinated, coffee-flavored hard candies called Kopiko—a Southeast Asian classic.
The students have their green cards, and their sights are set on citizenship. They spend six hours in this classroom every Saturday to prepare for their naturalization interviews and tests. Attendance is lower today than usual because many of the regular students are busy with Lunar New Year (Tết) festivities.
Photograph by Audra Melton
John Nguyen has led this class for the past nine years. He opens by drilling the students in English with questions they will be asked in their interviews. When he asks one student, “What is your race?” she stumbles over her answer, accidentally making a pun. Nguyen switches to Vietnamese to crack a joke in response, and everyone laughs.
“I’m dying,” Nguyen says, with his hand on his forehead. “This happens every time. There’s always something funny.” He keeps the energy in the room light to help the students stay engaged with the dry and sometimes difficult material.
Nguyen has come a long way since the days when he and his brother were struggling to survive as teens in a new city and culture. He ultimately earned his GED, attended community college, and completed a bachelor’s degree in visual communications. Since then, he has worked for advertising and marketing agencies.
In the early 2000s, he was able to sponsor his mother, father, and remaining siblings to join him in Georgia—the first time he had seen them since he set sail on the refugee boat as a child. Now he leverages his experience and knowledge to help others who are adjusting to life in the U.S., as he and his family had to.
“When I came over here, I didn’t have these kinds of resources,” Nguyen says. “I felt like there was a need for it. So we started the citizenship program.”
Nguyen says his students have a 98 percent success rate in achieving citizenship after his class. Some pass the test the first time; others have to try a few times. “They say, ‘I’m not gonna quit until I pass,’” he says.
But American politics have made their way into his classroom. A federal grant was supplying the monthly $6,700 that the organization requires to run three citizenship classes per week in different languages. That February morning was Nguyen’s last session before an executive order to freeze federal funds was issued by the White House. The class is now paused indefinitely.
“The students were so sad when I delivered the news,” Nguyen says. He hopes to provide ad hoc support to individual students by phone until funding is restored or another funder fills the gap.
A lot can happen in 50 years. The Vietnamese community has grown into an important part of Atlanta’s cultural patchwork, and the children of the early waves of refugees and immigrants have grown up. Now young adults, they are the ones who get to define what it means for their generations to be Vietnamese in America.
Jason Do came to the United States with his parents and brother in the early 1990s, when he was five years old, and arrived in Atlanta to join relatives who had previously resettled here.
Growing up, Do celebrated major Vietnamese holidays with his family, but he didn’t become seriously interested in the cultural traditions until he joined the Vietnamese Student Association at Georgia State University. The association connected him with Georgia’s broader Vietnamese community, including the Young Vietnamese Association of Georgia, a branch of the Vietnamese American Community of Georgia—a prominent social organization with a legacy going back more than 30 years.
“The majority of those members, they were born here—maybe in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” Do says. “Their parents had to find jobs and work to provide for the family. They didn’t have time to teach the kids about Vietnamese culture and traditions. So that’s where the association comes in, to try to help.”
As someone who was born in Vietnam and immigrated in early childhood, Do belongs to what scholars call the “1.5 generation,” which he himself calls the “middle generation.” With the association, Do has taught young adults about Vietnamese traditions, while in his career as an insurance agent and mortgage loan officer, he supports older Vietnamese clients in the home-buying process by working with them in their preferred language.
“We’re able to help the younger generation to know about Vietnamese culture and also help the older generation in the sense of assimilating to American culture,” he says.
Do and his wife have two children: a son who is two and a daughter who is five. “I make them speak Vietnamese at home,” Do says, “especially to my parents, because my parents don’t know much English. They know a little bit to get by, but their preferred communication will still be Vietnamese.”
Soon, he might enroll his daughter in a Vietnamese language class. He hopes his children will want to fully participate in Vietnamese traditions as they grow up.
“Of course not forcing them, just introducing them to it—if they like it, then they can continue,” he says. “They live in America, but I still want them to remember their heritage and where their family came from.”
Photograph by Audra Melton
Culture-sharing is an everyday norm for Generation Z, the most diverse generation in U.S. history, born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Now on the cusp of adulthood, or already navigating the early years of it, some Vietnamese American Gen Zers are enthusiastically sharing the traditions they learned in their upbringing with the rest of the world.
With a backdrop of the setting sun, clanging cymbals and pounding drums resonate through the neighborhood around Chùa Quang Minh on a Sunday evening to close out the Lunar New Year week. Invigorated by the instruments, pairs of athletic dancers on the Hong Hing Lion Dance Team bring to life three lions: gold, red, and pink. A man in a smiling Buddha costume leads the lions around the temple grounds as they bow in reverence to each statue and altar, delighting the audience along the way with acrobatic moves and bits of comedy.
Photograph by Audra Melton
Lion dance originated in China, but it’s important in Vietnamese tradition too. Lion dancers often perform at weddings, festivals, grand openings, and other big events. During the Lunar New Year season, Hong Hing’s schedule is packed with back-to-back performances at temples, churches, and Asian-owned businesses around the Atlanta area, as well as at one of the two major Tết festivals.
“I think it’s very important to understand where you come from; what your roots are,” says Kenn Ho, one of Hong Hing’s team leaders. “When I’m performing, I feel like I’m doing my best to keep the culture and the art and sport of lion dance alive.”
Ho cofounded Hong Hing in 2023 with three friends. One of them is Brian Nguyen, who says lion dance has been key for him to connect with Georgia’s Vietnamese community.
“I’m grateful that my parents were able to give me the opportunity to do this,” Nguyen says. Then he adds, laughing a little, “If they see this—I’m sorry that I got bad grades because I did lion dancing too much.”
Ho and Nguyen have engaged with their Vietnamese heritage through lion dance, but the group is not exclusive to Vietnamese American members. The dancers, all in their teens and 20s, represent a range of ethnic and racial identities, as do the audiences that seek out their performances.
“We’re looking to branch out and hopefully get [more] non-Asian people to join,” Ho says. “I think that would be a good way to have diversity within our team.”
Photograph by Audra Melton
Vietnamese student associations at Atlanta-area institutions are a popular way for young Vietnamese Americans to grow their understanding of Vietnamese culture and share it with others.
Vincent Huynh, a pre-dentistry student at Emory University who is from Lilburn, is copresident of the Emory Vietnamese Student Association this year. His father was one of the founding members of the Emory chapter in the early 1990s. “It’s kind of big shoes to fill,” Huynh says. “But we always want to do bigger and better.”
When his father and a few other students were getting the club up and running, it was “just pizza parties,” Huynh says. Thirty years later, it’s a thriving, dynamic group that hosts at least two events per month, where students from all cultural backgrounds enjoy Vietnamese snacks, drinks, games, and holiday activities.
The club’s biggest event is Emory by Night, a springtime gala open to the entire Emory community and beyond. Inspired by Paris by Night, a variety show ubiquitous in Vietnamese American homes in the ’80s and ’90s, the gala features music, dance, and sketch performances.
“My parents used to always watch Paris by Night,” says Jena Vo, an Emory accounting student from Marietta on the organization’s executive board. “It’s very nostalgic.”
To illustrate the diversity of culture within Vietnam, each year the Emory association chooses a different region as the gala theme. Last year’s theme was “Sounds of the River,” in reference to Miền Tây in the Mekong Delta; in 2023, “City of Lanterns,” highlighted Hội An on the coast. “I think it’s a really cool way to showcase different areas and cities that are not as commonly known,” Vo says.
This year’s theme was a poignant and timely ode to the heart of South Vietnam: “A Love Letter to Saigon.”
Sometimes the generations clash, says Angela Tran, a third-year nursing student and the other current copresident of the Emory association. She thinks traditional Vietnamese culture can be patriarchal, and there are certain parts she doesn’t agree with. But she respects what her parents’ generation went through after Saigon fell and how they’ve “rebuilt their lives from scratch here,” she says.
“We’ll always remember this,” Tran says. “It’s part of who we are.”
This article appears in our May 2025 issue.
