Dieu Hien The Interview. Do lacked a credit history, had no money and spoke no English. Today, however, the year-old refugee publishes a Vietnamese-language newspaper, tools around town in a silver Jaguar and has started plans to build a shopping center. The reasons for his rapid rise: Like thousands of other immigrants, the budding entrepreneur tapped an ethnic loan club for his seed money.
Such clubs amount to informal, small-scale banks organized primarily by immigrants to help one another. Though the loan clubs are not legally prohibited, they operate outside regular U.
Even so, they have nurtured fledgling businesses from the barrio to Chinatown in cities hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi diverse as Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Engstrom, a research associate at the University of Chicago who studies immigrant merchants.
Thanks to loan clubs, he adds, "most of these people open their businesses in three to hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi months after arriving here. Most of the clubs operate on the same basic principle: All club members, including the borrower, continue to make the monthly payments until everyone has received the purse once. By that time, each participant has borrowed and repaid the entire loan. The organizer, who is typically female, keeps a record of payments and vouches for newcomers until the club disbands.
In many of the more elaborate loan clubs, participants bid for the privilege of taking hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi pool. Whoever offers the highest interest rate wins, although each member can take the pot only once. The entire interest payment is immediately deducted from the fund and paid out to the other members. But the loan club may be an immigrant's only source of funds. The loan clubs are descendants of communal arrangements that originated centuries ago.
In many countries, groups of people have long pooled their cash to allow members to bury their dead or to celebrate marriages. Modern-day clubs retain much of that social flavor.
No hui, tanda or keh can be successful without a great deal of trust. Individual members may not be acquainted with one another, but they must all know and believe in the organizer, called a keh-ju in Korean or a chu-hui in Vietnamese.
She covers any defaults. As compensation, the first pool is traditionally hers; in a bidding club, she receives it interest-free. Even so, the organizer benefits from strong community ties. When a new Chinese immigrant asks to join a hui, for example, "it does not take much effort to establish his life history," says Tom Tai, director of the Chinese Business Association in Queens, N.
As a result, notes Chicago's Engstrom, the vast majority of loan clubs prove quite solid. People who have lost money in a loan club rarely complain to the police, but that may be changing. Court documents show that Cabling partly financed hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi small businesses in San Francisco with money from the keh. When her stores started losing money and word of her financial problems spread, the loan clubs disintegrated. If the court decides to protect the keh deposits by ordering Cabling to pay up, the case, which is expected to come to trial later this summer, could set an important precedent.
Whatever the outcome, hard-pressed immigrants will go on joining ethnic loan clubs. For many, the informal banks represent a leg up on the American dream. Someday the language and cultural barriers that hold back immigrants may start to crumble.
Until then, the loan clubs will no doubtprosper. But more than a change in the name, it is an event, the passing of an institution from one generation of immigrant to another. You meet a sophisticated woman by, the name of Kim Nguyen, the manager. She is Vietnamese, well educated, fluent in French and English. She steered me into a dining room, into the den that the former owner, Giacchino Paolo Aiello, an Italian immigrant who changed his name to Jack Hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi, presided over as a personal trading post of business influence and political gossip.
Do Van Tron, a 32 year-old entrepreneur, owns the place now. The cuisine has gone from sophisticated Intalian to sophisticated French-Vietnamese. He laughed when I told him his restaurant was once a drive-in burger joint. His father was a prosperous businessman and, therefore, a declared enemy of the communists, who took over in The details of his escape, including a shootout with Thai pirates, Tron hopes to make into a motion picture.
His Friend Oliver Stone also wants to try. He was in San Jose recently casting for a movie project based on the stories of Vietnamese refugees. It is scheduled to be shot in Thailand late this year or early next. It will be a success. To wish him well was all that was due. Driving along the freeway while fiddling with the radio dial, I found a Vietnamese music station at AM KSJXwith schmaltzy ballads interrupted by high-pitched frenetic advertisements. The ubiquitous Do Van Tron also stages numerous literary, cultural and musical events, along with beauty pageants and fashion shows.
Tron is the 11 th of 18 children, which is not considered an unusually large family in Vietnam. His father was a merchant in Pleiku, which is in the highlands of Vietnam and was the first city to fall during the fateful spring in After 13 attempts, Tron finally escaped from Vietnam. Although the ultimate journey was successful, it was so harrowing that he was propelled hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi a frenzy of work to put distance between that nightmare and his hard-woon new life.
Penniless, he arrived with two younger brothers in Orange Hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi in He supported himself by writing for various publications, but quickly realized that a fortune could be made catering exclusively in the Vietnamese community.
Sleeping out of his car, he solicited advertising, designed, printed and distributed them himself. Now he drives a Jaguar XJ6, owns real estate and business in multiplying. His only failure so far was not being able to promote hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi luong, a Vietnamese version of country and western opera AE- a twangy, down home music that I find inexplicably wonderful.
Quiet and soft-spoken, he is an anomaly in the Vietnamese community. Because of his financial success, he is something labelled as a communist dupe since he makes no secret of his desire to eventually live and work hai bot trai dat tron long nguoi Vietnam. But Tron manages to make a profit without antagonizing his rivals.
Having secrets is essential for survival in the Vietnamese community, and Tron is frank without being especially revealing about what he does. Although he considers himself primarily a literary and artistic person whose entrepreneurial talents are secondary, his talent for making money taking over. In Vietnam everthing is handicapped by poverty and political oppression, but here we work like machines. It is the enigma of the exile who had to leave home and is working his way back to spiritual fulfilment.
Designed by Sonny Le.
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