VietCzechs

8. 3. 2010 / Fabiano Golgo

Britain has lots of immigrants from India, Germany from Turkey, the Netherlands from Indonesia, Canada from China, the United States from Mexico. Czech Republic has a considerably strong, economically, population of immigrants that came from Vietnam. As the other places just mentioned, they are not the only substantial immigrant group in the country. Each and all of them have been home to people from all over the world, some in more expressive numbers, some in newer waves (like the Polish in Britain and France), others more traditionally linked to their new country, most of them not totally integrated in their first generation in the host country.

But the Vietnamese, unlike the Ukrainians --who came in big waves all throughout the 1990s to literally help build the new Czech Republic --, have no intention of going back to their homeland.

While many thousands of Ukrainians families stayed in Czech Republic, most were lone temporary work immigrants, who came with a project of a limited amount of years to put together the necessary funds for a better life for the part of the family that stayed behind. Many recently had to leave, anyway, without a job thanks to the global economic crisis and thus unable to pay the necessary bribes to win over the kafkian bureaucracy of the Foreigner's Police, as the Immigration Office is appropriately called.

The Russians that used to be synonym with the supposed Mafia guys that, according to urban legend, took over Carlsbad/Karlovy Vary and Prague's main boulevard, Wenceslas Square, shooting each other in front of casinos, now are believed to have left after the opening of borders within the European Union. Together with the former Yugoslavs, they stopped being visible amounts, dispersing back home or further West. The Nigerians form a relatively new pocket that came in male hordes to feed from the new British/African casino and brothel owners, mainly in Prague. They often spend thousands of euros to readily convince a Czech lady to give them a half-Czech child, both to speed up their process of getting permanent visas, but also to score culturally-driven status points back home, by having European offspring. Their kids are growing up in almost exclusively Czech cultural influences, though, with fathers almost universally absent after the first couple of years. Most Nigerians end up going back home after a few years, leaving their Czech family behind.

"Basically, not Gypsies"

But the Vietnamese are forming a totally different type of immigrant group. They came to stay. The first generation stayed hidden behind their language and inconspicuous behavior. The older kids from those who at first made possible for millions of Czechs to have something to wear for cheaper prices, who then moved to small food and generalities shops, pushed by the constant losses after police raids collected their untaxed and falsified goods, married among themselves and perpetrated an ignorance of the Czech idiom and behavior. They came young from Vietnam, with their parents, in the 1990s, and now they are in their early 20s. There is an universe of a few thousands of kids from 0 to 4 years old from these young Vietnamese couples. But their younger brothers and sisters are the ones to look at.

Irena a Karel - blind color date >

What may explain the difference between the current teenagers with Vietnamese parents in Prague, Plzen, Brno and Liberec, with whom I spoke, is their full identification with the Czech Republic. They were either too young when their parents immigrated, or were already born here in the 1990s, now sweating their hormones in an almost typically Czech adolescence.

Seldom discriminated at school or among their peers, they enjoyed a life void of the difficulties which even their older siblings, just a few years their senior, suffered. Fully Czech speakers, without any accent, they generally excelled in school, thanks to the value their families put on the importance of their education and integration . They listened to the same music, played the same sports, dated the same local girls or boys, in a true multicultural environment that can be found when closing the focus on adolescent school life and ghtettos in bigger Czech cities.

"I never dated an Asian girl," Karel tells me. "But that's perhaps because there is none in my school, at least not in my age group," he adds with a smirk, then explaining that he has a Czech name because this is a trend among immigrants like his parents. It is an intentional way of integrating their children into the local society. "They never went back, not even to visit, now that they make enough money -- not only with the food shop, but now also from my sister's nail shop --, they rather send tickets and money to other relatives to come too or to live better there," explaining that he never speaks more than 20 sentences in Vietnamese per week. "I feel like one of those only English-speaking kids from Mexicans in America. My parents live a life in a different language and world, while I am just like every other Karel in this country, just that with these different eyes," he laments.

His schoolmate Marek interrupts and boasts about how Karel is the most desired guy by the girls in school and how he never thought of him as an Asian, "probably because he speaks perfect Czech and I never saw his parents, we never asked what they do". He admits that, even though he never discriminated against Karel, he often says out loud bad things about "those Vietnamese," referring to them negatively "for having taken over the streets of Prague with a food shop in every corner, fast Chinese food and now also the nail salons".

The previous generation used similar adjectives to attack the street markets that sold anything possible to smuggle from China, although not preventing themselves from frequenting them. But Karel is not, uh, "really" Vietnamese, Marek tries to amend. Language seems to be one the most important things to be perceived as Czech, he agrees. Formal-speaking Gypsies are a proof that it is not enough to speak the language properly and without an accent, though. Behavior "and basically not being Gypsy" are two other conditions for a foreign-looking person to be naturally accepted by most Czechs, he concludes with a laugh.

Dog-eating good neighbors

So many urban households nowadays, in the Czech Republic, are constituted of families with Vietnamese-origin. The differences with the locals are many, from the food cooked to the amount of familiy members sharing an apartment, but it seems that some of the younger ones from these families are becoming a new breed of Vietnamese and at the same time a new influence to Czech culture. While their parents did not bring or add anything to local culture through their limited interactions, once they didn't mix much beyond their ethnic communities, it is very probable that these Vietnamese-rooted, but born and raised here, will be not only participative members of Czech economic, but also cultural life.

< Having more kids than Czech couples

It seems that rarely anyone of them is focusing on a future based on the business of their parents, which is naturally falling over the shoulders of their older brothers, as is culturally given, while we can already see an effort even of the Vietnamese younger women to find independence and to co-run their own businesses, like nail shops (even if many of them are owned by mafia-like business conglomerates, some dominated by Chinese money). Although when it comes to work there is equality in obligations for both men and women, the Vietnamese tend to concentrate economic power in the hands of the males. Vietnamese girls who came to this country at a young age grew up touched by some of the European -- more liberated -- female models of behavior. The Czech-raised Vietnamese girls often contrast with their mothers and older sisters for giving a lot of importance to beauty and status. They resemble the first generation of middle class Moscovite girls. Flashy and expensive-looking is their vectors.

As the younger children of hard-working first generation immigrants, who sacrificed their own comfort to provide a better life for their kids, these Vietnamese-blood kids, who lived all their conscious life here and are now in adolescence, got almost all they wanted from their already better-off parents. The older kids, on the other hand, generally had to fully participate in the first years of hard work to maintain the fragile textile and goods street markets, while the youngest were often interned in schools preparing for a better future. "My brother is 26, doesn't speak Czech well, is married to a fellow Vietnamese and they have a 2 and a 4 year-old kid," confirms Karel. While his brother had to help his parents during the 1990s, Karel was a toddler and blossomed in the first decade of the 2000s, when his parents had already saved and secured themselves, thus being able to let him grab all kinds of clothes from their stores, buy the legitimate ones with trendy brands, which helped him be seen by other kids not as a poor son of immigrants, but as the guy who has many Nikes.

Some would hate him for that and an occasional attack on his parents' roots would be heard, but mostly his classmates dealt with him as the richer kid in school, with whom they mostly liked to hang out with. "And I see from my cousins and some other people I know that this is normal, I mean, the Vietnamese being the coolest kids, the ones with the rap clothes, at the same time the best grades," reflecting a well known tendency of expecting high performance in the education of their kids by Asian cultures.

Czech boys are color blind...

Lara chose her "Western" name to substitute the difficult to pronounce original Vietnamese name she was given when she was born, about a year before her family moved to Plzen. She never went to Vietnam and only knows the words used by her mother when she is ordering her around domestic shores. Her parents speak in Vietnamese among each other, but they are never home and their contact is minimal. She got sent to boarding school in a school that didn't have that service, but decided to create it just for her and her brother from the money paid solely by her parents so that their kids would stay in school all week long, sleeping under the care of some teacher, and getting the best of education all day long. They only went home -- meaning to the market where they worked 7 days a week, from 6 to 22h, on Saturday mornings, rushing back Sunday afternoons. Her connection with her family and their culture is thus very limited.

Lara with her Czech best friend, Petra >

Lara has only dated Czech boys and never found any kind of prejudice, other than from one potential mother-in-law, who told her openly she didn't like the Vietnamese. Lara answered that she didn't either and the woman started laughing and later asked to be forgiven. In school she heard often jokes about how being Vietnamese meant this or that, but she never felt discriminated against by her large group of friends. These past couple of years she has been invited by them and their families to spend some local holidays or festivities with them, considering her parents are always working.

Nigro, as he is called because of his love for hip hop music and clothes, Nguyen says he has a typical Vietnamese name and helps out at his parents' food shop in Brno, but that is all he has in connection to his parents' culture. He met an American exchange student, son of Cuban immigrants in Miami, who told him of the similarities of their situation. He considered himself an "American with a disproportionate amount of knowledge about a small neighboring island"... Nigro confesses he knows more about Los Angeles than Hanoi. His current girlfriend, Lenka, is as blond as a Czech can be. Her father, who is 37, says he has a problem with his music, not his race... "Actually, I may be a racist, then," he jokes, "but against those blacks who created this loud thing he listens to," protesting with a laugh that the only advantage is that he is becoming deaf and thus doesn't have to listen to his wife complain all day anymore. What about having a grand kid with Asian eyes?, I ask: "If he will not look like my mother-in-law, we will have already profited," he continues making fun.

These few examples are not a scientific sample, but a knack of a reality that is emerging in the cultural control centers of Czech Republic. Soon these overachievers in school will be applying their skills and more dedicated approach to work in the real world. Some will want to enter the power structures. How long will it take for one to shine in politics and become the Czech "Obama"? A VietCzech prime minister is not a sci-fi theory, but a potential being formed right now among an also new sub-type of locals: the adolescents whose identities are in 3-D, just like their games and borderless virtual lives, those who could be called EuroCzechs. Their understanding of who is Czech and who is not is still similar to their parents' when it comes to language fluency and cultural affinity, but not when it comes to ethnicity or race. If you speak Czech and act Czech, you don't need to have a Czech looks anymore.

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