In like Nguyen: Vietnamese name most common among local buyers
He's just learned that his recent home purchase helped make his last name, the 229th most common surname in the U.S., the most common last name among King County homebuyers.
"I thought it would be a more typically American name, like Smith," says a surprised Nguyen.
Sitting near him is Lan Nguyen — no relation — the real-estate agent who sold Christian Nguyen and his wife, Khiet, their Newcastle home.
Pronounced N'win, the surname is so common among Vietnamese that "it's like Smith or Jones here," explains Lan. So she's not totally amazed Nguyen would rank relatively high. After all, Christian is her fourth Nguyen buyer this year, and 2003 is only half over. Still, it never occurred to her that her own last name "would dominate the market."
But it does, replacing Smith and Johnson. They have the distinction of being both America's most common names and King County's top buyer names for many years, until Nguyen surpassed them in 2001.
It's been King County's most common homebuyer surname ever since — despite the fact that Seattle's phone book has a dozen pages each of Smiths and Johnsons and only four pages of Nguyens.
How buyers named Nguyen rose to the top of the list is a story that can be told partly through the experiences of Christian Nguyen and Lan Nguyen themselves.
Both were born in Vietnam. Both came here as young refugees fleeing a war-ravaged nation, knowing nothing of American customs or language. Both are now American citizens with successful careers.
And both accomplished all this while never forgetting a key value of centuries-old Vietnamese culture.
Lan Nguyen, along with her parents and seven siblings, arrived in the first wave of refugees to reach Western Washington. The year was 1975. The seemingly intractable Vietnam War ended then with American troops pulling out.
Thuy Vu, formerly state coordinator for refugee resettlement and now an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, also arrived here in 1975 and says this was the first of several waves of countrymen to settle in the U.S. Another large group arrived in the 1980s. That's when the communist government forced those Vietnamese related to the former leadership to leave.
Since then, children fathered by U.S. servicemen have come here, as have family members of those already here, and individuals who'd been held in "re-education camps."
Today Vietnamese are still arriving. Vu says most are coming not as refugees with little choice, but as immigrants who want to be here. "They're the ones who at that time (1970s and '80s) couldn't leave for whatever reason. Now they can be sponsored."
By 2000, there were an estimated 46,000 Vietnamese in Washington, including 34,000 in King County, according to census calculations. Other sources estimate up to 40 percent of all Vietnamese carry the Nguyen name.
Credit for that, says Vu, goes to Vietnam's last emperor, Nguyen Anh. Since emperors had a history of disposing of those who bore the same name as the previous ruler, many families felt it prudent to change theirs. So beginning about 1802, Nguyen it became. "It was a matter of safety," Vu observes.
This also explains why the name is far more common among Vietnamese than Smith or Jones is among Caucasians and African Americans. Plus it makes understandable why Nguyen is the No. 1 homebuyer name in several other populous counties, both in California and Texas.
That information comes from First American Real Estate Solutions, a California real-estate information provider. Its research director, Christopher Cagan, says so far Nguyen is holding position here for 2003. Last year, according to a Seattle Times analysis, 197 Nguyens purchased homes in King County.
According to Dennis Arguelles, assistant director of UCLA's Asian American Studies Center and co-editor of the book "The New Face of Asian Pacific America," many Vietnamese arrivals had an easier adjustment than other refugee groups. "A lot of the folks disrupted were upper-middle-class or middle-class. They were well-educated and had some skills."
But that didn't mean it was easy.
Lan Nguyen recalls her family fleeing for their safety just days before the 1975 fall of Saigon. The family had been prosperous, but because the father had done contracting work with the U.S. government, they felt their lives would be in danger. Grabbing only a few belongings, Lan's family made it onto a boat.
However the South Vietnam government had not yet fallen so they weren't technically refugees. No country would allow the boat to dock. Finally the U.S. Navy rescued them and took them to a Navy base in the Philippines.
It was a bittersweet rescue.
Gravely ill, Lan's mother was evacuated to a California hospital along with her husband. Their eight children were sent first to Guam, then to Pennsylvania. Along the way, parents and children lost track of each other, and there came a point when it appeared the children would be split up and offered for adoption.
Finally, the Red Cross reunited the family, a Seattle church agreed to sponsor them and they started life over again in the Northwest.
That's what Christian Nguyen, his father and brother, did too, in 1985.
"We were boat people. We came here because I had an uncle here," he recalls. A teenager at the time, he attended high school here and graduated from the University of Washington in 1995. That was shortly after his mother and sister were able to leave Vietnam, and the family was reunited. His parents have since purchased a home in Kent.
"The way I see it, I've totally reborn myself," says the software engineer, who became a citizen in the early 1990s.
But along the way, neither he nor Lan forgot a deeply held Vietnamese belief — the value of home.
As Vu, the UW affiliate professor, explains, throughout history Vietnam has suffered disruptions that displaced its people many times.
"So having a place they can claim as their place is important. There's a saying in Vietnam which translates: 'Priorities in family spending are, home is first.' It's the highest priority, even more than jobs," Vu explains.
"In terms of spending priorities, people usually save up a significant portion of their income to get a home," he continues.
"If any single person can't afford to buy a home, then the children — even the adult children — pool their money. There is a lot of sacrifice."
That's exactly what Lan Nguyen's family did.
Thanks to the combined efforts of her father and teenage brother, the family was able to buy its first house within a few years. Then, right after college, she realized there was a good career to be had selling real estate, and not just to the Vietnamese, who started buying houses in the 1980s. Today, second-generation Vietnamese-Americans are enthusiastically entering the homebuying market.
Now an associate broker in John L. Scott's South Bellevue office, Lan says her Asian customers generally are more frugal and focused than the Caucasians who make up 80 percent of her clientele.
"They don't expand themselves on credit," she says. "They save very well." And younger buyers often live with their parents for years while saving up down payments that can reach 50 percent of their first home's purchase price.
Indeed Christian Nguyen and his wife, who's also a software engineer, socked away money for more than five years toward their first home, which was finished only in May. A spacious 3,400 square feet, it's located in an upscale Eastside neighborhood where prices start near $400,000.
"One thing I like about this country is everyone has their own opportunity. It's a freedom country," concludes Christian.
Elizabeth Rhodes: erhodes@seattletimes.com
 |
