By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

Hau Phan, 18 years old, lives in Jamaica Plain, goes to high school in Charlestown, and hangs out in Dorchester. Hair parted at the middle, wearing a denim jacket, he slouches in a chair on the second floor of a Fields Corner building that once housed Murray's Drugstore.

Now, it's an Asian food restaurant called the Magic Wok, and the home of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative, where Phan sits after school on a Tuesday, at a table with his friends.

"Dorchester is basically a hometown for me, because I can go and relate to people &endash; and their problems," says Phan.

Phong Phan, 14, lives in Fields Corner and goes to school around the corner, at the Grover Cleveland Elementary. Robinson Le, 13, goes to the Cleveland, too, and he lives in Savin Hill. The three are bilingual - Phong helps his parents read the bills - and says that, while they get along with kids of all races, cliques form in each of their schools based on ethnic grounds.

"The Asian kids know each other, and all the black kids know each other, and the one or two white kids know each other," Le says, offering a sampling.

Phong says he doesn't like when people make fun of the way Vietnamese people talk, and does a nasally imitation of their imitation.

All of them were born in America, members of the second generation of Vietnamese-Americans to call Dorchester home. Thirty years ago, on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell and the Vietnamese looked toward America for more welcoming shores.

Today's population - estimated at 11,000 citizens of Dorchester and as many as 20,000 when counting undocumented, or illegal, immigrants - began arriving in 1975, with the U.S. government withdrawing troops from Vietnam and leaving allies unprotected. With the Communist government in power harshly cracking down on religious freedom and free speech, thousands more streamed out, some first to refugee camps in other southeast Asian countries, fugitives from totalitarian rule. Throughout the '80s and '90s they came, steadily converting the neighborhood's Fields Corner pocket into one marked by their culture.

Tom Gannon, who has led Fields Corner civic groups for more than 15 years, said he noticed Vietnamese immigrants by the mid-'80s buying stores from earlier-arriving ethnic groups, a time-honored part of the American immigration experience.

"Obviously, at that point, the Vietnamese community began to have more of a face to the rest of Dorchester," he said.

Next, they bought entire buildings, leasing first to their own countrymen and later renting space to other groups.

In the mid-'90s, Boston's Vietnamese numbers boomed, rocketing by more than 500 percent between 1992 and 2002, part of a surge that Viet-AID, a local community development group, says propelled the state's Vietnamese population to the nation's fourth highest. Along Dorchester Avenue north to Savin Hill, the Vietnamese-American business presence evidences itself not just in grocery stores and nail salons anymore, but in law offices, a sprawling bookstore, real estate agencies, a car alarm store. Charles Street, next to Fields Corner Station, boasts the nation's first Vietnamese-American Community Center. Voting numbers in the key precincts - Ward 15's 7 and 8 - are climbing.

'Still fairly early'

But, for all their victories here, local Vietnamese activists acknowledge the community bumps up against the same struggles that met the multicolored waves of immigrants before them: language barriers, financial difficulties, education, inter-generational rifts, and the growing pains of cultural assimilation.

"I think this is a community right now which is still fairly early in the immigration process, meaning that there are folks who are successful and migrating upward, and yet the majority of the community are really working-class folks who are struggling with economic issues, health care issues, and logistic issues," says Nhan Paul TonThat, executive director of Viet-AID.

"I think our community in maybe seven to 10 years will be more mature, will be less refugee-oriented and more immigrant-oriented," he says.

To Phan, the community is mature enough to provide an after-school draw. He likes it, he says, because it's "like another Saigon."

For Bostonians old enough to remember, that comparison echoes the far more critical words of a Boston city councillor on the Dorchester Day Parade route in 1992. Caught on videotape, the anachronistic Dapper O'Neil expressed apparent displeasure at the makeup of the crowd and business district in Fields Corner, and said, "I thought I was in Saigon … It makes you sick, for Chrissakes."

Hau Phan has never met Dapper O'Neil, wouldn't know him if he shook his hand on the street. He doesn't even read the newspaper. But, slowly, the two have helped the Vietnamese community in Dorchester begin to wind its way full circle.

Access to power

Exit polls from last year's presidential election conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund showed that 40 percent of Asian voters casting ballots in Massachusetts did so for the first time. Efforts by Viet-AID and the Vietnamese American Civic Association (VACA), as well as politicians spanning ethnic lines who spy a burgeoning potential electoral base with unclaimed affections, have encouraged voter turnout. (One local pol who found himself on the downside of this was John Kerry, who received only 22 percent of the vote from Dorchester's Vietnamese last year compared to George Bush's 78 percent, according to the study, a product of the senator's efforts to strengthen diplomatic ties with the Vietnamese government.)

According to the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, no Vietnamese-American has been elected to an office higher than city council - a pattern borne out in Boston, where no Vietnamese-American has run for office. This year, Fields Corner housing specialist Sam Yoon, a Korean-American, became the city's first Asian-American candidate.

But the community has made inroads in the local power structure. Elected officials are hiring young Vietnamese-American staffers, hoping to better serve a constituency that can now connect with the official through a pipeline who, literally, speaks their language. There is also clearly a hope to connect with an emerging bloc of voters who, they hope, will one day speak their language on Election day.

"I'm in this office and I happen to be Vietnamese, not vice versa, that I'm in the office because I am Vietnamese," says Nathan Pham, a legislative aide to state Sen. Jack Hart, who grew up in North Carolina and lives in Pope's Hill. But, Pham says, "People in the Vietnamese community do see me as an extension of and representative for them." Shortly after he was elected, Mayor Thomas Menino appointed Diane Huynh to serve as a liaison to the Vietnamese community, a post in which Huynh helps Vietnamese close the biggest gap she says they face: the language barrier.

Trang Tran-Le, a legislative aide to state Rep. Martin Walsh, came to Dorchester from a refugee camp in the Philippines in 1981 when she was a few months old, and her family has thrived here, owning stores and eateries in Chinatown and along Dot Ave. From a crowded cluster on Mora St., the family has fanned out to suburbs like Quincy, where Tran-Le lives, and, soon, her mother plans to move to Georgia.

Tran-Le says her family's tenure in the neighborhood helps her connect constituents to Beacon Hill.

"Just by calling me up, they don't have to go through all the formality," she says Tuesday, sitting in Ba-Le, the Fields Corner eatery her mother founded. "For them to know someone for so long already, it's just easier."

Both Pham and Tran-Le say they have helped their bosses navigate foreign cultural waters. Pham says he had helped reinforce with Hart the notion that Vietnamese immigrants still maintain strong familial and emotional ties with their homeland, and care deeply about the political situation there, many of them vehement critics of the Communist government.

In the past, both say, Dorchester's Vietnamese have grappled with how to interact with the political establishment.

Pham says, "Part of that, I think, is a cultural issue, that people in the Vietnamese community don't know who they should talk to, or who they can talk to."

Aiming to fix that, Tran-Le has begun assembling a resource book with key phone numbers and outlines of the machinations of local government.

Still, TonThat sees room for improvement. After crediting officials who hire Vietnamese-American aides, he says, "My hope is that their staff grows into more than constituent service people, into larger policy decisions or policy staff … I'm embracing of all these liaisons, but I think they need to become more than liaisons."

'Not new anymore'

Because of their growing numbers, and the oomph that accompanies such a trend, Vietnamese-Americans have forced more than politicians to factor them into their hiring decisions. Boston Police in Area C-11 have a Vietnamese liaison, Tram Tran, on staff, and Thien Nguyen works as a community organizer with a focus on the Vietnamese community for Close to Home, the domestic violence prevention program in the station. TonThat notes that all of Dorchester's health centers employ staff fluent in the language.

Last year, when the MBTA began laying plans to renovate area T stations, they complied with residential demands for signs posted in Vietnamese. And when the Fields Corner Main Street group reorganized last year after a long fallow period, it did so with careful attention to balancing its new ranks with ample Vietnamese representation.

But, local activists say, and Vietnamese activists agree, the group hasn't availed itself of the civic apparatus so readily available in Dorchester. Between Savin Hill and Ashmont, the stretch of Dot Ave. around which the bulk of the community resides, at least eight prominent civic groups meet regularly, with precious few Vietnamese members in attendance.

Gannon, the longtime Fields Corner organizer, says he's had a hard time engaging his Vietnamese neighbors on the civic front. And, he says, the time has come.

"The Vietnamese community, as far as I'm concerned, is not an emerging immigrant population anymore," Gannon says. "They're not new anymore. After 30 years, they're part of the neighborhood, and they've got to get involved in St. Mark's or Savin Hill or Pope's Hill, or wherever they are."

TonThat says he appreciates Gannon's efforts to excite Vietnamese civic passion, but cautions, "I think that that - though generous - is expecting a bit much," and lists several factors for a perceived hesitation.

He sees a refugee mindset, with attention fastened on family and job, as an obstacle to civic involvement, and part of what Viet-AID tries to shake loose as it aids newcomers.

"There is still a great deal of poverty," he says, "and it's about putting food on the table and getting your kids to school."

Another factor, he said, is the length of time an immigrant has been here; those who came over in 1975 or soon thereafter, he said, are more engaged than recent arrivals. Like other groups who got here first, the Vietnamese are navigating a natural progression of understanding how the process works in democratic societies where the people who provide government services rely on the public's affection to hang onto their jobs.

Finally, according to TonThat, cultural traits hold the Vietnamese back from plunging full-bore into civic and political life.

"You will see that east Asian communities engage more slowly and tend to do so when the community itself can come together and engage the larger community," he says.

To Menino, during whose reign the city transitioned from a predominantly white to a majority-minority composition, the gradual adaptation is nothing new.

"They're involved, but new groups to our city have difficulty getting into the mainstream," the mayor says, rejecting the notion that the community should stick to a set assimilation schedule.

"There's no date - no 25 years, 35 years. It just naturally happens."

It happens at places like the Chua Luc Hoa Buddhist Cultural Center on Park Street; at the Super88 in South Bay, where adventurous fifth-generation Americans taste the flavors their neighbors have known for centuries; in rooms like the Dorchester Youth Collaborative; in parishes like St. Mark's, where the faithful hail from more than 20 different nationalities; and on Dorchester Avenue, where, for the immigrants, it feels a little bit like home.