When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, around 130,000 Vietnamese left the country. Instability in Vietnam after the war prompted another mass exodus in 1978 by the so-called ‘boat-people’. Seeing a humanitarian crisis, the U.S. Government lessened the restrictions of Vietnamese immigrants in 1980 and two years later the number of Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S. was over 250,000.
Forty years later, those first immigrants have established families and businesses in the United States and defined a community here in Central Florida.
Vu Nguyen and Hoang Doan are both Presidents of the Vietnamese Student Association at the University of Central Florida but three decades apart. They join 90.7's Matthew Peddie to discuss the generational differences between the first generation of Vietnamese Americans and the next.
