Word: viet
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...boardrooms and at its noodle-soup stands. Thieu and his older brother Nguyen Trong Thang were known not just for their wealth?their private company boasted estimated revenue of $60 million in 2002?but for who they are. Born in Vietnam but raised in France, the brothers are Viet Kieu, as people who fled the country following the fall of Saigon in 1975 are known. Once reviled as traitors, Viet Kieu are now seen as resources, even patriots, for their access to foreign capital and Western business and technical expertise. The Hanoi government courts them with preferential tax rates, relaxed...
...Since 1987, when the government first opened its doors to them, more than 150,000 Viet Kieu have returned to work for multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations or themselves. There are more than 700 Viet Kieu-owned enterprises in Ho Chi Minh City alone. Phil Tran's animation company, Glass Egg Digital Media, is one of them. But, says the 39-year-old whose family departed Saigon when he was 12, "There's always been tension between those who stayed and those who left." Many Vietnamese see returnees as carpetbaggers who escaped the lean 1980s and now flaunt their wealth. Viet...
...High-profile scandals haven't helped. Last April, returnee Huynh Quoc Quang was sentenced to life in prison for bilking people out of at least $10,000 with false promises of American work visas. The following month, police began chasing Ho Tran Lap, a Viet Kieu businessman accused of running an illegal long-distance calling service; he's still on the lam. And on Jan. 16, a Vietnamese-American who runs a company in Ho Chi Minh City that makes brushes and combs was stabbed in the forehead?the result, police suspect, of a business dispute...
...always read about the contribution of 'patriotic Viet Kieu' in the newspapers," complains Vu Du, a retired technician. "But look at all these fraudsters, getting rich and cheating the government. If we're not careful, we'll lose our country to such people." Thieu's case will only intensify the suspicions. State media has reported that 33 companies, some of them government owned, are being investigated due to their ties to Dong Nam Telecom...
...Less traveled is the northeastern loop, where the nascent tourist industry could take "Ho Chi Minh slept here" as its motto. Cao Bang province near the Chinese border is where the founder of independent Vietnam and his Viet Minh guerrillas hid from the French colonial army in the 1940s. The provincial government has turned the village of Pac Bo, said to be the site of the exact cave where Uncle Ho hid for four long years, into a communist-themed tourist attraction, complete with signs pointing out Karl Marx Mountain and Lenin Stream...