Nam Nguyen, 42, is editor-in-chief of Viet Magazine, an international bilingual publication based in San Jose, California. Often referred to in the community as the "Vietnamese Newsweek" the magazine has a readership of 30,000 and covers everything from high-tech industry to affirmative action to politics in Vietnam. Nguyen came to the United States seven years ago and has been active in the Vietnamese American community ever since. He discussed the life of that community with PNS editor Andrew Lam.

SAN JOSE, CA. -- We Vietnamese call Silicon Valley "Valley of Gold Flowers." This is because we, perhaps more than any other new immigrant group in California, have benefited from the high-tech boom.

Think about it. The second largest population of Vietnamese overseas resides in Santa Clara county. We were drawn here in the early 1980s the way Chinese were drawn to the gold rush in San Francisco a century ago. Today the new gold is the microchip.

We Vietnamese have almost a romantic relationship with the Valley. High tech firms here need lots of hard-working technicians and assemblers; Vietnamese have a reputation as hard-working and dexterous, and we're willing to work overtime. It's a perfect match. For refugees this is one of the fastest ways to get into the middle class without needing to have strong language skills. I know many people who take two, two and a half jobs, working seven days a week, and within a few years put a down payment on a home.

There are, of course, many problems the community here has to face. Gambling is a big issue because Vietnamese want to get rich quick. The newest arrivals are not receiving the kind of generous government help that earlier refugees did. Many of the newcomers are in their fifties and life is very hard here for them. And there are still problems with Vietnamese gangs who conduct "home invasions"--robberies and extortion--but this is lessening because people are now more cooperative with police.

But overall, wealth is more evenly distributed among Vietnamese living in Silicon Valley than in L.A. or San Diego. The reason is that so many of us have been absorbed into the high-tech industry. My sister and her husband typify our experience here. They came over in their 30's, spent two years on welfare, found work, studied at night, and went from being unemployed refugees to technicians to computer programmers who now earn together around $180,000 a year -- all this in eight years.

What's the key to our success? The one cultural heritage all Vietnamese have is that we put education above everything else, especially education in the sciences. We are also blessed because we tend to be extremely good at math. I'm not sure why this is but I have a theory. Vietnam is a poor nation -- our science labs are a joke! -- and that means the only two sciences in which we can excel are math and physics. That gives us an edge for engineering and computer science.

All in all, I'm proud to be Vietnamese -- we put into the culture more than we take out. The anti-immigrant bashers miss the point: Vietnamese in particular and Asians in general -- Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans -- are the main engine of the Information Age. Some 40 percent of engineers in the Silicon Valley are Asian and more than one-third of the high tech firms are owned by Asian Americans, most of whom are immigrants. That number is growing -- something the anti-immigrant campaign never acknowledges.

As a people, we have grown and evolved, and our individual potentials have found expression, much faster here in Silicon Valley than anywhere else. And thanks to communications technology, we are connecting with Vietnamese all around the world. We are becoming a global tribe.

Four years ago Viet magazine became the first overseas Vietnamese publication to go on line (http:/www.viet.net/vietmag). Since then our subscriptions have doubled with orders from Russia, France, Morocco, Vietnam itself.

The way I see it, we've passed the survival phase and we're now a thriving overseas community entering our entrepreneurial age. What I worry about is the second-generation Vietnamese Americans who are both smarter and more privileged than their parents but may not be driven in the same way. I wonder whether they will simply meld into American life or retain their ethnicity and help make our community even stronger. We need artists, writers, social scientists to balance out our preoccupation with the high tech field. Maybe the new generation will fulfill this need.

Vietnamese overseas went from being losers of the Cold War to key players in the Information Age. Our relationship with Vietnam has changed as well. Once we were the unwanted; now we have the technical know-how that could make our homeland leapfrog into the 21st century.

Vietnam's history began four thousand years ago with a myth about a dragon marrying a fairy who gave birth to a hundred eggs. The hundred eggs became the Vietnamese people who moved southward. The new batch of eggs, as it were, are now scattered across the globe, absorbing new technology and culture. It's a natural progression.