Vietnamese refugees in Britain: displacement, home and belonging

In 1975, North Vietnamese forces took control of Saigon, marking an end to the protracted conflict of the Vietnam War (also referred to as the American War and the Indochina War). By 1979, the impact of policies of forced relocation and the repression of ethnic minorities forced hundreds of thousands of people to leave Vietnam. Around 19,000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled in Britain between 1975 and the 1990s.

The arrival of Vietnamese refugees in Britain took place in the context of unemployment, housing shortages and increasingly restrictive immigration policy. Refugees were initially housed in camps run by voluntary sector agencies before being dispersed around the country. The dispersal policy [PDF, see pages 4-10] exacerbated isolation and unemployment, resulting in secondary migration to London and other major cities. The Vietnamese refugees who arrived in Britain were culturally and linguistically diverse, including Sino-Vietnamese from North Vietnam, as well as refugees from the South. My current work on the AHRC Translating Asylum project highlights the challenges that Vietnamese refugees experienced in accessing language support. This not only impacted on their employment prospects, but also made it difficult to access support with housing, welfare and health needs.

‘They didn’t have a home for us’: Vietnamese refugees in East London

Housing shortages and unemployment led many refugees to relocate to major cities, principally London. Vu, who arrived in 1979, recalled how Vietnamese people would squat in abandoned houses in Hackney. Some refugees were offered social housing tenancies in these areas, leading to the establishment of Vietnamese communities in the boroughs of Hackney, Deptford and Lewisham. Uyen recalls her family’s struggle to find housing in the city:

So I came here when I was about five, and we were placed in hotels, like bed and breakfasts, because there was no home, they didn’t have a home for us. (Uyen)

After six months of being in hotel accommodation, Uyen’s family were placed in local authority housing in Hackney. Uyen’s testimony also highlights the changes that have taken place in East London since the early 1980s. While Shoreditch is now known as a fashionable area, Uyen’s memory of Shoreditch in the 1980s is of a ‘dead, industrial wasteland’. 

In addition to housing problems, Vietnamese refugees faced the challenges of finding work at a time of high unemployment. Many refugees found work in garment factories, or made clothes using sewing machines in their homes. During the 1990s, Britain’s clothing industry declined as companies outsourced their operations. Vietnamese refugees in London found new sources of income through entrepreneurship in restaurants and nail salons. Vietnamese restaurants are points of connection between different generations of Vietnamese with diverse migration histories.

Food is widely recognised as significant in establishing a sense of identity and belonging in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment. Uyen described how her family feared they ‘would never eat rice again’ once they had arrived in Britain. For Vietnamese refugees arriving in London, Chinatown was a crucial location for buying Asian food and gathering with friends. The establishment of Vietnamese organisations enabled refugees to take part in social events and cultural traditions, contributing to a growing sense of community. In recent years, however, funding cuts under austerity have resulted in the closure of several Vietnamese organisations.

Multiple meanings of home

For refugees, home is a concept marked by particular ambivalence. While some individuals associated home with the country that they had been forced to leave, others felt more strongly connected to London, to Britain as a whole, or embraced the feeling of being at home in more than one place. Uyen recalled the impact of visiting Vietnam on her sense of home and identity. She described a ‘huge sense of belonging and of finding my roots’ when she first encountered Vietnam as an adult. Yet Uyen could not imagine living in Vietnam, and felt a strong sense of attachment to Hackney as home. 

Son, who arrived in Britain at the age of 11, described the multiple meanings of home and their spatial and temporal dimensions, including the idea of the ‘homeland’ as the place of one’s ancestors:

Maybe if you’re local Vietnamese, if you live in the country, let’s say where I’m from in the middle of the country and I go down South to Ho Chi Minh to work, and I go home for Lunar New Year, then yes, that would be considered as home, to visit my parents, my ancestors. But because us boat people, we’ve been away so long, we don’t say that is home any more. We say we go home to visit family, but we call the UK home now. (Son)

Participants’ narratives emphasise the intertwining of home with wider power relations. 

The impact of reception and dispersal policies had a crucial impact on the extent to which Vietnamese refugees could develop a sense of home. While secondary migration to London did not result in immediate housing security, it offered the chance for refugees to find work and to access support from Vietnamese-led organisations. Home is a broader concept that is entangled with personal memory and identity as well as structures of power, and will remain contested. 

This text is adapted from Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City: Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London, out now in hardback and e-book versions with Routledge.

There is a paucity of research on longer-term experiences of resettlement, work and community formation (notable exceptions include Barber 2018). Attempting to redress this and drawing upon in-depth interviews and ethnographic research, Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City: Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London provides new insights into experiences of home and work among Vietnamese communities. This new research throws light on how work may contribute to a sense of belonging, while recognising the impact of precarious work and insecure housing on experiences of home and community.

Further reading

Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. Abingdon: Routledge.

Bailkin, J. (2018) Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Barber, T. (2018) The integration of Vietnamese refugees in London and the UK: Fragmentation, complexity, and "in/visibility". WIDER Working Paper, No. 2018/2, ISBN 978-92-9256-444-5, The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki.

Boccagni. P. (2016) Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives. London: Palgrave.