Posted on 09/10/2005 6:47:15 AM PDT by angkor
Storm Takes Community Back to Its Beginnings, but Buddhist Temple Offers Hope
BILOXI, Miss., Sept. 8 -- It took 30 years for Vietnamese refugees to turn a homely corner of Biloxi into a thriving neighborhood -- and 13 hours of Katrina to send them back to the day they came here.
Much of the neighborhood is either leveled or broken beyond repair. The My Viet Supermarket is gone. The Chi-Kim-Lien fashion boutique -- gone. Gone too is the marquee restaurant, Xuan Huong, which took up half a block of Division Street and brought tourists into the neighborhood from all over the Gulf Coast.
Xuan Muise, owner of the Xuan Huong restaurant, was also the neighborhood's mayor and mother hen. Muise, a spry woman of 78, belonged to the first wave of Vietnamese immigrants to settle here, in 1975, after she escaped from Vietnam in 1969 and landed in Southern California. She had visited Biloxi, thought the weather reminded her of her home country ("not too hot, not too cold") and helped the neighborhood grow up, taking people in and showing them the way to jobs and mortgages.
Her greatest pride was the Chau Van Duc Buddhist Temple. She spent 18 years helping to raise money for it and four years watching the temple go up. The temple, for many here, was the most significant symbol of the Vietnamese in east Biloxi, the sign that they belonged.
Chau Van Duc opened, unfinished, nearly a year ago. But the grand opening, with 53 visitors from around the country, 30 of them monks, was Aug. 28. More than 1,000 families arrived to join the celebration. A day later, the 53 out-of-town visitors survived Katrina's blows by punching a hole in the ceiling of the temple's storage closet ...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
They are a proud, working class group of immigrants and I admire their achievements. They are not a drain on society the contribute to society.
Hardly. I'm sure they'll waste no time in rebuilding, rather than sitting on their posteriors looking for ways to blame the President.
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