Making Berlin home: How the ‘most- integrated’ immigrants keep their Asian culture alive
By Dana Dela Cruz, Aryana Kamelian, Isabell Liu
BERLIN — Red paper lanterns and blinking neon signs adorn the halls of Berlin’s Dong Xuan Center, a sprawling Vietnamese shopping market in eastern Berlin’s Lichtenberg neighborhood. Small children run past, shouting in a mix of German and Vietnamese. A hairstylist belts along to a Vietnamese ballad.
Ho, who wished to withhold his first name, goes to the center for haircuts. Today, he and his brother carry grocery bags filled with greens and canned goods.
Twenty-six years ago, when Ho first arrived in Berlin from Hanoi, he struggled to learn the German language. Now he’s a German-Vietnamese interpreter for the police, the Foreigners Office and other government agencies that deal with refugees.
It’s a common success story among Berlin’s Vietnamese population, which is widely considered the city’s most “integrated” migrant group. But integration does not always go hand-in-hand with belonging — even for Ho, who now holds German citizenship.
“If you grew up in Vietnam, no matter how long you live in Germany, you’ll never feel German,” said Ho. “[Citizenship] is just a piece of paper. Your home country is in your heart.”
Feelings of home and belonging are complicated for many Vietnamese and other Asian people living in Berlin, where pressure to integrate into German society is often at odds with the preservation of one’s culture. But as Berlin becomes more of an international city — one in every four Germans has migrant background, according to federal statistics — its Asian residents are finding a balance.
Ho’s story — much like that of many Vietnamese Germans — began with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, when communist North Vietnamese forces overtook the South Vietnam capital of Saigon. About a thousand Vietnamese people — mostly international students — were already living in Germany prior to 1975, but two waves of migration that came just after the war were the main ones.
Shortly after the fall of Saigon, approximately 35,000 South Vietnamese “boat people” began flooding into former West Germany as refugees. A few years later in 1980, the reunified communist state of Vietnam signed an agreement with East Germany to send 70,000 Vietnamese guest workers.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, wartime prejudices have lingered in some pockets of the community — after all, Berlin is one of the few places where South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese communities coexist.
“The South Vietnamese think the North Vietnamese attacked them,” said Ho. “They think they’re the enemy.”
It’s a split that mirrors the divide between former East and former West Berliners, also tied to communism. But it might be diminishing as time goes on and newer immigrants enter the city.
After the fall of the wall, Vietnamese immigrants continued entering the country as family members, asylum seekers and students. Today, Germany is home to more than 176,000 Vietnamese citizens and German citizens with Vietnamese background, according to federal statistics. In Berlin, official statistics count 26,000 Vietnamese residents.
And they are known today as the most “well-integrated” and “successful immigrant population” in the country. Das Vietnamesische Wunder, many Germans call this phenomenon: the Vietnamese Miracle. As more Asian groups grow in population — China and India are now the two largest sources of immigration from Asia — the “success story” is often applied to them, too.
This narrative of achievement is most obvious in schools. Among the children of Vietnamese citizens, roughly 60 percent attended the prestigious, college-prep Gymnasium school track in 2016, according to a 2017 study. For the children of Korean citizens, the rate was about 70. And for native German students, it was around 40.
But Vietnamese culture has not been sacrificed to integration. In fact, at popular restaurant Monsieur Vuong, Vietnamese culture is a source of pride. Its red-and-yellow awning juts out from a nondescript tan building, as if a visual metaphor for the meeting of two worlds.
The restaurant offers classic dishes such as spring rolls, glass noodle salad, and pho — the national dish of Vietnam. The menu is a tribute to owner Dat Vuong’s childhood, which he spent in southern Vietnam before moving to West Germany in 1987.
Vuong, 37, says his livelihood as a chef allows him to honor his culture while sharing it with others. A Saigon native, Vuong remembered spending the little pocket change he had as a child on wonton soup from a local street vendor.
“I grew up with this food,” Vuong said.
Today, he shares that memory with restaurant patrons through his internationally-famous wonton soup.
In the late 1980s, there were no Vietnamese restaurants in Berlin, Vuong said. At the time, many Vietnamese people were opening Chinese or fusion restaurants. When he opened his first restaurant — simply named Indochina Cafe — in 1999, Vuong had to hand out free samples in the streets to attract customers.
His tactics worked. Indochina Cafe became so popular that Vuong needed to find a bigger location. He opened Monsieur Vuong, bringing the rich flavors of the country to the streets of Berlin and a piece of home to the many Vietnamese locals.
Vuong preserves his cultural ties through religion, too. Once a week, he and many of his Vietnamese friends visit their local Buddhist temple. The temples are spread out across the city, without any central location.
“That’s why we don’t have something like a Little Saigon or Chinatown here,” Vuong said. “Everyone is well-adapted.”
As his restaurant thrives, Vuong continues to treasure the exchange of culture he sees at his tables.
“Most people don’t know much about Vietnamese culture,” he said. “But after spending time in the restaurant I see people becoming curious. They would love to go to Vietnam.”
Though some may not be able to shell out the time or money to actually visit Vuong’s home country, they can make the 40-minute commute into former East Berlin to visit the city’s own, so-called “Little Vietnam,” the Dong Xuan Center.
In 2004, founder Ngyuen van Hien set out to create a wholesale market in Berlin. However, one stroll down the center’s many halls will quickly reveal that many of the shopkeepers — and visitors — are not all Vietnamese.
Other patrons include Polish, Pakistani, and German shoppers — even tourists from abroad, said Yala Lu, a Chinese shopkeeper who works in the center. Lu and her partner co-own a clothing store called Jin, and have been living and working in Germany for eight years — all of which have been spent manning this very storefront, a fortress of mass-produced clothing wrapped in plastic.
Still, the center has a decidedly Vietnamese character. Mini Buddhist shrines greet shoppers from the doorways of many of the shops, and the scent of incense permeates the halls. For many Vietnamese, the Dong Xuan center is a welcome reminder of where they came from.
But it doesn’t stop them and other Asians from feeling the sting of their status as visible minorities.
For 32-year-old, Chinese-German artist Lisa Wang, preserving her culture meant coming face-to-face with discrimination.
Wang and her family immigrated from China to western Germany in 1994. They were the only East Asians in their small town, Wang said, though everyone was friendly. Yet slowly but surely, Wang began detecting what she called “little hidden insults.”
“There was this one guy who used to spit on me at school,” she said.
On another occasion, an elementary teacher who had helped Wang prepare for a contest didn’t congratulate her when she won. Instead, he told her she only won because she was Chinese.
And yet, ten years later, this same teacher contacted Wang with a slightly different agenda. He gave her a gift of art books, then messaged her later that evening proposing a physical relationship.
“I became this object of desire in his head, and he started coming on to me,” Wang said. “The gist of this whole story is like, if you grow up here, and you’re a woman of color, you just become objectified in the double sense,” she said.
For Wang, dealing with that “double justification” as an Asian woman took a physical toll.
In her teen years, she attended Chinese classes every Saturday to learn how to read and write Mandarin. She “hated it,” as learning Chinese characters requires repetition and memorization. Eventually, when she turned 17, her hair started falling out.
“I think in hindsight, this was me rejecting my identity and the crisis,” said Wang.
But she no longer dwells on her German nationality or her Chinese heritage. Those “labels,” says Wang, are there for politicians. Her education in fine arts inspired her to see past them.
“As an artist, I would say it’s better not to fall into those categories,” Wang said. “I do not feel either Asian, Chinese, or German. I feel, maybe, a little European.”
For others in the Asian communities, labels are a source of political empowerment. Young Asian activists — mostly second- or third-generation — are forging a new “Asian German” identity to fight against misrepresentation. Pan-ethnic collectives are forming throughout Berlin, including the group Asian Germans, Make Noise (Deutsche Asiat*innen, Make Noise, or DAMN).
“We’re at an age where we’re starting to care,” said Thao Ho, founder of DAMN. “We’re the first generation of migrants’ kids.”
Ho, 26, studies cultural studies at Humboldt University. She founded DAMN in 2016 after feeling alienated in white-dominated activist spaces. Despite a slow start, the collective now hosts regular events including open mic nights, community meet-ups, and workshops on topics like internalized racism and Asian masculinities. The organization’s Facebook group has over 250 members.
“Asian German perspectives are still underrepresented in German society or are not taken seriously,” DAMN’s manifesto reads. “We want to strengthen Asian German votes. We want to empower each other. We want to show solidarity.”
The Asian German movement, still in its infancy, resembles the push for an Asian American identity in the 1960s and 1970s. Both movements were spearheaded by young activists with similar goals of racial justice, representation and pan-ethnic solidarity.
In fact, Ho was inspired by the Vietnamese community in Orange County, California — an area also known as “Little Saigon.” She studied at Orange Coast College for a year, where she joined a Vietnamese student club. Before coming to America, Ho felt “ashamed” of her Asian identity.
“I was trying to assimilate, not speaking my mother tongue, avoiding Asian people, not caring about Vietnamese culture,” Ho said. “Living in Orange County, I could just be myself.”
Ho hopes DAMN can do the same for others. But she still faces some pushback. Some people — who are of Asian descent — don’t agree with the Asian German label, preferring to choose “Asian” or “German.” Ho says the label is only a “working title” meant to spark conversation.
Others argue that the organization — which is primarily Southeast Asian — is not inclusive enough. Ho says they’re trying to reach out to more people of South Asian descent, including Berlin’s growing Indian population.
Moving forward, Ho hopes to include the voices of older Asian Germans. She also wants to create solidarity with other minority groups, such as Black Germans, Turkish Germans, and the queer community.
Progress is sometimes slow. Political consciousness within the Asian German community is “so-so,” Ho said. It took Ho two years to convince her mother of DAMN’s importance.
“It’s just the beginning,” Ho said. “I hope the next generation is not ashamed of their roots.”
