After the Storm, Mr. Cao Goes to Washington

NEW ORLEANS

Each time I visit my home town, one more building has been repaired, another restaurant has reopened, another old friend has moved back. But when I was here in New Orleans last week, I saw signs of change -- actual signs around town -- in one place where they rarely appear: the heart of the Vietnamese enclaves tucked in the city and its suburbs.

At Three Happiness restaurant, where my family lingered over bo luc lac and fried bananas with honey, there was a stack of yellow flyers with Vietnamese writing urging residents to vote. On the highway, we saw bumper stickers bearing the slogan "Cao Now" rather than the more dubious "New Orleans: Proud to Crawl Home." And at the breakfast table, we talked about the powerful social and political forces that Anh "Joseph" Cao rode on Dec. 6 to become the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress.

The Vietnamese community in New Orleans and its suburbs has been a largely invisible minority in a city dominated by the racial politics of black and white. When I tell people that I'm from New Orleans, they picture the all-white krewe of Rex parading on Mardi Gras or remember Mayor C. Ray Nagin dubbing the city "chocolate" -- the only shades of New Orleans that many people recognize.

Cao notched an unlikely victory last week against Democratic political veteran Rep. William J. Jefferson, the man who won a ninth term in 2006 despite a 2005 FBI raid on his home that turned up $90,000 in his freezer. The novice politician's triumph has introduced the nation to another side of the Big Easy. He has also become a new symbol for the Republican Party -- House Minority Leader John Boehner reportedly sent out a memo that included the bad pun "The Future Is Cao" -- and delivers much-needed momentum, coming on the heels of Sen. Saxby Chambliss's runoff victory in Georgia earlier in the month.

But Cao's win is also the product of the rude political awakening in the Vietnamese community in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. For nearly three decades, we actively ignored politics. My parents, who immigrated in the 1970s, never voted, and I don't think anyone ever knocked on our door asking us to. They weren't even registered. My mother had a law degree in Vietnam, but she eschewed the profession, along with politics, once she arrived in the United States. She had seen how politics had ravaged her homeland, and like many Vietnamese immigrants, she wanted no part of it here.

The Vietnamese clustered in the eastern part of the city in a neighborhood we called Versailles, with its own bakery selling meat pastries, a video shop that stocked Vietnamese favorites and restaurants serving up steaming bowls of pho. My father had a family medical practice on one of the main boulevards. The local Catholic church, Mary Queen of Vietnam, anchored the community.

Many of the original refugees who came to New Orleans were fishing families sponsored by the church, who in turn brought their relatives and friends. They found cheap housing in the city's poor, largely black east side and familiar work hauling in shrimp and catfish from the muggy bayous. They kept to themselves, unwilling or unable to cross the barriers of education, language and culture that separated them from the rest of the city.

Larger Vietnamese strongholds in California and Houston have begun to break through politically in recent years. The race for supervisor of Orange County, Calif., this year boasted the first all-Vietnamese roster of candidates. In 2004, Democrat Hubert Vo became the first Vietnamese elected to the Texas legislature.

But in the New Orleans area, where the Vietnamese population totaled more than 13,000 in 2005, no one from the community had ever held public office. We didn't have a Mardi Gras krewe to march in the parades. We were large enough to be self-sufficient but never significant enough to attract the attention of local politicians. And really, we were fine with that.

Until Katrina hit.