Funding for this program is made possible by the Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage Area, the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, and by Mississippi State University.

[tense music playing] [Emma To] When my parents first moved, a lot of the Vietnamese people told them, hey, you want to live in this area, which is the Biloxi Back Bay or the east side near Point Cadet.

This is the part where they accept us and if you go to other parts, they might not accept you.

[Man 1] We tried to build up the future for my children.

I don't know for me, but we try.

Back then, the price for headless shrimp size 21-25 would be around $5-$6 per pound.

Fuel back in ‘85 and █86 was abo $1.10-$1.20 per gallon.

Shrimping back then was more profitable than the last couple of years.

[Reporter 1] Just three days into the Louisiana season, there was little left to catch.

That's why shrimpers are making haste in Mississippi's waters.

Are you getting enough shrimp in right now?

[Man 2] Right now, we're not.

[Charlie Nguyen] Sometimes we had to anchor it up three to four days waiting period, waiting for something to show up.

[Tim Isbell] I always felt bad for them because you-- once you find a place that you like, you don't want to have to turn around and leave and start all over again.

We leave Vietnam from the boat.

And at that time, I was like 13.

And I came to America in 1985.

My uncle asked me to go down here to Mississippi because he just bought a boat and he got nobody to help him.

So I just came down here to help him.

Extreme kind of work for him to go on a shrimp boat like this.

Then after five years, I saved a little bit of money and I decided to buy a boat for my own.

And this is my third boat right here, and I already worked like 20 years or more-- a little bit more than that already.

[Lee Nguyen] No shrimps today.

Shrimp's too slow.

[Interviewer] Too small?

Yes.

Too small.

[Interviewer] What do you do?

Do you go to somewhere else?

[Nguyen] I don't know.

[Van Nguyen] And we have to pick up, like, every hour.

So we check on the shrimp to see where we got a good spot for shrimp.

Sometimes it's just no matter where you go, the shrimp is-- it's slow, it's slow.

[Interviewer] Are you losing money when you go out?

[Van Nguyen] Sometime, yeah.

If we don't find a good spot of shrimp, then we're just burning fuel.

The boat engine, it will take 100 gallons a night and if we don't catch a certain amount of shrimp, we don't make no profit.

Right now, we are very-- we are kind of having a hard time to do a shrimp business because diesel price is going up and shrimp price is going down.

So that's why we are very struggling with it.

Not just me, everybody.

[Interviewer] Everybody?

Yeah.

[Reporter 2] I'm really in the middle of Highway 90 right here and this water is getting deeper.

We pulled up on Cowan road and are headed north right now.

I'm not going to stay here much longer, folks, because-- in fact, we need to back up now, Greg.

This water is coming in quickly.

It is coming in fast.

It is deepening quickly.

And we are going to seek higher ground right now, but this gives you some idea of the power of this storm as Katrina begins to make her presence felt on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

[Ryan Bradley] Here in Mississippi, we've had a plethora of man made and natural disasters.

Just looking back in recent history, it really started with Hurricane Katrina.

That knocked out about half of the commercial shrimp fleet.

Then we had the BP oil spill in 2010, and that really has decimated our wild oyster reefs, which is one of the biggest fisheries in the Mississippi Coast.

We've had next to zero harvest since the BP spill.

But then we've been plagued with these Bonnet Carré spillway disasters, which we had one in 2016.

We had another one in 2018, again in 2019 and in 2020, with 2019 being a record opening-- a record number of days it was open.

[Deanne Stephens] When you have that man-made disaster on top of the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina, if you don't have the size boat and the storage capacity to go out of the Mississippi Sound into the Gulf of Mexico and do the deep water and stay out, you don't have the capacity to go find the shrimp.

So it really was a decade in the 2000s, from 2005 on, it was about 10, 15 years there where it was just one thing after another.

And recovery for some was just simply not possible.

You also had, beginning in the '90s and through the 2000s, importation of farm-raised shrimp.

[Benedict Posadas] We know that for a fact.

More than 90% of what we eat here in the US is imported.

And foreign countries, they have lax regulations.

They can do whatever they want, as long as they satisfy paperwork and produce those products at very low cost to bring them in here.

[Bradley] A lot of these imports that come into the country, they're subsidized by their host countries where they're being produced.

So that allows them to put them on the market much cheaper and undercut our fishermen here in America.

And when a state where prices are inflating across the board, the cost of materials and supplies are rising with your product being stable or even decreasing, it makes for very tough market conditions.

[Posadas] One country sells it at half the price of what we sell here in the US.

US product, foreign country half.

Foreign country B, 75%.

So who can compete with that?

There's no way.

So the margins are getting slimmer and slimmer.

Sometimes $0.01, $0.02, maybe $0.05 per dollar sale.

That's hard.

The captain, a crew and maybe another crew and maybe another, depending on the size of the boat.

A $0.05 per dollar sale profit is not good enough to keep them in the boat.

[Interviewer] Do you think your kids will take over the boat one day?

[Van Nguyen] No, sir, I don't think so.

Every time I talk about it, they just-- no, it's hard work.

They don't want to do it.

[Interviewer] Do you have children?

[Charlie Nguyen] Yes, I do have children.

I have two boys and one girl.

They are all grown.

[Interviewer] Are they fishermen?

No.

They don't want to be fishermen.

The fisherman is hard work.

And they're out too long, work day and night.

It's got no time.

You know how the kids, they want something to enjoy.

[Interviewer] Did you want them to be fishermen?

Not really.

Not really.

[In Vietnamese] In my opinion, with the younger generation now the majority of young people from 17 to 18 or 20 to 30, they don█t like getting into the shrimping busin because in America, young people can get a loan from the government to go to school and pay for an education for a better life just like my own chi [Dung Van Nguyen] I guess only l 1% of the young generation, they want to work on a boat.

They don't want to do this kind of work.

Yeah.

I encourage a young kid to do that, to get a good education and do some other kind of work instead of shrimp boat like me.

Hard work.

[Loi Nguyen] We have to accept our kids, our younger generation to move forward with their life.

We don't want them to turn their back and look back.

We want them to move on, have a better life.

Good education, good job.

[To] I told my mom, I was just like, "I'm not going to college."

I was like, "I want to go work at the casinos."

And she's like, "no, I no cross ocean for you to go work in casino."

Like, anybody can work at a casino.

[Jennifer Le] Their goal for their children was not to continue to do hard labor, to do manual labor, to go out in the sun all day or to stay up all night pushing shrimp head off on a shrimp boat or shucking crabs in a hot boiling room and then also coming early at 4:00 AM in the morning to pick crab meat.

That wasn't there envision for their children's future.

Go somewhere else.

Go to school, get an education.

Her saying to encourage us to go to school is.

"I always wanted an education, I wanted to be in a classroom setting, I wanted to touch a notebook, write a pen.

Don't be like me and not know anything or not knowing--" her saying is not knowing any better.

[To] It's almost like the idea of shoot for the stars and you can still land on the moon.

Like, go really high.

Don't just stop here.

Don't just go and do what we can do here on the Coast.

Like, go further than the Coast.

And then you can always come back here someday, but go out there and have high goals.

And if you don't become a doctor, you can still become a nurse.

If you don't become a nurse, find something else, but don't just stop here.

We could do this as immigrants and refugees.

You don't have to do this because we did this for you.

And now that we are growing up and a lot of us are doctors, lawyers, nurses moving to bigger cities like Houston, Seattle, Cali, none of us are coming back.

And it is sad.

It is sad that the kids are moving on, not taking over their families shrimping business, not working in the seafood factory.

I think this is one of the stories that will just be left behind for me to tell my kids and the grandkids and everything.

I think the Vietnamese time in the seafood industry is kind of slowly starting to dwindle away.

[Van Nguyen] I sell at the dock like 250 a pound.

And I think we just caught like maybe 20 or 30 pounds.

Yeah, 30 pounds.

So that would be like $80 if I sell at the dock like $80.

In one hour, I burn like 15 gallon of diesel.

It's almost $3 a gallon so we're less than $50.

Just say, like, $40.

And we sell $80.

I make $40 just on that tails we just picked up.

And see, that ain't much.

[Interviewer] Yeah.

[Van Nguyen] But add it up, we worked all night long.

We're going to make, like, a couple hundred dollars after the fuel.

We can make, like, a couple hundred dollars a night.

[Interviewer] How do you feel about that?

[Van Nguyen] Well, it's not a lot, but it will help me to pay for bills and stuff.

But it's not a lot.

Not a good bed.

No, it's not good.

It's slow.

Yeah.

I catch at that night about 200 pounds.

And if I sell it, it can make like $500 on that night.

After you deduct from the fuel and everything, you don't make no money.

[Stephens] One of the things that I always want recognized is the perseverance of the fisher people.

Whether it's rain, whether it's BP disaster, whether it's high cost of fuel, they persevere.

As the hardships of the fishing industry become apparent and local people realized that this isn't a negative thing, that this is a positive thing that is only making the fishing industry here that historically had been here, it's only making it stronger and viable.

We all have to fight the hurricanes.

We all have to fight the oil slicks.

We all have to fight these things together.

It is really a wondrous thing to go to the docks.

You see the fishing, shrimping boats.

They've got some Vietnamese names.

Some of them have American names.

And you don't know whose boat is whose.

They're all the same boats, and they're all going after the same product.

And I think that realization came that we're in this together.

The Vietnamese are recognized now as the Mississippi, along with others who have been here, seafood industry.

They're part and parcel of it.

[Loi Nguyen] Once a year, the Lunar New Year is bringing the community together.

Not the Catholic.

Hope.

The Vietnamese, Buddhist, whatever religion bring us together to remember our ancestors, to have a three-day festival, a good time together.

[Interviewer] Do you think it's better?

Do you think it's healed over time?

[To] I definitely think that it has healed.

And I think as the generations started growing up together and different groups of people and background, we went to school together and I think as the Vietnamese moved out of the community, also in the immigrant central and we went to other areas such as D'Iberville, St.

Martin and Ocean Springs, we were forced to be out of our comfort zone because there were not a large Vietnamese community in those areas in the '90s and 2000s.

But when we did find our pockets of people, and when we ended up growing up with them, it created a shared culture.

And this new culture ended up breeding this peace and this love.

And I think that's why we're seeing more of different cultures coming and showing up to Lunar New Years.

[Cressman-Vu] Down here-- I don't know anywhere else, but down here in Biloxi, everybody loves each other.

It used to be they don't know us, but now it's not.

I can go anywhere, people love us.

We all are human no matter what color skin-- yellow skin, white skin, black skin.

So in Biloxi, we're together now.

[Interviewer] Is there anything that I haven't talked about that you would like to talk about?

No.

Thomas, Thomas, [Vietnamese] anything you want to add on?

[Thomas Vu] Well, I think that people have a chance, have an opportunity to come over here to the United States.

First of all, you have to thank God.

Yes.

Thank God for blessing us every day and bringing us here.

But this land is the land of opportunity.

I feel United States country is the best country in the whole world.

From food, clothing, and everything they need, The United States be there, were there to help them.

So I think we thank God and thank you, everybody.

Come here and build this country greater.

From my bottom of my heart, we thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, God.

Thank you, America.

[Cfficial] We must pray that sometime in the future that Vietnam and the rest of the oppressed peoples of the world will be free.

[speaking Vietnamese] [Official] America has always welcomed the oppressed, just as you were welcomed, and we will certainly welcome future oppressed peoples in years to come.

America has always had its doors open because freedom is for everyone.

It does not matter what language you speak or what culture you embrace.

Freedom is for everyone.

I would say to you that although Vietnam has fallen, that you are now Americans, Americans of Vietnamese heritage.

The spirit of the Vietnamese nation that you represent will never be conquered because you are now in America, the land of the free, but you continue to be a great people and always remembering your ancestors and your heritage.

Thank you very much.

[music playing] Funding for this program is made possible by the Mississippi Gulf Coast National Heritage Area, the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, and by Mississippi State University.