In the off-season, Tuong Cao spends eight hours a day repairing his nets and gear under the carport of his home in Cut Off. Since coming to the United States from Vietnam more than 20 years ago, Cao has worked tirelessly, and now owns a boat. Devoutly Catholic, Cao steers his boat with the help of a compass, a crucifix and an American flag.

Day Five: Thursday, March 28, 1996 Gulf shrimpers take a pounding Farm-raised imports take over Immigrant shrimper honors family legacy Shrimpers, regulators often at loggerheads Thailand transformed by shrimp boats

Immigrant shrimper
honors family legacy

By John McQuaid,
Staff writer

CUT OFF

Cao grew up fishing with his father on a small boat out of Vung Tao, a seagoing town on the coast of South Vietnam. From the time he was 13 or 14, he spent almost every day on the water from dawn to dusk, pulling up nets of finfish and shrimp.
  He might have spent the rest of his life that way, but the Vietnam War changed everything.
  Cao was a 23-year-old soldier in the South Vietnamese Marines when his side lost in 1975. Discharged just days before the end of the war, he and other soldiers made their way home on an unmarked bus, worrying the whole time that they might be stopped and captured.
  Meanwhile, the Viet Cong were closing in on Vung Tao. Cao’s family feared the communists would seize their boats and decided to flee. On edge, they prepared an escape and waited for Cao and his brother to return from their military duty. Cao made it, but his brother was left behind.
  On April 29, 1975 — a day before Saigon fell — 80 family members and neighbors, including Cao’s parents and his wife, Cay Nguyen, packed into a 40-foot shrimp trawler and made for the shipping lanes. The boat rode low in the water and its engine strained as it headed out to sea.
  ‘‘A lot of people were seasick and were vomiting all the time. We were all afraid we wouldn’t make it — afraid we would run out of water and food, that we might sink, or the motor might break down, or that the Viet Cong might stop us,’’ Cao said. He spoke through an interpreter, though his English is passable.
  But good luck followed the refugees. After three days at sea, an American cargo vessel spotted them. Cao remembers watching as many people threw themselves up against the side of the ship during the rescue operation, trying to get aboard.
  Since that day two decades ago, Cao has worked ceaselessly to build a life for himself and his family in the United States — a life that echoes his lost childhood. He shrimps offshore in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the 64-foot trawler he owns and captains, the St. Joseph.
  At a time when shrimping has become a culture of complaint about cheap imports, oppressive regulations and other problems, Cao says he tries not to worry. His complaints are few. He just wants to shrimp.
  ‘‘We do it day and night,’’ he said. ‘‘From the time we leave the dock, the engine never stops. It’s go, go, go until we come back. Then we go out again. We have to keep making money.’’
  In just 20 years, Vietnamese immigrants have become part of the rich tapestry of fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. With iron bonds of family and community, they have weathered the shrinking industry’s changes.
  Some competitors resent the newcomers, who tend to keep to themselves. But many have grudging admiration for their work ethic and persistence.
  With shrimping in decline, Vietnamese-Americans are virtually the only ones still building offshore shrimp boats in the Gulf.
  ‘‘This is the land of opportunity, and a lot of what we complain about, they see as opportunity,’’ said Joe Rodriguez, a boat owner and owner of Rodriguez Boatyard in Bayou La Batre, Ala., which in the last year has had a small boom in building for Vietnamese-American shrimpers.
  It wasn’t always that way. Arriving as refugees in several waves during the late 1970s, they at first were considered interlopers by local shrimpers. Their use of Asian-style push nets was quickly banned in Louisiana waters when other shrimpers complained.
  In 1981, arsonists torched two shrimp boats owned by Vietnamese immigrants in Seadrift, Texas, and the Ku Klux Klan held a rally against the Vietnamese in Galveston Bay, Texas, according to ‘‘Gulf Coast Soundings,’’ a book on shrimping by anthropologist Paul Durrenberger.

Nothing came easy
  Cao started out a penniless refugee. The steady upward arc of his life since then almost makes fishing look easy. But success came only through consistent, sometimes backbreaking, effort.
  After their dramatic rescue, Cao and his shipmates were moved to a refugee camp in the Philippines. Months later, they were moved to a camp in Florida, where, one by one, authorities farmed them out to sponsors around the United States.
  By this time the Caos had a son, David. The three of them ended up in New Iberia, living in a house with a sponsor and other refugee families. In early 1976 Cao’s sponsor helped place him at a local shoe repair shop, where he quickly took to the work and started teaching himself English with a phrase book.
  ‘‘After he had made his 40 hours the first week, I told him in sign language he didn’t have to come back the next day,’’ said his boss, Mark Gulotta, who now owns a Western boot shop in New Iberia. ‘‘Then he went back into the shop, and someone came out and said, ‘What did you tell him? He’s really upset — all he’s saying is, no want go home, want work.’ It was at a time when I really thought we had lost the work ethic in this country, and there he was asking for more.’’
  Cao spent more than two years working in the shop, then moved to the New Orleans area in 1978. As the Cao family kept growing, Gulotta became the godfather of one of their six sons. The two men still talk to each other from time to time.
  Cao was determined to get back into fishing if he could. After a brief stint at another shoe repair shop, he and his family moved to Cut Off in 1980.
  He and Cay got jobs in fish houses, cracking crab claws four and a half days a week. He commuted to New Orleans for a day and a half of work at the shoe repair job. On Sundays, he rested.
  The Caos moved into their home in 1990, on a quiet residential street a couple of blocks off Louisiana 1. None of their immediate neighbors is Vietnamese, and Cao says he’s friendly with them, bringing back shrimp to barbecue. But generally he and Cay, who speaks little English, move within a tight-knit network of their Catholic church and about 60 fishing families from Vietnam who live in the area.
  Because many fishers live in small coastal towns, spending long periods at sea, immigrant fishing communities often manage to keep their cultures intact. In New England, many Portuguese and Italian fishers retain their language, customs and links to Europe. In Louisiana, fishers of Cajun, Croatian and Spanish descent also hold onto their traditions.

Home-grown network
  Those close ties enabled Cao to move from being a minimum-wage employee to a successful boat owner with impressive speed.
  In eight months during 1986 and ’87, Cao, a cousin and three brothers-in-law built the 64-foot St. Joseph — without help from professional boat builders.
  The five worked 12 hours a day on a rented lot near a shipyard, where they bought cut steel, tools and other materials. Cao was in charge of materials, which he bought with a loan pooled from family members and friends. The others, who had worked building other boats, handled the drilling and welding.
  ‘‘If you know how, it’s easy,’’ Cao said.
  But that solidarity is one of the things the global fisheries crisis is eroding in many places.
  Like everyone else, Cao has been hit hard by cheap imports from, among other places, Southeast Asia; by rising costs, fierce competition and rules, such as the requirement that he use turtle excluder devices.
  Cao devotes himself to a set routine in the winter, when shrimp are out of season, to ready his weather-beaten equipment for the spring. Short but solid, with a moustache and a wisp of beard, pale skin and a warm smile, he spends each day in a folding chair in his carport, sewing his nets from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
  With practiced fingertips, he stitches mesh tubes to webbing containing the aluminum frames of TEDs. That in turn must be attached to the net on one end, and to the bag that holds the catch on the other. He also spends time darning holes caused by snags on rocks and other debris.
  After that, Cao dyes the nets bright sea green using a large metal vat he keeps in his backyard, along with an apparatus of ropes, pulleys and tree branches he uses to suspend the dripping mesh.
  The St. Joseph sits idle at a dock a few miles away on Bayou Lafourche, sandwiched between other shrimp vessels, also named for Catholic saints, owned by Vietnamese-Americans. After Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, which fell on Mardi Gras this year, he and his three crew members began getting the boat in shape for April, when the shrimp resume running in the Gulf.

$30,000 a good year
  Cao’s boat is medium-sized for an offshore trawler, and he typically spends 10 to 14 days on a trip, keeping within a few miles of shore. He will return for a day, maybe two, before heading out again. All told, he says he can bring in $100,000 worth of shrimp in a year, but the high expenses leave him with a net income of $25,000 to $30,000.
  Even with all his energy, Cao has his limits. Injured several times during combat, he lost his right eye when mortar fire blew up in his face. He still has a slight limp in his right leg from another explosion.
  But he seems to have no bitterness about the war. It bothers him more that American-born shrimpers seem to resent him for working hard.
  ‘‘We work day and night, then we come in and sell a lot of shrimp, and people get mad at us,’’ he said. ‘‘We are catching more shrimp than the Americans and they don’t like it.’’
  Cao is now a naturalized American citizen. His family is settled, even Americanized. His son David attends Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe, and his other sons — Michael, Hung, Dung, Tuan and Minh, 10 to 19, are enrolled in local schools.
  Though he is carrying on his father’s work, Cao believes the fishing legacy will end with him. He has bigger plans for his sons — college and careers as professionals. They tend to get seasick anyway, never a promising trait for a fisher.
  He and Cay try to give a disciplined structure to their children’s lives. They work on the boat sometimes and do chores around the house. They have curfews. Cay says she worries about what they’re exposed to away from home.
  ‘‘We don’t want them to go out anywhere, no matter how old they are, but they have other ideas,’’ she said.
  Their Catholicism helps. Its symbols are everywhere, from the praying hands mounted high on the rigging of the St. Joseph to the rosary beads draped on the windows in the wheelhouse, near a tiny American flag. They attend a Vietnamese-language Mass in LaRose every Saturday evening. At the beginning of the shrimping season in April, a priest blesses the boats and sprinkles them with a little holy water.
  Cao regularly sends money to relatives back in Vietnam. ‘‘They think we are rich, but I still have to work all the time,’’ he said. ‘‘They don’t understand.’’ He says he’d like to visit his homeland someday, but he has no desire to live there again, despite the recent normalization of relations with the United States.
  The Cao family stays in touch with the rest of the 80 people who fled Vietnam on the trawler that day 21 years ago. Many live in the New Orleans area, including Cao’s parents, a brother and two sisters. All of his eight siblings now live in the United States, including the brother who missed the boat that day. He lives in Cincinnati and works as an electronics repairman.
  ‘‘I am an American citizen,’’ Cao said. ‘‘I try to remember and to keep contact with Vietnam, but it’s much better here than there.’’