ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the war that led to the formation of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian communities in America. It reviews a wide range of findings from local studies of Vietnamese, Chinese-Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong ethnic groups, to examine in more depth their adaptation processes, including such topics as mental health, pregnancy outcomes, and the educational progress of their children. The chapter looks briefly at prearrival characteristics, migration motives and events, and mental health outcomes among Indochinese adults, and then touch on infant health outcomes and on the educational progress of their children. Immigration statistics do not include children born in the United States. National data on social and economic characteristics of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian Americans are available from two main sources: the decennial census and annual government surveys of nationwide samples. The process of psychological adaptation appears to be temporally as well as socially patterned.
