Owner Huu Dao said the shrimpers who tie up in Biloxi come for his Vietnamese food. “It’s so good,” he said, that he recently opened a second restaurant in Petal.
Kaitlin Truong, who leads the local group Asian Americans for Change, said many of the Asian employees lost their jobs at the casinos because of the recession. The skyrocketing insurance rates make it hard to open a business in East Biloxi.
“Many of the small businesses on the Point have not come back and may never come back because of the obstacles in rebuilding there,” said Trinh Le, community empowerment coordinator at the Hope Community Development Agency, a group that has helped rebuild East Biloxi since Katrina. “Many of the Vietnamese shrimpers are struggling.”
Tung Banh, who works for the Catholic Charities’ Migration and Refugee Center in Biloxi, said a large percentage of the young Vietnamese men are forgoing working in the seafood industry that employed their parents in Vietnam and now in Biloxi, Instead they are training to become welders and finding higher wages in shipbuilding on the Coast.
Peter Nguyen worked in the seafood industry for 15 years and still helps the fishermen. NAVASA is looking into ways to reduce the insurance costs on shrimp boats and testing nets made of a lighter material that save on fuel costs. The price for these new nets is double the cost of what the fishermen are using now, so Nguyen said they are testing them on one boat to see how it pays off.
Felicia Hillard grew up on Crawford Street in East Biloxi and now is working at the Hope CDA and partnering with NAVASA to revitalize the community. She focuses on small business development and is exploring ways to reopen or expand business, including community gardens where the Vietnamese could grow and sell vegetables.
“We have resources for them,” said Hillard, who thinks the Vietnamese know to come to them or one of the other agencies in Biloxi for help,
The future of business in East Biloxi is still a blank slate with so much open land since Katrina. Groups of designers came to the Coast after the storm and left behind their visions of a new East Biloxi.
“I personally think the Living Cities plan really scared some Vietnamese folks off,” said Trinh Le. “They saw condos, high rises, casinos and hotels on their property in those pictures and didn’t understand fully what it meant due to the language barrier. Now folks are waiting to sell their land, or they don’t want to rebuild because they don’t want the casinos to buy them out later down the line.”
She along with residents, business owners and property owners in East Biloxi envision an international marketplace. After two town meetings last year, “It seemed like people, Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese, are genuinely interested in an International District on Oak Street,” she said.
Combine that international marketplace with other businesses that will open and Hillard said, “The end product is just going to be phenomenal.”
