It's pretty nice hearing all of these. Interesting seeing how we all ended up and how some of our past histories may have influenced the way posters here think.
To expand on my earlier comment, I know very, very vaguely that on my mother's side, my maternal grandfather's family migrated from north to central Vietnam several centuries back. Though never stated outright I'm pretty certain they were landowners. My grandfather was the fifth of twenty children, and worked in his (older?) brother's company (I think it had to do with oil) while still in Vietnam. He seems to have had some training in art/literature and was an amateur poet. I don't know much about the rest of his family, but they do appear to be a very huge clan, and a lot of them for some reason have this eerily similar, stereotypical Korean look. There are apparently relatives in Germany, Canada, Australia, Britain, France. My mom said I have some cute cousins in France but I never met them. Anyways, the clan is so big that according to my dad there were little kids who were my mother's granduncles (in hierarchical terms).
My maternal grandmother's story is a bit more interesting - her father was a Western-educated doctor, but died from typhoid in his 40s (I think... something). Since my grandmother was the most tomboyish of her three sisters, she was forced to drop out from school at age 14 and become the "man" of the house, doing handyman sort of things and working. Somehow she ended up going into a foreign exchange student program and attended the University of Michigan in the 50s, and later became principal of an international school. When she fled here she worked for IMF (I think). My grandma's oldest sister married the guy who would become the last South Vietnamese ambassador to America, incidentally, which leads me to believe that my gradmother's side must've been high up enough in society somehow. Either that or my grandaunt was really hot when she was around my age.
My maternal grandmother I don't know a lot about. I'm assuming they were a traditional upper-middle class family. I know two of her sisters married the same guy.
My paternal grandfather came from an old landowning, scholar-gentry family in north Vietnam. Strangely, most people with my surname tend to be Chinese migrants from the 19th century at earliest, but according to my father the earliest records of that side of the family he is aware of comes from the 17th century, when a father-son pair in the family were highly esteemed mandarins. I don't think it's improbable that my direct patrilineal line may have had Chinese origins, however - political refugees running from various conflicts in China was common enough - but there's nothing to prove or disprove it at this point.
My great-grandfather, at any point, did the good ol' polygamy thing and had up to four wives (apparently he could've had more wives since he was a charming (and rich) fellow but he didn't want to deal with it). My grandfather was the eldest child of the fourth wife, which meant he was very low in the family hierarchy. He went through the famines that followed the Japanese occupation, and apparently though our family was supposedly upper-class landowners we had barely enough food for ourselves during that time. Anyways, he graduated with a degree in literature, and from what vague information I know had some sort of government job involving rice distribution in the 50s, and he was known for his generosity and virtue. Eventually, he ended up with a very high rank in the South Vietnamese government - something akin to the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Oddly, he and the family were not particularly financially well-off and lived relatively humbly for someone of high rank - I suspect this might be because my grandfather had to single-handedly support himself and ~20 other family members, including his children, siblings and their families, some random cousins, and my grandmother's relatives. A story my dad always told me was when he was little, there was a time when they could only afford to buy one egg a month that was shared among everyone living with my grandfather. Though that may or may not have been exaggeration, the fact that a relatively high ranking member of the government was living on scraps is very indicative of the problems South Vietnam had at the time. Additionally, I guess while he was pretty high ranking he wasn't the cream of the crop, ie the people like the Prime Minister who probably actually had a lot of the wealth. Ultimately upper-middle class at this point, from what I gather.
Anyways, in 1970 my grandfather was later moved to a different post, as spokesperson and/or chief advisor to the South Vietnamese ambassador to Japan, which meant that he, along with most of the 15-20 or so relatives living with him, moved to Japan (except my oldest uncle, who joined the South Vietnamese army and became an officer). I suspect this was either a demotion due to the regime changes and political instability, and/or my grandfather was seeing the writing on the wall and wanted to get the family out of South Vietnam ASAP. If it was the latter, his decision was certainly wise - he was able to get pretty much all of the family from Japan to America in several stages, which is how my dad ended up in the States a few years before the first wave of Vietnamese refugees came.
My grandfather obviously could not return to Vietnam once it was certain the communists would win, since as a high ranking government official, and one who was descended from upper-class landowners, they wouldn't give him an easy time. So he fled in ~'75 with the remaining parts of the family to America. He seems to have suffered from some sort of depression for a number of years, according to my dad, often getting drunk on beer and getting really sad about my oldest uncle who was imprisoned by the communists (my grandfather and my oldest uncle apparently had some sort of falling out, though they appear to have later reconciled once my uncle escaped to America). Anyways, he appears to have gotten back on his feet by the time I was born and when he died he was considered a well-respected member of the diaspora community here in the states.
Anyways, all that aside, pretty much almost everyone on my paternal side that I know of has worked in the government at some point of their lives (if you include military, teaching, etc. as government). Also, I think my grandfather, thanks to his position, had a rather different perspective on the war and the world in general compared to a lot of Vietnamese refugees - even other 1st wave refugees that tended to be more well-educated and "Western" than later waves - which explained why even though he voted Republican like a lot of Vietnamese because they were seen as the ones fighting the commies, he hated their guts. He thought Bush Jr. was the most terrible President of his lifetime, and he still voted for him. He seems to have passed this onto his children, at any rate, which is why we're mainly center-left/liberal, really atypical for older Vietnamese. Heck, my dad occasionally is borderline far-left sometimes (by American standards). Though, of course, we all still prefer S. Vietnam to the commies if we were given the choice.
tl;dr: Upper-class/upper-middle class Vietnamese bureaucrats turned upper-middle/middle class Asian-Americans bureaucrats.
