THE FISHERMEN AND THE DRAGON

Fast-paced though complex account of ethnic collision among the fisheries of Gulf Coast Texas.

“This is a book about a racist backlash against refugees fleeing a ruinous war,” writes Johnson, author of The Feather Thief, to open a narrative that pits Vietnamese newcomers to East Texas against an array of enemies, most dangerously the KKK. When the Vietnamese arrived, they found few friends among the White fishermen of Galveston Bay, who were happy to sell those newcomers junk boats and machinery at exorbitant prices, as with one who “grinned at a reporter while describing the time he sold a boat to a Vietnamese shrimper for $25,000, even though he knew it was decrepit.” Meanwhile, Johnson notes, a Gallup poll soon after the fall of Saigon “showed only 36 percent of Americans believed refugees fleeing the calamitous war of their country’s own making deserved resettlement,” lending weight to the hostility on a homefront suddenly populated by a wave of 130,000 Vietnamese. One Anglo fisherman bought into the widely circulated lie that among the refugees were Viet Cong agents bent on destroying America, and he began terrorizing two young brothers in “Gook City,” one of whom killed their tormentor. Amazingly, he was acquitted by an all-White jury on the grounds of self-defense, which only lent energy to KKK members from far afield who came to chase the Vietnamese out. In another kind of radicalism, a Taiwanese manufacturer that had been dumping toxic chemicals into the bay, poisoning the fishery, met local resistance that included both Anglos and Vietnamese. In the end, the KKK dwindled away, but “the White supremacist movement charged ahead.” Even though most shrimp consumed here is imported, Johnson observes that the domestic crop is largely brought to market by Vietnamese fishermen. His fascinating and disturbing narrative is a winning mix of biography, true crime, and ecological study.

A carefully written investigation full of villains—and the occasional hero.