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You know things are getting pretty bad when Thailand’s economy looks better to investors than California’s. But that’s what Frank Jao, creator of Orange County’s Little Saigon, is finding. In fact, as the recession worsens, and the cost of property remains prohibitive, Jao is casting his entrepreneurial eye to his homeland, Vietnam. Where once he saw political oppression, Marxist economics and heartache, now he sees low-cost labor, coal mines and an area rich in resources. It’s a big change for a man for whom the United States seemed the legendary promised land.

A businessman with ties to the American and South Vietnamese governments, he and his wife fled Saigon in April, 1975, one week before the communists captured it, and joined thousands of refugees at Camp Pendleton. Fortunately, Jao spoke English and had learned the basics of American business while working for Xerox in Saigon. Within two years, he was a realtor in Orange County.

By 1978, Jao recognized that the local Vietnamese community needed an Asian shopping district; so, with money from other Vietnamese-Americans and hard-won bank loans, Jao, then 31, began developing Little Saigon. Today his company, Bridgecreek, manages about $200 million in holdings. But now Jao wants to go back to Vietnam. Last year, he invested in a Thailand-based lumber company. “We wanted to be in the region so we could understand the market before we went in (to Vietnam),” he says. But first America must end its 16-year-old economic embargo of the country. “When the communist bloc in Europe collapsed, it was a shock,” Jao says. “If that could happen, anything could happen.”