Years later, while working at Wachovia Bank in 2008, Truong packed his bags and booked a one-way ticket to Saigon, using his bilingualism and American background to land himself a job at a reputable Vietnamese real estate company. Still, he had other aspirations. In 2011, Truong helped open the immensely popular Chill Skybar , the first of many rooftop watering holes that would soon pop up across the skyline of Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon).

At the age of six, Loc Truong joined the nearly two million of his countrymen who fled Vietnam following the fall of Saigon. After resettling in San Diego, California, he grew up as an average refugee teenager, never thinking he’d return to the country his family had once left behind—until a stop in Vietnam during a collegiate semester at sea planted a seed in his mind.

“It was an international concept—both Vietnamese and western-operated—with a mixologist and more western-style music like hip-hop and house,” explains Truong. “From then on, many new ‘sky bars’ opened up, competing with each other and ultimately lifting overall standards for food-and-beverage and entertainment in HCMC.”

A hip hop-soundtracked roof bar with fancy cocktails may not seem like a groundbreaking concept to reveling urbanites in New York or Los Angeles, but for the growing middle class of Saigonese armed with newfound disposable income, Chill and its contemporaries helped pave the way for a now-burgeoning scene of high-concept restaurants, bars, and breweries opened by repatriated members of the widespread Vietnamese diaspora, called Viet Kieu.

Though once considered derogatory, the term Viet Kieu is now used by Vietnamese locals simply to distinguish themselves from those who were born or live overseas. It also connotes a legal status—in 2004, the Communist Vietnamese government formally declared the diaspora an integral part of the Vietnamese community. By 2007, it had begun visa exemptions for those who could prove their Vietnamese origin. Today, Viet Kieu enjoy tax breaks, relaxed limits on property ownership and business licenses, as well as the ability to bring over foreign spouses and children.