Cigarette Smoking among Vietnamese Immigrants in California

In the 18 years since 1975, more than 600,000 Vietnamese have arrived in the United States from Vietnam. Census figures for 1990 show that Vietnamese are the fastest-growing Asian/Pacific Islander ethnic group in the United States, with a growth rate of 135% in the decade since 1980.1 Population projections show that by 2030 they will vie with Filipinos to be the largest Asian-Pacific Islander population in the country. 2 In previous research conducted in 1987, we found a high cigarette-smoking prevalence rate of 56% among Vietnamese men. ~ Concern about this high prevalence led us to develop and evaluate an antitobacco program targeting this population in the San Francisco Bay area, To assess preintervention baseline smoking behavior, we conducted a survey of Vietnamese in the San Francisco/Oakland (intervention) and Los Angeles (control) areas in the spring of 1989. This article reports the survey results.