DA LAT, Vietnam -- She couldn't stop sampling the tropical fruits, the steamed snails, the candied plums. She was enthralled by the children. Almost every conversation seemed to end in laughter; she was home, and she was happy.
"This is where I want to raise my family," she exclaimed.
Nearly 20 years after she fled the fall of Saigon with her parents, Camellia Ngo, now a thoroughly American 28-year-old lawyer, has decided to return to Vietnam. And she is not alone. As one of the most dramatic refugee tides in modern times draws to a close, a new generation of Vietnamese raised in the United States is heading home in small but growing numbers to do business and sometimes, like Ms. Ngo, to stay on.
With the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo in February, as many as 10,000 Vietnamese a month are returning for visits to a country hungry for their cash but often suspicious of their Western ways.
They are greeted by frequent inefficiency, red tape and primitive working conditions, even while fending off a continuing backlash at home among many older refugees who oppose contacts with the Communist nation they fled.
These homeward journeys, coming near the end of an exodus of some 800,000 people to the United States, are a crossroads in Vietnamese-American relations. By the end of next year, officials in Washington aid, organized refugee departures from Vietnam should at last be over, and the largest refugee camps in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia will be shut down, with the final stragglers sent back to Vietnam.
The refugees left this country in distinct waves: first high-ranking officers and government officials; then desperate boat people; then, under separate agreements with Hanoi, the Amerasian offspring of U.S. servicemen, and now, planeloads of aging and mostly broken former political prisoners and their families.
In contrast, although there are no official estimates, Ms. Ngo is a member of an emerging new group, young Vietnamese-American professionals who see Vietnam as a land of business opportunity as well as roots: the first optimistic generation of refugees, without the scars of war and loss their parents carry.
Last month Ms. Ngo was on her second visit to Vietnam, negotiating projects for her Oakland law firm, the Miller Group, which is acting as a middleman for foreign investors.
She was also preparing to take up residence here next year as her company's representative, along with her Vietnamese-American husband, Michael Nguyen, a mechanical engineer.
"We want to do business here, but business is mainly our means of getting here," she said as she sat at a tiny outdoor food stall in the small mountain city of Da Lat, surrounded by the bustle of the marketplace.
"This is why Michael and I want to come back to Vietnam, to live the simpler life our parents lived. We want our children to grow up in a place where they know their neighbors," she said.
Ms. Ngo's fascination with the land her parents fled makes them a little uneasy, but unlike the parents of some of her Vietnamese-American friends, her father never threatened to disown her if she returned.
There are no firm figures on the number of refugees who are returning to stay, known as "Viet kieu." But their businesses are a growing part of an infusion of hard currency from Vietnamese in the United States that the Hanoi government says totals more than $600 million a year.
Some less affluent emigres bring a few thousand dollars to help their families establish small enterprises like guest houses, tailor shops or motorcycle repair shops. Wealthier individuals or groups are negotiating to build hospitals or finance condominiums and beach resorts.
The smaller enterprises mostly fly below the radar of government interference and red tape.
Like other ethnic Vietnamese, Ms. Ngo benefits from family connections -- an aunt in this government office, an in-law in that one -- that she said can at least help steer her through the bureaucracy.
She also makes full use of family ties to address the mutual mistrust that can make business negotiations here a delicate minuet. Suspicion on the Vietnamese side has been furthered by foreign entrepreneurs who have taken advantage of their innocence in the marketplace.
On the other side of the coin, foreign entrepreneurs face a morass of vague and shifting investment laws and a business culture in which local enterprises seem happy to sign exclusive contracts with more than one foreign firm.
And there are mixed feelings here toward the Viet kieu, people who left their country at a time of hardship and returned prosperous.