Immigrants have changed the face of Westminster

Margie Rice lived in Westminster before it had a grocery store. Or a Vietnamese heritage. If both historical notes now seem hard to imagine, it just goes to show what has happened to the once sleepy white-bread community of 92,000.

Westminster/Little Saigon?

You talk about a twain that you’d never think would meet.

But they did meet and, as a Times story noted Sunday, the city soon will be the first in the country to sport a Vietnamese American majority on its council.

As an elected mayor set to begin her fifth term and a Westminster resident since 1956, Rice has seen it all unfold.

In the early days of the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s, she was a school board member. The newly arrived schoolchildren didn’t know what was expected of them and couldn’t speak the language. Some eschewed indoor restrooms, using the school yard instead, and were unfamiliar with knives and forks in the lunchroom. Rice remembers a young Vietnamese boy flushing a goldfish down a toilet. “He never realized he’d never get it back,” she says.

Today, it’d be fair to speculate that some of those same children now define the city. Which leads me to ask Rice if she foresaw that 30 years ago.

“Never,” she says.

And becoming future political leaders and significant players in the city’s commercial vitality?

Out of the question. “We were just coping with day-to-day stuff,” she says.

Hard to believe today, but Rice says she wasn’t convinced then that the new arrivals would stay very long. “I thought they were just coming over to stay until the war was over and then they’d want to go back to their own country. That was my thought at the time, that we were giving them safe haven here. But they’ve brought so much to our city.”

The 79-year-old Rice, with 30 years of school board and City Council service behind her, still marvels at how the immigrants did it. Language problems, social adjustments, antipathy from an entrenched community that didn’t like what was happening to the face of their city.

In one of many defining moments, the council rejected a 1989 request for a parade permit from a veterans group representing Vietnamese soldiers who had died during the war. But it wasn’t the rejection that made the headlines, it was Councilman Frank Fry’s remark.

“It’s my opinion that you’re all Americans and you’d better be Americans,” he said then. “If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam. That may be unfair, but that’s my opinion and I’m sure that is the opinion of a lot of people around here.”

Fry suggested the group honor their dead on recognized American holidays such as Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

He later said he didn’t want a divided city that had to have two of everything. In his way, he argued, he was trying to bring people together.

Rice chuckles when I bring up the incident and says she and Fry have laughed about it over the years. “Frank is Frank,” she says of the veteran councilman. “I don’t know if he regrets it or not, but I know he’s well-respected by the Vietnamese.”

I tried in vain to reach Fry, who worked with Vietnamese American leaders in Little Saigon a few years ago to create the country’s first memorial park honoring South Vietnamese soldiers.

I’m one who never gets tired of the story of Vietnamese assimilation into America, because it just seems so improbable. Rice concedes that some white and Latino residents have never made peace with the large Asian imprint on the city and aren’t especially thrilled that three Vietnamese Americans will be on the council.

But she also says she doesn’t see the city as having a split personality, with Little Saigon and its 29,000 residents existing as a separate entity.

“They helped us build our city,” she says of the immigrants. “I still think we would have been a small city, to tell you the truth. I don’t think we would have progressed as fast if we didn’t have as many cultures.”

How did it get done? The same way that Westminster went from having no grocery store to building the Westminster Mall -- step by step and with a lot of hard work.

Parade issues? This year, Rice says, the city had its first Founders Day parade in 25 years, reflecting all three major ethnic groups.

“We’re all in it together,” she says, “working together. I’m very proud of our city and wouldn’t want to change it.”

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dana.parsons@latimes.com