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LITTLE SAIGON : Immigrants Cling to Culture While Adapting to a New, Fast Way of Life

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Patrick Mott is a regular contributor to Orange County Life

In 1977, the Westminster-Garden Grove border seemed as unlikely a spot as one could find for an Oriental boom town. It was--and is--what might be called Orange County’s heartland, a series of residential neighborhoods shot through with commercial strips along the major streets. What an Easterner would call suburbia.

But in the last decade, that ribbon of land, and many of the nearby neighborhoods, have become the scene of one of the largest population migrations since the Gold Rush. And, like their Forty-Niner predecessors, the nearly 100,000 Southeast Asian refugees--Cambodians, Laotians, Chinese but mostly Vietnamese--who began anew in Orange County with little or nothing have become part of the fabric of the region, adding a different and highly specific cultural identity to what formerly was a largely blue-collar Anglo community.

The Vietnamese community in Orange County is the largest such concentration in the world outside of Vietnam. And the focal point of this society within a society is the roughly milelong stretch of Bolsa Avenue between Brookhurst and Magnolia streets, known today as Little Saigon.

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Little Saigon presents a stark contrast to the more traditional physical and ethnic landscape of Orange County. On any day on the Bolsa strip, visitors can see Vietnamese shoppers picking out the evening’s main dish from a tank of live catfish, or chat with a group of Vietnamese students over espresso in a French/Vietnamese bakery, or watch an entire barbecued pig being hung up in a deli window next to whole roast ducks and chickens. And, because Little Saigon is made up mostly of small family businesses, the dozens of signs in Vietnamese lining the wide street can be a startlingly unfamiliar sight to the first-time visitor.

The heavy concentration of Vietnamese businesses is only a five-minute drive from the largely Latino neighborhoods of Santa Ana and the middle-class Anglo districts of Garden Grove and Fountain Valley. Taco stands are only blocks away from Vietnamese barbecued duck kitchens. The transformation began shortly after the fall of Saigon in 1975, when the first waves of refugees and boat people fled their Vietnamese homeland, leaving most of their possessions behind. After many of the refugees were processed through temporary “tent cities,” such as the one set up at Camp Pendleton, Orange County churches, social service organizations and individuals sponsored them, helping them find homes and jobs.

Later, other refugees, some moving from U.S. cities where they had initially wound up after fleeing Vietnam, were drawn to Orange County by the climate--similar to Vietnam’s, though less humid--by the prospect of reunions with friends, and by word that jobs, particularly assembly work in the county’s booming electronics industry, were abundant.

A period of cultural adjustment followed, with many of the immigrants learning English and raising capital needed to start businesses. Slowly, however, along the Bolsa strip, the beginnings of a commercial district appeared--small markets, clothing stores, restaurants and the occasional professional office, such as a doctor or dentist.

In 1979, there were roughly 30 Vietnamese businesses in Orange County. Today, there are between 700 and 800.

The majority of these businesses are concentrated in Little Saigon, the hub around which life for many of the one-time refugees turns. It is their social as well as commercial center--a place to shop, to socialize, to maintain ties with friends, neighbors and literally thousands of others who are in the unique position to empathize with their past and present lives.

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Little Saigon also represents, for many Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians, a tie to their past and a possible gateway to their future, a reminder that while they may be chronologically close to their roots in Vietnam, they now live and work in America. To grow and prosper, they are finding it necessary to adopt Americanized business and marketing strategies in order to expand their businesses.

“Little Saigon is the symbol of the Vietnamese people in exile, and we do want to keep our identity,” said Dr. Co Pham, an obstetrician/gynecologist and the chairman of an ad hoc committee of Little Saigon business people who are trying to attract more tourism to the area. “But we have to learn to adopt American ways of doing things. In this country, if you’re not growing, you’re going downhill.”

In the past, there has been no danger of that happening in Little Saigon. In its first decade, the area boomed.

“In 1977, there was only one market set up on Bolsa,” said Tony Lam, a restaurateur who helped found the Orange County Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. “Then a jewelry store and a pharmacy started up, then a couple of restaurants. Things started snowballing. People looked up and said, ‘My goodness, things are doing good.’ People started following in others’ footsteps--doctors, tax preparers, professional services. And it became a little Saigon. Now you can even find Vietnamese fast-food.”

What you can’t find, at least so far, are many non-Asians. While Little Saigon has a high profile in the Southeast Asian community, it has not been a magnet for outsiders. Lam said shoppers from the rest of Orange County and elsewhere “have been hesitant because, in my opinion, I think they believe they might be confronted in some way, that there might be bad feelings or crime. But I think we are in a law-and-order area, and now we are going to have a special police substation here.”

Crime in the Little Saigon business district “is no higher or lower than in any other business district in the city,” said Westminster Police Lt. Bob Burnett.

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Language, predictably, has been a barrier to commerce.

Lam acknowledged that “many stores are run by just a man and wife or relatives, and a few are not ready to receive tourists, particularly English-speaking people.”

“Some (merchants) speak English very well,” Pham said, “but others get a little office space, do things just the way they would do them at home and find no need to learn English.”

It is not necessarily personal inertia that has caused many of Orange County’s Indochinese refugees to keep a low business profile. Many reasons can be traced to their cultural heritage and the belief by some refugees that their lives in America may yet be temporary.

“You have to remember that the immigration didn’t occur during one period of time only,” said Dr. Quynh Kieu, a Fountain Valley-based pediatrician and a leading activist in the Vietnamese community. “The steady trickling in of people, such as boat people, after 1975, they are now much better adjusted. They have jobs, homes, they’ve been able in many cases to re-establish their careers after years of hard work, and their children are benefiting from local schools and going to American universities. They are the group now presenting more interest for their local communities. They are also the ones concerned about maintaining their cultural identity.

“Then there is a group that came later, around 1979, a large group of boat people. They are the ones who are still struggling with many of the basic survival needs. They’re still trying to improve their language skills, get jobs, a better level of pay, housing, employment, health care. This is a struggling group.”

Many want to return to Vietnam. According to a study done by United Way in 1984, 94% of Vietnamese immigrants living in California said they wanted one day to go back. Eighty-six percent of the respondents said they thought of themselves strictly as Vietnamese, and 14% referred to themselves as Vietnamese-Americans. None said they considered themselves wholly American. Those who said they intended to apply for American citizenship totaled 64%, while 22% indicated they would not apply. The rest were not sure.

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Even though many of the respondents said they would one day apply for citizenship, “until they actually do, there’s really no way of knowing whether they will,” said John Liu, a professor of comparative culture at UC Irvine. Also, he said, many who say they intend to apply may be doing it in order to sponsor family members still in Vietnam who want to immigrate to the United States.

“Citizenship isn’t necessarily identification” with American culture, Liu emphasized.

Further, there is an inbred tendency in many Vietnamese, Kieu said, to accept their lot, to not rock the boat.

“I think that coming from where we came from and keeping in mind that we came here not entirely of our own volition is significant,” she said. “We could either live miserably in a regime that allowed no personal individual freedom, no respect for traditional values, or we could go to a country that affords you open opportunities.

“Everybody who made the choice to come here feels pretty fortunate and that makes it easier to be happy with what you have. And that’s sometimes a disservice, that feeling of being thankful to fate for allowing you to be here, coupled with the tolerance that can make people passive. That can be an obstacle to helping people better themselves here,” she said. “This country is a country of opportunities, but you have to be aggressive enough to seize them. They have to learn that it doesn’t just come your way; you have to look for it.”

Lam, Pham and several others in the community have spearheaded an effort at local entrepreneurship. After much advocacy from local groups, the Westminster City Council and Redevelopment Agency this month approved the designation of Little Saigon as a tourist zone and special redevelopment project. This opens the door to designation of the area on tourist maps, as well as putting up signs that point tourists and shoppers toward Bolsa Avenue and its environs. Lam said he also would like to see a local office of tourism.

While Lam said he and other community leaders were “very pleased” about the new designation, he added that “a lot of improvement must be done. We’re working on a brochure to introduce Little Saigon to people, to show what we have, what we sell. We’d also like to train tour guides for the area and put up welcoming signs and directional signs. We hope to be working closely with the city on this.”

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City officials have noted that business revenue from Little Saigon makes up a substantial portion of the city’s $1 billion in retail sales, and Councilwoman Joy Neugebauer said that “the City Council recognizes the potential that exists to develop the area as a major business center.”

Life wasn’t always so promising in Little Saigon. When Asian businesses were first becoming established in the area, some members of the predominantly Anglo population, as well as established merchants in the neighborhood, were openly hostile to the newcomers. Several non-Asian businesses moved rather than be located near Vietnamese stores. Petitions were circulated asking the City Council not to grant business licenses to immigrants. Kieu said there were incidents of vandalism, with broken or defaced shop signs and shattered windows.

“(The merchants) were never willing to report the hostility they encountered,” she said. “They didn’t want to make a lot of noise. They thought they should be thankful for anything they could get. But that has improved as the community has gotten better organized and become aware of the rights they have. Things have improved tremendously.”

Also, Pham said, “people have matured. More Caucasian people are working with Vietnamese people in business today. And in Little Saigon, things have become more Americanized. Things are cleaner and there’s better service.”

Ky Ngo, a lawyer and the president of the Garden Grove-based International Vietnamese Mutual Assistance Foundation and the Vietnamese and American Friendship Foundation of U.S.A., said that misconceptions about Vietnamese life still survive in the Caucasian community. For instance, he said, some people continue to believe, erroneously, that Vietnamese eat animals such as cats and dogs, are Communists or are anti-Christian (many in fact are Catholic). He said people tend to forget that the Vietnamese people who now live in Orange County once were America’s allies during the Vietnam War.

But the misconceptions are falling away. Kieu said that “the city’s labeling (Little Saigon) as a special area is going to help. The quality of construction on Bolsa has gotten a lot more attractive. In the future, I would tend to see the older shopping centers being improved to be competitive, and making use of better signs to appeal to a broader public. People will use better marketing techniques, ones that are used in the traditional American way. I think things will remain chiefly Vietnamese, but there will probably be larger shops rather than myriads of smaller ones.”

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What will likely not change, she said, is the Vietnamese people’s tie to their cultural heritage.

“They will all attempt to hold onto it,” she said. “This is a unique treasure that we need to maintain and fortify.”

Liu conceded that the Americanization of the Vietnamese refugees will not happen overnight, or even in one generation. However, he said that already traditional values among that population are being tested by such American cultural phenomena as the lack of heavy emphasis on the nuclear family, the emergence of women from subservient roles and the birth of new generations of Vietnamese who have never seen or known Vietnam. It is those members of new generations, he said, who will identify themselves more and more as Americans.

In the face of such change, Little Saigon remains a cultural anchor, albeit a changing one, Lam said.

“The scars of war take a long time to heal,” he said. “This (neighborhood) is a kind of remembrance. We want to remind people that Saigon was never lost in our hearts and in our minds and won’t be in the next generation to come. We’re trying to bridge the gap between East and West and still give the Vietnamese people a sense of pride.”

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