Expo Helps O.C.’s Vietnamese Firms Enter Mainstream : Commerce: Some believe time has come for Little Saigon’s entrepreneurs to break out of insular shell.
When Richard Nguyen first arrived in Little Saigon in the fall of 1976, he and a handful of Vietnamese then in Orange County would car-pool every other week to buy Asian groceries in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.
“It was a whole day trip just to buy rice,” Nguyen recalled.
Nearly 20 years later, Little Saigon is home to some 4,000 Vietnamese businesses, including two dozen Asian supermarkets. Like Garden Grove’s Koreatown, it is a commercial hub for the fastest-growing Asian community in the land.
Now entrepreneurial pioneers such as Nguyen--a former restaurateur who now works as a real estate agent--believe Little Saigon businesses should emerge from their insular shell. And this week, with the Vietnamese American Business Expo, they are making their first concerted effort to bring that about.
The weeklong expo, called “20 Years Later: Business Achievement in the Land of Opportunity,” brings together seminars and workshops aimed at helping business owners find opportunities outside the Vietnamese community. This weekend, about 100 businesses are expected to set up display booths at the Orange County Fair and Exposition Center in Costa Mesa.
“This is a chance to expand to other markets,” said Joseph Vu, a Westminster financial consultant who is the director of the expo. Vu thinks many businesses in Little Saigon have neared the limits of their growth; the one way for them to continue to thrive, he says, is “to get out of their comfort zone.”
Peter Ho, who opened a television repair shop in Westminster in 1980, agrees. “There’s too much competition in Little Saigon,” he said. “They don’t have enough clients.”
The number of Vietnamese businesses in Orange County has been growing steadily in the ‘90s, according to the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, whose business directory is now an inch thick. Even so, many businesses have changed hands, and others haven’t gotten over the ill effects of the recession, says Van Tran, an attorney in Little Saigon.
“People are working 12 to 16 hours a day just to eke out a living,” Tran said. More recently, he added, “there’s also some hemorrhaging in terms of people going back to Vietnam and attempting to invest and start businesses.”
The restored trade relations between the United States and Vietnam have spurred many entrepreneurs to venture back to their former homeland. But members of the Vietnamese Entrepreneurs Assn. in Orange County, who organized the expo, say there are too many legal and political hurdles for business success. Expo organizers are encouraging Little Saigon merchants not to look abroad but at the mainstream U.S. marketplace.
Among the expo programs are workshops to help merchants obtain Small Business Administration loans, promote their businesses on the Internet and to deal with financial stress.
Expo organizers say attendance at the program has been modest. Chuyen Nguyen, a longtime Little Saigon businessman, says the low attendance itself reflects the insularity of Vietnamese businesses.
“The format is Americanized,” Nguyen said, referring to meetings in hotel conference rooms. And many Vietnamese are too busy minding their shops to attend, he said.
Still, like many Vietnamese business owners, Nguyen said the expo is long overdue. “It’s encouraging,” he said. “They are trying their best to expose Vietnamese businesses to the American mainstream.”
