One Man’s Vision for Little Saigon
Along a two-mile stretch in Westminster, on what was once a decaying strip of auto-wrecking and salvage yards, some 2,000 businesses cater to the largest Vietnamese exile community in the world.
About half of them pay their rent to one man: Frank Jao.
Short, erudite and with an eagle’s eyes and claws for business, Jao, 48, is the principal developer behind Orange County’s Little Saigon. Using his Chinese Vietnamese heritage, Jao (pronounced JOW) has drawn investments from wealthy Asians overseas to help him build hundreds of millions of dollars worth of properties along Bolsa Avenue and adjoining streets. Merchants here call him chow fou, which means “godfather” in Chinese.
Now, facing stagnant retail sales and changing demographics, Jao is trying to push Little Saigon into the next stage of development: from an insular ethnic enclave to a mainstream tourist mecca.
Although some are intent on preserving Little Saigon as is, Jao wants to provide a wider array of foods, attract a few magnet retailers like Barnes & Noble Booksellers and turn the Bolsa corridor of strip malls with jutting Vietnamese signs into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard with a unique cultural ambience. And then market all of this to Southern California and beyond.
“I do see a lot of potential for Little Saigon,” Jao says, speaking in a drawl that reflects his deliberate style. A former vacuum cleaner salesman, he heads Bridgecreek Development Co., an 18-employee firm he founded in 1978, when the first few Vietnamese businesses emerged in Westminster.
Other Asian business districts, including Koreatown and Chinatown in Los Angeles, also are seeking a much-needed infusion from outsiders. They are putting up banners around the community, adding signs in English and advertising more--all in the hope of raising awareness and being more accessible to non-Asians.
Little Saigon’s advantage is that it is located in a quiet bedroom community and has easier parking access, whose shortage is a perennial complaint about Chinatown. But Vietnamese food isn’t as widely known or accepted as Chinese and Japanese cuisine. Little Saigon also has a glut of shops that sell goods and services with less appeal to those outside its community, such as beauty salons, ethnic music stores, acupuncture offices and cafes.
Jao and others say merchants in Little Saigon depend almost entirely on compatriots, drawing mainly on the more than 70,000 Vietnamese who live in and around Westminster--a town that has been partly reshaped into an American version of Saigon. On sunny mornings, elderly Vietnamese women wearing cone-shaped straw hats can be seen walking to drugstores that sell starfish flakes. Lunchtime crowds fill dozens of restaurants that serve pho--traditional Vietnamese noodles. And at night, young men gather inside dimly lighted cafes, listening to booming Vietnamese pop music, sipping sweet coffee and taking long drags on cigarettes.
But there are troubling signs of change as well. The district’s core consumers are aging, moving out of the area and increasingly being lured to non-Vietnamese shopping venues. The influx of Southeast Asian refugees, which peaked in the early 1980s, has slowed dramatically in recent years. What’s more, a good chunk of the existing customers of Little Saigon are on government support, which faces cuts in Congress.
Seeing all this, Jao worries that Little Saigon--and his hard work--could shrivel, as have many Chinatowns in California and elsewhere. The solution, he says, is to pull tourists from all over the region while developing Little Saigon into a kind of “gateway” to Vietnam. That way, local merchants can cash in as the nascent U.S. trade relationship with Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries develops.
“For those who have the vision,” he says, “it is an opportunity that could be very profitable.”
Opposition on Various Fronts
But not everyone shares Jao’s vision.
He has encountered fierce opposition from some Vietnamese expatriates who accuse him of trying to turn Little Saigon into a Pan-Asian district, or worse, another Chinatown. Jao also can’t expect much help from the Westminster government, which over the years has shown little inclination to support Little Saigon.
Early on in the area’s development, some residents of Westminster sought to limit the growth of Vietnamese businesses. The effort was defeated, but people in Little Saigon say it discouraged the government from taking a more active role in the district.
Westminster officials say it is not the government’s job to promote or develop Little Saigon, even though the city of Los Angeles, for example, is investing $100,000 to help Koreatown merchants with marketing.
“Little Saigon needs to come together and develop a strong business association and market itself,” says Don Anderson, Westminster’s community development director.
Consensus, however, has never been easy to build in the divided Vietnamese community. Little Saigon is also fragmented geographically. Shops and restaurants are spread out along Bolsa and surrounding streets; there is no heart to the district, as there is in Chinatown and Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.
“The challenge for Little Saigon is to identify the core territory,” says David Wilcox, a senior vice president at Economics Research Associates in Los Angeles, who has studied ethnic business districts.
Jao sought to do precisely that by proposing a $2.4-million, 500-foot pedestrian bridge over Bolsa that would serve as a kind of Little Saigon landmark. But earlier this year, he shelved the plan after repeated community protests that the structure’s roof-line design was too Chinese. Although Jao insists that the bridge project was killed by a small group of extremists, the incident reflected the community’s deep-seated ethnic and political divisions--and Jao’s own uneasy position as the most influential figure in Little Saigon, who also happens to be ethnic Chinese.
Ethnic Chinese who once lived in Vietnam make up a small share of the residents of the Little Saigon area, but they operate about half of the shops. Like Jao, many come from strong entrepreneurial backgrounds and are generally more comfortable with the U.S. restoration of trade and relations with Vietnam than other Vietnamese, some of whom refuse to have anything to do with their Communist homeland.
“There is an entrepreneurial split between the Vietnamese and the ethnic Chinese,” says Steven Gold, a former Whittier College sociology professor who has written extensively on Vietnamese refugee issues. Gold, who teaches at Michigan State University, remembers interviewing one Little Saigon merchant who derisively called the area Cho lon, the name of Saigon’s Chinese business community.
Certainly, Jao has made the most of his Chinese roots and fluency in English, Vietnamese and several dialects of Chinese. The seventh of 11 children, he was born and grew up in Haiphong, a harbor city north of Hanoi in North Vietnam. His entrepreneurial verve emerged early. By 14, he had four workers distributing newspapers for him, his income matching that of his father’s government clerk’s salary.
After high school, Jao moved to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), where he attended night college and worked as an interpreter for the U.S. government, then later at Xerox. His contacts helped him and his wife, Cathie, catch one of the last airlifts out of Saigon just before it fell to the Communists in April 1975.
The Jaos arrived in Camp Pendleton with $50 between them. But within a few days they were living in an apartment in Garden Grove, and Frank Jao was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners. It took two weeks to make his first sale, but during his door-to-door trudges around Orange County, Jao saw his future career. Land along run-down Bolsa Avenue was plentiful and cheap, and Jao figured that thousands of Vietnamese would settle around Westminster because of the proximity to Camp Pendleton and the climate of Southern California, fueling demand for goods and services then only available 30 miles away in Chinatown.
“His plan was wise,” says Danh Nhut Quach, a pharmacist who opened Little Saigon’s first business in November 1978 and has been a partner with Jao on several projects. Quach and Jao were among the first wave of immigrants in 1975, many of them college graduates and high-ranking military officials. When the so-called boat people, many of them poor fishers and farmers, streamed into California in the late 1970s, Quach remembers that Jao leaped at the opportunity.
With financing from a Chinese investor living in Indonesia, Jao bought a 21,000-square-foot retail center on Bolsa in 1979, a project abandoned midstream by bankrupt developers, which he turned into an overwhelming success. Jao and his firm have since built nearly two dozen shopping centers, including the Asian Garden Mall, a 180,000-square-foot complex--the largest shopping facility in Little Saigon.
Although ownership of Jao’s developments is spread through a complex network of partners that includes people like Roger Chen, the owner of the successful Ranch 99 chain of Asian supermarkets, Jao’s firm manages or controls roughly half of the retail and office space in Little Saigon.
“Jao had a magic hand. Anything he touched seemed to be successful,” says Yen Do, publisher of Westminster-based Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese newspaper outside of Vietnam.
‘More and More Economic Anxiety’
But Do and others wonder whether Jao still has that touch. Besides the failure to muster support for the pedestrian bridge, Jao’s latest development--a $4-million shopping center and cultural court--has been slow to fill up with tenants and consumers.
In a black Mercedes, Jao cruises by the court, pointing to the 124 marble and concrete statues and hundreds of feet of bas-reliefs depicting Chinese and Vietnamese fairies, gods, philosophers, poets and warriors--artwork handpicked by Jao during visits to China and Vietnam. At the end of the runway-long parking lot, a pair of 30-foot laughing Buddha statues guard the two-story New Saigon Mall, where there is a fun center and eateries that serve hamburgers as well as Vietnamese noodles.
Jao says the mall and outdoor museum, which opened in January, are just the kinds of things that will attract tourists and second-generation Vietnamese Americans. But so far, 35% of the mall remains unoccupied, and 14 of the 19 outdoor kiosks that stretch along the parking lot and the court have yet to be leased. To boost traffic, Jao has held raffles, an Asian baby contest and other events.
Observers say the new mall’s tepid start reflects a saturation of businesses in Little Saigon, or worse, a slowdown in the enclave’s economy. The latest tax data don’t indicate an overall decline of sales in the area, but many merchants are struggling because of the glut of competing businesses that has led to sharp price cuts. Some merchants reported a 30% drop in sales during February’s Tet Festival, the big celebration of the Lunar New Year that is seen as a barometer of the district’s commercial activity. Moreover, records show that business bankruptcies have edged upward in the last couple of years.
“There is more and more economic anxiety here,” says Do, the publisher.
He and others say Jao’s new development also may be feeling the pinch from community residents upset with the Chinese artwork in the mall’s court. “It is a kind of silent protest,” Do says, adding that for all of Jao’s hard work and success, he has not taken the time to sell his vision or develop consensus for projects like the pedestrian bridge. “Maybe because he was so successful, he just forgot one of the ingredients--the cooperation of people here.”
Jao concedes that he did not lobby hard enough for the bridge. But he adds, “We can only do so much as a developer.”
Meanwhile, Jao is moving ahead on his own. He is spending $30,000 to develop a brochure that he hopes to have in airports and area hotels by fall. He is talking with Starbucks and Payless Shoes about opening stores in Little Saigon. And he is trying to revive the pedestrian bridge, albeit with some changes, in the hope that the city will take a more active role.
But as a shrewd pragmatist and consummate businessman, Jao is also turning to projects elsewhere that have a clearer payoff. He is building a 1.1-million-square-foot, $300-million shopping center in a city in China bordering Hong Kong. He is pursuing ventures in Northern California’s East Bay Area where the Southeast Asian community is expanding.
Jao won’t talk about his wealth or politics, but he belongs to the exclusive Lincoln Club, the Republican powerhouse of Orange County. His wife works with him. The couple have two young daughters. They live in a comfortable but not extravagant oceanfront house in Huntington Beach, where Jao moved from Westminster several years ago to distance himself from all-consuming work.
Apart from pickup basketball on Saturday mornings, Jao has few activities outside of his business. He does not drink or smoke, and he rarely engages in the social affairs of Little Saigon. He says he would like to slow down, but he sees too many opportunities.
Perspective Differs From Critics’
He has traveled to Vietnam more than a dozen times in the last decade. A few years ago, he opened an office there and has bought construction materials and artwork from Vietnam while exporting scrap material. Despite criticism from some in the community, he makes no apologies for pursuing ventures there.
“I look at the picture a little more broadly and practically,” said Jao, whose diet of readings includes the Economist magazine and the scholarly journal Foreign Affairs. “Trade with Vietnam is going to happen no matter what. It seems to me that, globally, people are less ideological and more pragmatic and economic-oriented.”
Jao believes that in time, more merchants and residents in the community will come around to that thinking and support the growth plans he has for Little Saigon. Jao already has backing from some merchants who don’t mind the big statue of Chinese philosopher Confucius and the 72 smaller models of his students in Jao’s cultural court, especially if they will attract more visitors.
“Tourists are more willing to spend. I welcome all non-Asian comers,” said Kimberly Ho, owner of a cosmetic and skin care boutique on Bolsa.
As Ho spoke, Trish Horn was taking her first stroll through Little Saigon along with a few friends. Horn had heard about the cultural court, but it was the shopping that captivated her. “I love it,” she said, adding that she didn’t come from far away. In fact, Horn has lived within a few blocks of Little Saigon for 13 years.
“I didn’t know what was here,” she said, a bit abashedly. “You know how it is. You feel uncomfortable because you’re unfamiliar with it.”
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Little Saigon
Vietnamese expatriates, particularly Frank Jao, have been instrumental in developing the business district of Little Saigon in Orange County.
