Big Trouble in Little Saigon

Next to the small Buddhist shrine inside the front door of David Du Tran’s Little Saigon Supermarket is a glass display case filled with cell phones and pagers, symbols of the forces that tug at this family business.

Just steps away, out along Westminster’s Bolsa Avenue, a small band of protesters gathered recently, bearing placards that focused sharply on another challenge to multimillionaire Tran: still-simmering political tensions left over from the Vietnam War.

Tran’s story is classically Vietnamese.

He had a family of eight and $200 when he arrived in San Diego 20 years ago. He had fled Saigon, where the Communist government had taken over his thriving bicycle factory.

He has since built a small business empire in Orange and Los Angeles counties that includes three grocery stores, a wholesale food business, two restaurants, two fast-food outlets and a company that imports cooking oil and rice.

“It’s an amazing success story,” said Orange County Supervisor Charles V. Smith, who was Westminster’s mayor in 1990 when Tran opened his first store there, Little Saigon Supermarket.

Now, along with fellow shopkeepers in Little Saigon and other ethnic markets that have sprung up like mushrooms, Tran faces stiff competition--even though booming immigrant communities elsewhere in Southern California are providing fertile markets for independent grocers.

“The pie is getting smaller and smaller,” says Tran’s eldest son, Robert.

Merchants, caught between two cultures, are struggling to keep longtime customers while wooing a new generation.

“This new generation of Vietnamese don’t go to Little Saigon. They go to Nordstrom and eat at McDonald’s,” Smith says. Merchants “open up, do business for a while and then they go belly-up and shut the doors. You’re seeing more and more of that.”

Reaching out to customers in two worlds, Little Saigon Supermarket sells 27 kinds of fish sauce and 24 types of egg noodles, along with Skippy peanut butter, Froot Loops and Lucky Charms.

Bobby Tran, youngest of the sons, sells pagers and cell phones next to the “entrance God” shrine in the supermarket. Robert, who used to spend 60 hours a week helping his father, has launched his own Internet company. Now he devotes only a couple of hours a day to the grocery business.

With his family and community shifting around him, David Tran keeps working--14 hours a day, seven days a week. He does not want to lose ground. It was a long and perilous journey from Saigon to Little Saigon.

Tran was born in 1941 in Van Co, a village in South Vietnam. His family lived in a thatch-roofed hut with thin bamboo walls.

Their travails are revealed in Tran’s self-published autobiography, “Chapters of My Life: An Amazing Story of a Vietnamese Who Has Become a Millionaire From His Empty Hands!”

Tran helped support his family in the early years in Vietnam by selling cigarettes from a cardboard roadside stand. Plagued by poverty and political upheaval, the family struggled with loss and uncertainty.

By the time Tran was in his 20s, he had sold a variety of wares, from water buffalo to Singer sewing machines. He operated bars and stores. He even tried his hand at banking.

Repeatedly, success seemed within reach, then evaporated in that climate of political uncertainty. Through it all, Tran was the pragmatist.

“What was important to me,” he wrote, “was how political events would affect my business.”

At one point, Tran launched a bicycle factory that grew to employ 700 people.

“Luck also blessed me,” he wrote. “The two huge gasoline storage tanks in Nha Be were burned down, causing a tremendous shortage of gas. Many people immediately turned to bicycling.”

But Tran’s luck ran out in 1975 when the Communists rumbled into Saigon. Pressured by the government the following year, he signed over his business. He continued to work at what had been his own factory for about $1.50 a day.

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Then freedom became his goal.

First Tran sent sons Robert, then 10, and Hung, 8, in a fishing boat with relatives trying to flee the country. Robert, now 30, remembers being shot at and how the boat began to sink. It was towed back to shore and the young brothers were jailed.

Following their release, Tran shipped his sons off again. This time their boat made it safely to Malaysia. Then Tran and the rest of the family made their escape. They were reunited in July 1979 in San Diego.

Tran took college classes and was jubilant when he landed a job as a television repairman at $6.25 an hour. But before long the shop closed down, convincing him that “self-employment was the key to success.”

Working 18-hour days, he rose at 2 a.m. to buy fruit and vegetables from farmers, peddling them from the back of his station wagon in a daily trek that stretched from Escondido to Los Angeles. To keep from nodding off, Tran would slip his hand into an ice chest he kept at his side.

Those are not bleak memories, however. “It made me happy to do business again . . . in the land of freedom and opportunity,” he recalled.

Other immigrant families were swarming to Westminster, creating what would eventually become the world’s largest overseas Vietnamese community. Tran moved his family there and in 1982 started his wholesale firm, Delta Food Co.

Once the wholesale business was established, he leased a store on Bolsa Avenue and dubbed it the Little Saigon Supermarket after the vibrant community that surrounded it. He borrowed $45,000 from friends and family to pay the first and last month’s rent.

The store soon became a gathering spot for immigrants.

“It was really the first big, modern Vietnamese supermarket in Little Saigon,” recalled Supervisor Smith, who spoke at the ribbon-cutting.

So popular was the store--and so scarce the parking--that customers would sometimes wait 40 minutes for a space.

Building on that success, Tran opened a second grocery store in Garden Grove in 1994. He named it Vanco Foods, after the village where he was born. Last year, he opened another Vanco Foods outlet in Fountain Valley. The stores are all within a 3-mile radius of each other.

Tran’s holdings also include Vanco Inc., the Westminster import company; Thuy’s Bakery and Thuy’s Food to Go in Garden Grove; and AA Buffet in Buena Park. He also owns an ethnic restaurant in Alhambra, Noodle 2000.

In Westminster, where it all began, grocery stores are springing up everywhere, even though immigration from Asia has slowed.

Competitor Tawa Supermarket Inc., which operates 13 of its 99 Ranch Markets, counts Little Saigon as its toughest market.

Tawa’s Bolsa Avenue store once did more business than any of its other outlets, said Hanson Fan, chief operating officer of the Buena Park-based chain. But for the last two years, sales have been flat. And Tawa, like Tran, has been forced to accept a lower profit margin.

And lately, competition is just one of the troubles dogging David Tran.

In a particularly bitter twist, his Little Saigon Supermarket recently became the target of a small group of protesters who picketed the store after Tran was quoted in a newspaper as saying that trade with Vietnam could result in lower prices for his customers.

The protesters, hard-line anti-Communists, balk at any hint of softer relations between the United States and Vietnam. Protest leader Ky Ngo said that Tran’s status as a successful businessman requires that he “reflect the overwhelming view of the Vietnamese refugee community.”

The picketing, which has dwindled of late, has saddened Tran, son Robert says, adding that his father’s interest is in business, not politics.

In a recent interview at Little Saigon Supermarket, David Tran acknowledged that the stiffening competition worries him, but he said he thinks his grocery stores will survive. Still, Tran knows his future is tied to fate, the cold realities of business and the fresh dreams of his children.

“They like communications,” he acknowledged. “They like the Internet.”

If his children decide not to continue in the family business, Tran plans to sell it. But he says he will not stop working.

“In my life,” he said, “I cannot sit down.”