Little Saigon Shows Its Own Christmas Spirit

In Orange County’s Little Saigon, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

The hub of Southern California’s Vietnamese emigre community, home to many raised in Buddhist traditions of the East, is increasingly embracing America’s Christmas celebration--in its own way, community members say.

“There are so many Christmas decorations everywhere in the community . . . like I have not seen before,” said Westminster City Councilman Tony Lam, who came to the United States from Vietnam in the mid-1970s.

Christian or not, “People are making money, and they want to celebrate too, with their families and with food,” Lam said. “Just because 1/8my family is 3/8 not Christian, that doesn’t make Christmas less meaningful. For Asians, festival time is important. There are messages there that are universal, and we just want to share the feelings of togetherness too.”

In the cafes of Bolsa Avenue, where old men pass afternoons with chess and coffee sweetened with condensed milk, there are more decorations and more karaoke machines equipped with “Jingle Bells” tracks than ever. Mini-mall shops that sport Asian decor around the time of the lunar new year in February now are festooned with Christmas trees and wreaths and paper cutouts of Santa Claus.

Why? Many community members say immigrants and their children are more boldly binding together traditional beliefs with Western ideas. The decorations are a powerful visual indicator of how fast assimilation is happening, particularly during the final Christmas season before 2000.

Orange County is the center of Southern California’s Vietnamese community, a population for which estimates range as high as 300,000, the largest outside Vietnam. While many Vietnamese Americans are Christian, having been raised in families shaped by the French colonial tradition, even Buddhists are taking to Christmas as a way to mark their simultaneous participation in two cultures.

That’s an experience familiar to Westminster resident Janette Ong. The 24-year-old marriage counselor-in-training said life with her parents, who came to the United States in the early 1980s, always has been a complex mix of East and West.

Her parents are East. She is West, with a splash of East. She is a Christian, but the lunar new year means just as much to her as Christmas. Sometimes she receives “red packets” of money for Christmas, even though the red packets are a traditional gift associated with the Lunar New Year.

“We will celebrate Christmas this year, with the tree and the decorations, but we will only eat Asian food,” she said. Like many younger Vietnamese Americans who aren’t as tied to Asian culture as their parents, “We want to be able to do what our neighbors are doing,” she said.

“This is home to younger people now,” Ong said. “I don’t know of any other home. We want to fit in.”

The tug is a common one felt by second-generation immigrants, said David Gibbons, 37, the Korean American pastor of Newsong Community Church. His congregation of nearly 800, which gathers at the Elks Lodge in Santa Ana, is largely composed of young, single Asian Americans.

Gibbons said the reasons more Asians are embracing Christmas also can be traced to more complex issues of identity and race and youth. To be Asian and to be Asian-American are wholly different experiences, he said.

“Recent immigrants are just trying to make it, and they look for safety in their old traditions and their culture,” said Gibbons. But their children “don’t have to find safety in the old generation’s culture, and so they find those things in Christianity and . . . Christmas.”

Tustin resident Pascal Tran, 28, who attends Gibbon’s services, says he feels no tie to the old-school culture of his parents. The engineer and his wife, Agnes, 26, are Christian and see Christmas as the year’s major holiday.

“Sometimes my parents try to prevent us from assimilating, but I’m not weighed down by that,” Tran said.

He hasn’t given much thought to the lunar new year coming in a few months. For now, the Trans are planning on their first Christmas with their 3-month-old baby and have several wreaths hung in their home along with Christmas candles. They also have two Christmas trees.

“I do get some things from my parents’ traditional beliefs. I believe in hard work,” he said. “But the younger people . . . like me . . . are getting old enough to say that 1/8the United States 3/8 is my home, this is Christmas.”