25 Years After the Fall of Saigon, a Vietnamese Enclave Thrives

At dusk, as the sun drops low over a commercial salt flat three hours northeast of Ho Chi Minh City, Pham Phuoc carries one of the last loads of the day to a drying hut. Half a world away, Little Saigon sleeps in predawn darkness, the bustle of the day still hours away.

There is a vast distance, both in time and space, between the two places. But not between the people. Culture binds them, as does family. And the legacy of war.

From an American perspective, the fall of Saigon 25 years ago marked the end of fighting. From the Vietnamese perspective, it was just another transition, one that brought peace but also oppression.

And it marked the beginning of an exodus, as more than a million people fled their homeland. More than 200,000 eventually settled in Southern California, according to some estimates, about half in Orange County.

The 25-year-long influx has permanently altered the social fabric here. Middle-class Vietnamese have taken their places among the county’s established professional and entrepreneurial classes. Working-class Vietnamese staff assembly lines at local high-tech factories. Their children have brought new energy and diversity to local schools.

And Orange County’s Little Saigon enclave, home to more than 2,000 small businesses, has become the heart of the world’s largest community of Vietnamese outside Vietnam.

“The Vietnamese certainly have taken Little Saigon as their focus point,” said Frank Jao, a Vietnamese immigrant who developed much of Little Saigon. “Culturally, that is the point where everybody goes together and grows together, and shares their interests in life.”

While the changes brought by the Vietnamese emigres have been disquieting for some old-time Westminster and Garden Grove residents, others have embraced their new neighbors.

“It’s very challenging to integrate all of these cultures and languages,” said Huldah Hunter, the 100-year-old widow of a Presbyterian minister who has witnessed the growth of Little Saigon from her home in the Mission Del Amo Mobile Home Estates just east of the Asian Garden Mall.

“Through the senior center I have seen them not only strive to integrate but also to share their own culture,” Hunter said. “It’s a two-way street. You have to encourage and be encouraged. But when you’re part of the change, it happens so gradually you sometimes aren’t aware of it.”

State and federal statistics show that about one of every four Vietnamese immigrants to California since the fall of Saigon in 1975 has headed for Orange County--the majority destined for Westminster, Garden Grove and Santa Ana.

The influx has had a marked effect on everything from businesses to schools to local government. The Orange County registrar of voters’ office, for example, today hands out registration forms in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Yet the political effect has been muted, other than providing early core support for former U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), who shared many of the immigrants’ visceral hatred for all things Communist.

“They’re not as strong politically as you would have expected them to get over the years,” said Chuck Smith, chairman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors. Smith, a former Westminster mayor and city councilman, said relatively few Vietnamese are registered to vote, compared with the overall population. “The bottom line is they don’t vote.”

The disconnect is a product of past experience.

“It’s a basic mistrust of the political system,” Smith said. “They come from a country where politicians are considered corrupt, and there’s always a power struggle. They don’t have the faith that people raised here have in the American political system. ... There have been very, very few Vietnamese candidates.”

Westminster City Councilman Tony Lam, the nation’s first Vietnamese elected official, said voter registration is low in the community in part because a relatively high number of Vietnamese have not obtained citizenship. Though Vietnamese have become more politically active in recent years, he believes it will take the next generation to get the community fully engaged.

“It takes time to really educate them to get involved and do something good for the community,” he said.

In local schools, the effect has been more pronounced. Asian enrollment rose to 31% in the Westminster School District last year, with Garden Grove Unified not far behind at 28%, according to state enrollment figures.

As for other immigrant populations, learning English is the key to success, said John F. Dean, Orange County superintendent of schools.

“Adolescents had a much more difficult time learning the language [quickly and] adequately enough to be able to read a chemistry text, or a history text,” he said. “That was the biggest challenge: helping them before they got discouraged and dropped out of school.”

Vietnamese students also have flocked to local community colleges. Within the Coast Community College District, enrollment of Vietnamese students has nearly tripled since 1990 to 16% this year, said Jorge Sanchez, the district’s director of institutional research.

And the Vietnamese students tend to differ from others at the district’s Coastline, Golden West and Orange Coast colleges in that they approach their educations as a way of life, rather than as part of their lives.

In general, “students have a tendency to come and get what they need and leave,” Sanchez said. “The Vietnamese socialize on the campus, work on the campus and study on the campus. The two-year college environment almost becomes synonymous with a four-year college.”

Part of the education equation at all levels, Dean said, is strong parental involvement and support among Vietnamese families.

“The families are very enthusiastic about education for their kids,” Dean said. “They’re very supportive of education because they know that’s the key to the future.”

Little Saigon Comes to Life

The first steps to that future, for many, take place in Little Saigon.

The Vietnamese business center along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster is surrounded by predominately Vietnamese neighborhoods that stretch across the municipal boundaries of Garden Grove and Santa Ana.

It wasn’t like that when Danh Quach first laid eyes on Bolsa Avenue in the late 1970s. Then, there were auto yards and small farms, open lots yet to be developed, and a few Vietnamese families. Quach saw potential in the openness, and established the first Vietnamese-owned pharmacy in Westminster.

“I looked at the area,” Quach recalled, “and I saw a lot of empty space.”

The early nucleus quickly drew other Vietnamese families looking for work and affordable living.

The first Vietnamese refu-gees to arrive in California came through Camp Pendleton in northern San Diego County. Military veterans retired in Orange County sponsored many refugees, who settled into low-rent homes in Westminster and Garden Grove and began filling menial, low-wage jobs, according to a master’s thesis on Vietnamese immigration patterns in Orange County by Steven R. DeWilde, now a Los Angeles city planner.

As Little Saigon has matured, the profile of new immigrants has changed as well. The first wave of immigrants after the fall of Saigon in 1975 came from South Vietnam’s privileged and military ranks, but the new arrivals are from the lower socioeconomic rungs. From 1986 through 1996, nearly two-thirds of Vietnamese immigrants to Orange County were students, unemployed or retired. Laborers and manufacturing workers made up the largest single employment category, accounting for about 10% of immigrants.

And they’re still coming. While the flow of Vietnamese immigrants has slowed in recent years, 44,314 legal immigrants from Vietnam arrived in Orange County from 1990 to 1996--nearly double the number from Mexico, the second-ranking source of legal immigration. No one knows for sure how many Vietnamese move into the area after settling elsewhere in the nation, adding to the last official count of 71,000 Vietnamese in Orange County from the 1990 U.S. Census.

To outsiders, Little Saigon can seem insular, an ethnic enclave like Chinatown in San Francisco or Little Italy in New York, but defined by strip malls instead of older urban architecture.

Yet DeWilde said the Vietnamese immigrants are following a traditional path for new immigrants to the United States. The pattern begins with a core neighborhood in which businesses become surrounded by homes occupied by new immigrants. As the community matures, and the immigrants and their children prosper, they move out into the general community.

A Times anal-ysis of real estate and population data for Orange County shows that Vietnamese have followed that same pattern, expanding out during the last 25 years from the core neighborhood in Westminster to more far-flung regions, while retaining close cultural and economic ties to Little Saigon.

Last year, Vietnamese bought more houses in Westminster, Fountain Valley and Garden Grove than they did a decade earlier--but they also bought more homes in Irvine, Anaheim, Tustin and Placentia.

Jerry Kelly, owner of Century 21 Casa Linda Realty in Westminster, said about 75% of his buyers are Vietnamese. Many are moving out of houses they bought a decade ago and into larger homes in the area, while keeping their first houses as rental properties.

As the community matures, consternation has grown among some Vietnamese leaders over how to keep Little Saigon vibrant in the face of increasing Americanization of Vietnamese youth. Some hope to convert Little Saigon into a regional tourist draw.

But for now, it remains a cultural and social hub for people trying to mesh with a new society without abandoning the old.

New Neighbors, New Cultures

At the eastern edge of Little Saigon, Marion Falke trims an apple tree behind the trailer she and her husband moved into when they came West from Chicago a few months before the fall of Saigon.

Falke, like her neighbor Hunter, is among the few non-Vietnamese residents of the Mission Del Amo trailer park, which 25 years ago was filled mainly with white adults. Where Hunter embraces the changes in the neighborhood, Falke these days feels like a stranger on her own street, unable to understand the voices flowing from other double-wide trailers.

Falke counts the changes in her neighborhood in ways big and small. The trailer park used to hold a Sunday breakfast in the clubhouse but as more Vietnamese moved in the breakfasts fizzled out.

“The Vietnamese wouldn’t come to the breakfast because they wouldn’t eat that kind of food,” she said. “When we have meetings someone has to translate for them. They don’t abide by the rules of the park. They speed through here like maniacs and leave their cars all over the place.”

Falke has contemplated moving out, but time has worked against her.

“When you hit 80, it’s a hard job to move,” Falke said. “I still might move if I get mad enough.”

Nearby, Virginia Dowling is more sanguine about the changes. She and her husband moved into Del Amo just two years after the park opened in 1969. At the time, the Vietnam War was still raging, a chicken farm stood across Bolsa Avenue and the trailer park was limited to adults.

The sprawl of Little Saigon long ago consumed the chicken farm, and when rentals fell off, the trailer park’s owners opened it to families. Now some of the trailers are home to Vietnamese children but they have no place to play, which Dowling sees as a bigger cause for concern than their ethnicity.

Her longtime neighbors tend to forget other changes in the park, she says, such as the low occupancy rates of a few years back. The influx of Vietnamese families breathed new life into the neighborhood.

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Times staff writer Ray F. Herndon contributed to this story.

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Vietnamese Home Buyers: Putting Down Roots

Nearly 1 in 20 home buyers in Orange County is Vietnamese. The percentage of buyers who are Vietnamese outpaces the percentage of Vietnamese in the overall population--about 3%.