Little Saigon
Alternate names include Little Vietnam and Little Hanoi (mainly in historically communist nations), depending on the enclave's political history.An intercity bus service named Xe Đò Hoàng connects the Little Saigon in Orange county to the one in San Jose and various other cities in California and Arizona with high concentration of Vietnamese Americans.Since 1978, the nucleus of Little Saigon has long been Bolsa Avenue, where early pioneers Danh Quach and Frank Jao established businesses.The Vietnamese community and businesses later spread into adjacent Garden Grove, Midway City, Fountain Valley, Stanton, Anaheim, and Santa Ana.In Orange County, Little Saigon is now a wide, spread-out community dotted with myriad suburban-style strip malls containing a mixture of Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese businesses.[5] Garden Grove Park is the location of an annual Vietnamese Lunar New Year festival held in late January - early February known as Tết.Over the years, the vibrant community of Little Saigon has experienced frequent openings and closures of small mom-and-pop Vietnamese businesses, resulting in sights of some abandoned strip plazas.[7][8][9] Due to the large influx and presence of relatively poor ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam in the 1980s (which also coincided with the arrival of immigrant elites from Taiwan and Hong Kong), the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles has another important concentration of Vietnamese in Southern California.While not generally referred to as "Little Saigon", the stretch of Garvey Avenue in the working-class barrios of Rosemead, South El Monte, and El Monte have a relatively heavy but scattered collection of businesses owned mainly by majority ethnic Chinese Vietnamese with a growing number of ethnic Vietnamese residents and business owners as well.One particular shopping center in Rosemead, called Diamond Square, is anchored by the Taiwanese American chain 99 Ranch Market (now closed) and contains various Chinese Vietnamese small businesses and a food court catering to local Asians.The epicenter of the Vietnamese-American community of San Jose, however, is on Story Road (stretching from Senter Road to McLaughlin Avenue), home to the popular Grand Century Mall and Vietnam Town (both shopping malls are owned by Chinese-Vietnamese real estate developer Lap Tang) and is officially designated by the San Jose City Council as "Little Saigon".The strip of Stockton Boulevard has a great number of Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants and many places for ethnic foods, such as phở and boba.[16] Vietnamese businesses are concentrated along International Boulevard and East 12th Street in the district, and include Oakland's Sun Hop Fat market, a fruit and grocery store that was one of the first.[17] In the summer of 2021, the Oakland Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, along with Good Good Eatz (a program funded by the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation to promote ethnic food districts[20]) and Pokémon Go developer Niantic organized a "Summer Fest" centered on Pokémon Go events and local food, along with retro video games made available by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment and COVID-19 testing and vaccinations.Notable pro-democracy activists, such as Thuong Nguyen Foshee, who was just recently released from prison in Vietnam, call Orlando their home.Annual events, such as the numerous Tet New Year Celebrations at the Central Florida Fairgrounds and across the city, help spread Vietnamese culture and promote diversity throughout Orlando.In 2008, Anh "Joseph" Cao made history after being elected to Congress as a Republican from Louisiana's heavily Democratic 2nd congressional district, which includes most of New Orleans.Communities there are served by a number of Viet-organized social service agencies (such as The Southeast Asian Coalition in Worcester Viet-AID, the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development) and some religious and publicly funded organizations.Albuquerque, New Mexico has a small "Little Saigon" community with various Vietnamese restaurants and businesses on and around Central Avenue in the city's International District.[27] In Charlotte, Central Avenue (near Briar Creek Road) is the original "Chinatown" consisting of "Saigon Square" and a pair of other Chinese/Vietnamese shopping plazas that include "Dim Sum Restaurant" (which serves New York-style dim sum), the "Eang Hong Supermarket", "Van Loi" (which serves cha shao), and a dozen or so other stores.There are also numerous hopping nightclubs, karaoke, and video bars joining the growing list of Chinese, Thai, Filipino, and Korean residents and establishments that make up the remainder of surrounding Asian District.The district is very popular with local residents and students from nearby Oklahoma City University, providing a colorful and authentic taste of the Far East in the heartland of America.Oklahoma City's original Little Saigon neighborhood was featured in the New York Times as well as National Geographic's March 2003 issue's ZipUSA series titled "73106: Lemongrass on the Prairie".[33] The largest Vietnamese commercial district is now found in Houston (Alief), a strip along Bellaire Boulevard west of Chinatown, Houston, with most Vietnamese-owned businesses and restaurants centered at the Hong Kong City Mall on Bellaire and Boone (anchored by Hong Kong Food Market and Ocean Palace Restaurant).Business was attractive to Vietnamese immigrants in this neighborhood due to the depressed rents during the time of construction of the WMATA Clarendon metro station.[35] The Washington, D.C., suburb of Seven Corners in Fairfax County, Virginia, is now home to the largest Vietnamese American population and cultural center on the eastern seaboard.While there is no full-fledged "Little Saigon" to speak of, the most prominent hub for local-area Vietnamese is the shopping mall called the Eden Center, complete with a garden and an arch signifying its entrance.In Greater Richmond, the concentration of Vietnamese restaurants and shops near the intersection of Horsepen Road and West Broad Street is sometimes referred to as Little Saigon.The location has long been in neglect; 120 families still live in shacks, many of whom are third and fourth generations of people affected by World War II.The Dong Xuan Center in Lichtenberg is the largest Vietnamese market in Germany which offers many things from Vietnam including restaurants, shops, cafes and bars.
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