From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Little Saigon is a large Vietnamese American community in Westminster and Garden Grove, California where they constitute 30.7% and 21.4% of the population, respectively. In many cases, the population also consists of people of Chinese Vietnamese stock (meaning the descendants of Chinese settlers from the Guangdong province of China who settled in Vietnam several centuries ago). It was settled in the late 1970s after the Vietnamese began arriving and establishing small businesses in the United States. It was then developed during much of the 1980s and 1990s. A major Little Saigon can also be found in Houston.
In California, Little Saigon is a wide, spread-out community dotted with a myriad of strip malls containing a mixture of Vietnamese and Chinese businesses. It is located west of Disneyland between the California State Highway 22 and Interstate 405. However, the main center of Little Saigon is Bolsa Avenue, which runs through Westminster. It is lined with numerous huge shopping centers and strip malls. As with many other Vietnamese American communities, competing restaurants that serve Vietnamese cuisine (especially Phở beef noodles) are abundant. Restaurants serving Chinese cuisine such as Trieu Chau and Cantonese are also available but in smaller numbers.
The major Chinese American supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market had its first start in Little Saigon. However, the flagship store has since closed and replaced by another supermarket.
Little Saigon is a vehemently anti-communist community. During the Têt New Year of 1999, a Vietnamese American video store owner named Truong Van Tran caused quite a stir when he displayed in his store a a portrait of Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. This stirred anger and passions in the local Vietnamese American community, many of whom were war veterans (of the US-backed South Vietnamese military), refugees and immigrants from the former South Vietnam - a curious irony since Tran himself was among the refugees who fled the country. Others that participated were second and third-generation Vietnamese Americans of the aforementioned groups. Mass vigils and demonstrations (sometimes peaceful and sometimes coming close to a riot) in front of the store ensued. In the coup de grâce, the owner was then arrested by Westminster city police on the charge of illegally renting pirated videos. Since the incident, the video store has since disappeared. The event also raised some controversial issues about constitutional free speech in the United States.
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