50th Anniversary: Having lost everything, they rebuilt a Little Saigon in Orange County ...Middle East

Fifty years ago, one Saigon fell, and another arose.

It was never supposed to be that way.

On April 30, 1975, the communist North Vietnamese Army captured the democratic South Vietnamese capital. The last Americans evacuated the city, taking as many South Vietnamese allies with them as they could. The two-decades-long Vietnam War was effectively over.

“It was chaos,” said Linh Vo, reflecting on the day, now remembered as Black April by Vietnamese Americans, when her life changed forever. She was just a 13-year-old girl.

“The whole country was collapsing,” Vo recalled. “My father — he was a two-star general — came home from work and just said, ‘It’s time to go.’”

He whisked Vo, two of her siblings and her mother to a harbor where Vo remembers seeing “a lot of big boats and tons and tons of people running for them.”

Her sister was pregnant, and Vo had no idea where they were going. Some of her nine siblings, older and with families of their own, decided to stay home as their country changed hands.

That was the day the Vo family split in half.

One side remained rooted in Saigon — renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the victors of the war.

The other planted itself in Orange County — in what has since been known as Little Saigon.

“Growing up, my mom and I never talked about my family’s background in Vietnam,” said Barron Vo, Linh Vo’s 31-year-old son. “I learned more about it later on, but I didn’t know too much for a long time.”

His life has always been in Orange County. He’s never met his cousins in Vietnam, and they don’t speak the same language.

Vo never could have predicted that her family’s story would come to epitomize one of the largest diasporas of the 20th century.

Orange County, with its 215,000 Vietnamese American residents, is the largest hub of Vietnamese people anywhere in the world outside of Vietnam.

“Little Saigon in Orange County is looked at as the capital of the Vietnamese outside Vietnam,” said Frank Jao, a refugee who became the area’s preeminent real estate developer.

American officials never intended for that to happen.

“When the refugees came here after the war, the policy in the U.S. government was to disperse them across the country to have them incorporate and basically disappear into existing communities across all 50 states,” said Linda Trinh Vo (no relation), professor emeritus of Asian American studies at UC Irvine.

Instead, a large Vietnamese population gathered strength in Westminster, forever adding to the flavor of Orange County with a new Saigon of sorts — a Little Saigon.

“There is no border between the Vietnamese community and the rest of Orange County,” added Tim Nguyễn, president of the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce. “We all intermingle. It’s a fusion.”

Today, about 7% of Orange County’s population was either born in Vietnam or is of Vietnamese descent, and Vietnamese Americans live in every city of the county.

Still, Little Saigon — which now stretches from Westminster well into Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and Santa Ana — maintains a unique sense of place grounded in five decades of cultural heritage and an unmatched density of Vietnamese residents and businesses.

“I recognize that there are a lot of Vietnamese communities across the country,” Trinh Vo said. “But Little Saigon in Orange County is the largest, the most vibrant, and I think it’s also the one that’s transforming in terms of really developing into something more than just being a refugee or immigrant community.”

Congregating not dispersing

“When I arrived here in the 1980s, there used to be a Burger King and a Blockbuster in the shopping plaza across from Fountain Valley’s Westmont Park,” Nguyễn said. “It’s all been replaced by Vietnamese restaurants.”

A 2024 study from Cal State Fullerton finally defined what it means to be in Orange County’s Little Saigon, showing that at least 30% of people living in 41 contiguous census tracts in central Orange County are of Vietnamese descent. That makes it what experts consider to be an ethnic enclave.

Little Saigon businesses employ close to 50,000 workers and have an annualized payroll of more than $2 billion, according to Cal State Fullerton.

More than 700 Vietnamese businesses on a 1.25-mile stretch of Westminster’s Bolsa Avenue alone, the original commercial corridor of Little Saigon, continue to do close to $1 billion in annual sales, the city reports.

Beyond the amalgamation of Vietnamese commerce, Little Saigon is a fusion of Vietnamese and American cultures.

“We’re Americans, we grew up as Americans, but we were raised very traditionally Vietnamese,” said Sonny Nguyen, who, along with his brothers, founded 7 Leaves Cafe, a Vietnamese tea shop that began in Garden Grvoe and now has more than 50 locations nationwide, including in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta.

The cultural fusion extends far beyond the dinner table.

Garden Grove and Westminster school districts teach a Vietnamese language immersion program. Westminster and Fountain Valley have Vietnamese mayors. Thomas Thanh Thai Nguyễn is a Vietnamese-born auxiliary bishop for the Diocese of Orange. Tri Ta is a Vietnamese-born politician representing northwestern Orange County in the California State Assembly.

And, as of this year, for the first time, much of central Orange County is represented in Congress by another Vietnamese American, Derek Tran, whose parents came to the U.S. as refugees.

“I’m trying to use my soapbox that I have in Congress to communicate the historic nature of my position as the first Vietnamese American to represent Little Saigon,” Tran said. “It’s really for me about showcasing that the Vietnamese community has political power in D.C. As time passes, we’re going to be able to expand on that political power.”

Little Saigon is a community with a distinct sense of place and a strong economy.

It’s also someplace that was never meant to be, Trinh Vo said. “Little Saigon shouldn’t exist.”

“The idea was that the refugees wouldn’t congregate in one area to put a strain on social services,” she said.

In the months following the fall of Saigon, President Gerald Ford authorized the evacuation and resettlement of approximately 140,000 refugees from South Vietnam and Cambodia to the United States.

They arrived at four resettlement camps across the country: Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas and Camp Pendleton here in Southern California.

Pendleton processed the most refugees, about 50,000 of them, who flew in through the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County.

Retired Marine fighter pilot Col. Charlie Quilter, who had flown missions in Vietnam for 13 months, remembers as a new major serving at El Toro seeing the ramp in front of the old air station tower filled with 707s “disgorging hundreds of jet-lagged people.”

Once landed, they were bused to the sprawling seaside base where they lived in tents and makeshift huts.

Retired Marine Col. Alice Marshall was a captain when her commander told her that she was heading to the base to oversee the security and well-being of the refugees.

Marines had 36 hours to build them a place to stay until they could transition out into American society.

“Marines being Marines, they said, ‘Not a problem,’” Marshall recalled. “So the 1st Marine Regiment at Camp Horno became the manpower along with the combat engineers who were the ones that built the camp.”

In all, Marshall said, eight tent-camps were built where the refugees would live and wait to see who would sponsor them. Some, who had relatives, would leave right away, others stayed for months, she said.

“Some only had the clothes on their back and some didn’t even have shoes,” she recalled as the buses continued to arrive in the early days. “With the nice ‘May Gray,’ it was downright cold and they were given jackets, and we got them situated.”

Marshall said she sympathized with the refugees facing an entirely new environment and not knowing what was going on.

“Me and the others would smile and be friendly in the way when you can’t speak the language,” she said.

The Marines provided plenty to eat and medical attention, she said, introducing their visitors to the food that was what the Marines ate in their chow halls. There were also games and sports for the kids and daily English classes.

On a test flight one day that took him over the part of Camp Pendleton where the refugees were staged, Quilter said he “decided to put on a one-plane airshow by doing aerobatics.”

“My feeling at the time was: Here are a bunch of folks fleeing their homeland for an unknown shore,” he said. “We were their allies in a bitter war that did not end well for them or us. I just wanted to give them a little diversion from their worries.”

Marshall said she knows of some Vietnamese children in the camps who later became Marines, and she knows Vietnamese people now whose grandparents came through Camp Pendleton as refugees.

Among those, she counted several of her doctors who now care for her, she said. “They made something of themselves.”

The base’s refugee center finally closed after Liang Sui Lang, his wife and nine children, according to a New York Times story, boarded a van for Los Angeles, where their sponsors awaited them.

By winter, thousands of refugees had begun to make their homes across Southern California, especially in central Orange County, where jobs awaited and — it’s hard to believe these days — land was once affordable.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Orange County was home to assembly-line jobs in the computer, electronics and defense industries that required few language or technical skills. These industries were eager to hire an immigrant workforce.

Westminster, in particular, was a young, post-World War II community built around manufacturing that by the 1970s was struggling to maintain its economic engine.

“Orange County, back then, was semi-developed — not like it is today,” Jao said.

“So, Westminster just happened to become the heart of Little Saigon because there was more land availability and more affordability,” Jao said. “We knew the area would grow, but we had no idea at all that it would grow to this magnitude.”

In 1978, a few enterprising refugees, including Jao and his neighbor Danh Quach, set up shops along a downtrodden section of Bolsa Avenue dotted with salvage yards, repair shops and farmland.

Quach took out a $37,000 loan to open a pharmacy, among the first Vietnamese-owned businesses, in a strip mall across from a Japanese nursery and a strawberry field.

“At lunchtime, there was no place to eat, no restaurants,” Quach recalled in 2015.

Jao and other developers took note.

Soon, the Thành Mỹ and Hoai Huong restaurants opened nearby. So did Hương Grocery and Hoa Binh Market.

“They realized that if they congregated in one area and lived together, life was more affordable and easier,” Trinh Vo said. “They really were resisting U.S. government policy at the time to try to disperse them and spread them out to have them assimilate as quickly as possible.”

By 1987, Jao had opened the $15 million Asian Garden Mall. To this day, it’s the area’s signature landmark.

One year later, Gov. George Deukmejian visited the Asian Garden Mall to officially declare Little Saigon as a commercial center.

“That was a tremendous recognition,” Jao said. “It signified that the Vietnamese refugee community in Orange County was thriving and doing well.”

The mall’s green-tiled roof, huge windows and distinctive Vietnamese-Chinese architecture made it more than a shopping center. It was a beacon of prosperity for a group of refugees planting new roots.

Home to 300 Vietnamese storefronts selling all kinds of goods, services and social activities, the 150,000-square-foot mall drew Vietnamese shoppers from 60 miles in every direction, from South Orange County to the Inland Empire and Los Angeles, Jao said.

Defying the odds, Little Saigon had become a place of its own.

The Los Angeles Times called it “a city within a city.”

Jao’s company alone, Bridgecreek Group, has gone on to develop $400 million of shopping centers, mini malls and residential buildings that have come to help define Little Saigon.

And dozens of other developers continue to play a role in the area’s commercial growth.

Prosperity and pain

While refugee families succeeded, many continue to struggle with finances, trauma and health.

“There’s a veneer of a very successful community given where we’ve come in 50 years,” said Trinh Vo. “But, I think there’s still a process of healing that’s impacted mental health services and physical health services that our community has had to continue to advocate for.”

The median household income in Little Saigon is nearly 30% lower than what it is for all of Orange County, according to Cal State Fullerton’s 2024 study.

The typical housing unit in Little Saigon is older than in much of Orange County.

And, none of the 24 hospitals in Orange County with emergency departments are within Little Saigon’s boundary.

Other data has shown that the Vietnamese community in Orange County disproportionately struggles not only with access to routine physical and mental health care, but also with higher incidences of childhood obesity, certain types of cancer and post-traumatic stress relative to other ethnic groups. Experts lament a lack of focus in the community on prevention and mental health care.

“Fifty years on, and our trauma is still very raw,” said Paul Hoang, a licensed clinical social worker who runs a mental health care system out of Fountain Valley. “As a culture, we like to talk about our successes, but talking about mental health is still taboo. It’s still connected with shame.”

Part of what complicates the conversation around health and well-being, experts say, is the diversity within the Vietnamese community itself.

“I think there are a lot of misperceptions that the Vietnamese refugee and immigrant community is homogeneous,” Trinh Vo said. “It’s exceptionally diverse in terms of where they have come from within Vietnam, how they came to the U.S., their backgrounds, education and work experiences.”

“The first wave that came through Pendleton had found a way to escape before the fall of Saigon,” she said. “Not all of them, but many of them, had more resources. They tended to be educated and had contact with Westerners before the end of the war.”

“Later waves through the 1980s and 1990s tended to have less resources, less assistance for housing, education, job opportunities and social services,” Trinh Vo added. “There was compassion fatigue in the United States. By then, most Americans were not in favor of settling more refugees. The sentiment toward refugees was not positive.”

That’s especially important to note considering that the Vietnamese population in Orange County tripled between 1980 and 1990 and then doubled again between 1990 and 2000 as secondary waves of immigrants continued to arrive.

“My dad arrived in 1975; my mom was a boat person arriving in the 1980s,” said Christine Cordon. “We grew up on food stamps and MediCal.”

Now, Cordon is Westminster’s first Vietnamese American city manager.

“As city manager, understanding cultural sensitivities is really important, especially when the culture is so deeply rooted here,” she said.

Family dynamics have also shaped outcomes for Vietnamese Americans in Orange County, Trinh Vo said.

After the fall of Saigon, some refugee families that made their way to Orange County were fortunate to remain intact.

Many were not.

Minh Tâm Nguyễn, a commander in the South Vietnamese Navy, arrived at Camp Pendleton, having left behind his pregnant wife and 1-year-old son in Vietnam, not knowing if he’d ever see them again.

His wife, Kiên, and his son, lucky enough to flee Vietnam weeks later, ended up at Fort Chaffee.

After reuniting in California, they formed the Advance Beauty College, a cosmetology school in Garden Grove that has helped thousands of Vietnamese estheticians open nail salons across the country.

Today, more than half of all 22,000 nail salons in the U.S. are owned by Vietnamese Americans. In California, it’s more than 80%.

“My dad was a Vietnamese Navy commander,” said Tâm Nguyễn, an entrepreneur who runs the college now with his sister, Linh, and is a former president of the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce. “He was ridiculed by his friends that he would go to Hacienda La Puente Beauty College. It was very hard for him to put his machismo military status aside, but he did it for his kids and family. That’s the best motivation anyone can have.”

Although Nguyễn’s father put his Navy ego aside to find success in California, it was the English he had learned as a military officer that set his family up for prosperity.

“My dad was able to find work because he had English skills,” Nguyễn said.

Other Vietnamese families faced an even more treacherous path to reunification in Orange County.

Take the story of Long Dinh and his wife, Diep Tran.

Born into the Vietnamese bourgeois, their parents and grandparents held prominent positions in the Vietnamese government, overseeing provincial affairs in the north of the country through the first half of the 20th century.

When Ho Chi Minh took over their provinces in 1954, their families had to flee to the south along with about a million Vietnamese people escaping communism for the first time.

They lost everything as they started over in Saigon.

“If we did not flee, we would have been executed,” Dinh said.

He joined the South Vietnamese army in 1963, fighting alongside Americans to reclaim his homeland.

“Freedom or death,” he said. “Those were my options.”

By 1975, he was a spokesperson at the army headquarters.

“I knew there was no hope for winning the war,” he said. “But, I didn’t want to run away.”

Finally, he decided to leave.

On April 30, Dinh, Tran and their three young children left their home on an army base near Saigon to head to the airstrip.

As they walked, mortars destroyed the runway ahead of them and their house behind them.

“We were spared, but we were stranded,” Dinh said.

“For the second time in our lives, we lost everything,” Tran added.

When the Viet Cong reached the base, they captured Dinh with the surrendering South Vietnamese army.

He spent the next seven years in communist concentration camps.

“Life in the camps was worse than if they had executed us,” Dinh said. “Instead of dying at once, we died a little bit every day. We saw no future. We had no freedom. We were starving.”

In 1980, Tran and the three children escaped the country by boat. They headed to Singapore and then Malaysia, where they spent eight months waiting for her sister — who by then was in Orange County — to sponsor their entrance into the U.S.

“I didn’t think we’d ever see Long again,” Tran said.

Tran and her children were part of the second wave of Vietnamese refugees to come to Orange County. This wave came not in 1975, but in the years following the fall of Saigon, often experiencing higher levels of separation, loss and trauma along the way.

“Many of the refugees that came in later waves had been persecuted in communist Vietnam, sent to prison or tortured,” Trinh Vo said. “Their lives and their escapes tended to have been much more difficult.”

Linh, Tanya and Peter Dinh began to grow up in Orange County as their father languished in Vietnamese prisons.

“Peter wrote in school that the thing about life that bothered him most was that he had no father,” Tran recalled.

Dinh was released from prison in 1982. Then, he had to wait about eight more years in Vietnam until the U.S. and Vietnamese governments reached a deal in January 1990 to allow former prisoners of war to leave the country and reunite with their families in America.

“One time Peter and I had been able to speak on the phone, he had called me uncle, not father,” Dinh said. “I left him when he was so young.”

In the summer of 1990, he finally met his children at LAX.

Peter Dinh, his only boy, was 17.

When they had last seen each other, Peter Dinh was a child in his mother’s arms.

“I could not believe it,” Long Dinh said. “I was so happy. I just felt happiness.”

“Then, I remember driving home on the 405 Freeway and seeing all the headlights of the cars,” he said. “It was like the stars over the jungle of my childhood, but these stars were on the ground and not overhead.”

Today, Long, 84, and Diep, 81, live together with Peter, his wife, TrucLys, and their 4-year-old daughter, Gabrielle, in a Huntington Beach home just outside Little Saigon.

“My grandchildren are very lucky,” Dinh said. “They have the opportunity to live their lives freely, to live how they want to be. The ‘American Dream’ has been achieved.”

A time for reflection

On April 12, hundreds of community members gathered at the Museum of the Republic of Vietnam in Garden Grove for an early commemoration of Black April.

“Younger Vietnamese Americans need to know their roots and why they’re here,” said Quan Nguyễn, the museum’s director. “They must understand their identity to become good American citizens and contribute to America with that historical knowledge.”

Inside the museum, Hoàng Đức Nhã, former political secretary to the president of the Republic of Vietnam, addressed the crowd in Vietnamese.

The New York Times once called him the most powerful man in Vietnam outside the president.

But his words were lost on Barron Vo, there to help his mom sell artwork in the gift shop to fundraise for the fledgling museum.

“Growing up, sure, I went to Vietnamese class,” he said. “But, I didn’t care too much about learning the language. Honestly, I was just really into skateboarding.”

Then, in 10th grade, his history teacher put on a documentary about the Vietnam War. Up popped a picture of a Vietnamese general who he thought looked a lot like his grandfather.

“I went home and told my mom, and that’s how I found out a little bit about what my grandpa’s life had been like in Vietnam,” Barron Vo said.

“As a single mom working in L.A., I just didn’t find the time to tell Barron about my childhood,” Linh Vo said through tears. “It’s so hard. So hard. You just work all day long, and you’re so busy. And it was easier to speak English to him, and hard for me to tell my story in English. We just never really had a chance to talk about my childhood. It was just work and school. Work and school.”

All these years later, Barron Vo would like to reconnect with his culture and help his mom rekindle some sort of relationship with her homeland.

Linh Vo hasn’t been back to Vietnam since that fateful day 50 years ago when she, a 13-year-old girl, left home by boat as gunshots whisked around her.

Vietnam has changed a lot since then.

While still under communist control, the country now has “mutually beneficial and balanced trade relations” with the United States, according to the U.S. Department of State.

The two countries do more than $124 billion in annual trade — although tariffs could threaten that — and more than 700,000 Americans visit Vietnam each year as tourists.

“I want to go to Vietnam,” Barron Vo said. “But, my mom’s reluctant.”

“I still have a sister there,” Linh Vo said. “She’s 80, maybe 81.”

“But when I think of Vietnam, I still remember the war. I still remember walking out on the streets and seeing soldiers lying there burned up like charcoal, dead on the streets.”

“I’ve seen that,” she said. “I’ve seen dead people. I’ve seen my dad getting shot in the leg and my mom, a nurse, having to take care of him.”

“So, that’s what I still remember.”

“I have to say America is the land of opportunity, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t struggle,” she added. “America is the best place in the world, but it’s not easy. I worked hard. I went through a lot of ups and downs. Being here today with my son took a lot of hard work and dedication and determination.”

Staff writers Hanna Kang and Erika I. Ritchie contributed to this report.

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