Little Saigon
From Wikinfo
Little Saigon is a large Vietnamese American community in Westminster and Garden Grove, California. 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. Another Little Saigon can be found in Houston, Texas.
In California, Little Saigon is a wide, spread-out community dotted with a myriad of Vietnamese and Chinese businesses. Restaurants that serve Vietnamese (especially Phở beef noodles) and Chinese (Trieu Chau and Cantonese) cuisines are abundant. 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. The major Chinese American supermarket chain 99 Ranch Market had its first start in Little Saigon.
Little Saigon is a vehemently anti-communist community. During the [[T�t|T�t 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 refugees and immigrants from the former South Vietnam - a curious irony since Tran himself was among the refugees who fled the country. Mass vigils and demonstrations (sometimes peaceful and sometimes coming close to a riot) in front of the store ensued. In the coup de gr�ce, the owner was eventually arrested by Westminster police for renting out illegally 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.
External links
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Little_Saigon" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Saigon, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
