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Tag Archives: Vietnamese American


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Lunar new year nomenclature and the multicultural metropolis

Chinese New Year decorations in Dublin, Ireland. Photo: William Murphy (Flickr/Creative Commons)

Chinese New Year decorations in Dublin, Ireland. Photo: William Murphy (Flickr/Creative Commons)

On Sunday I stopped by the Monterey Park Lunar New Year Festival with my family. For two days, the organizers blocked off several blocks of bustling Garvey Avenue to make room for street food vendors, trinket sellers, and corporate sponsors giving away free goodies. While most of the vendors were speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, there were a few booths from non-Sinophone cultures: an Indomie booth, a booth selling dry pho noodles, and a booth promoting tolerance of Islam (with one of the few banners that was in English only).

The Chinese are not the only ethnic group that celebrates new year according to the Chinese lunar calendar. Calling this a “lunar new year” festival rather than a “Chinese new year” festival is a deliberately inclusive choice. This event draws in visitors from across Southern California, not just heavily Chinese Monterey Park, and even if the event is sponsored by a Chinese newspaper and most of the vendors are Chinese, they were expecting people from many different ethnic groups.

In Sydney, food blogger and former politician Thang Ngo posted an open letter to the city’s Lord Mayor asking why that city continues to have a “Chinese new year” festival: Continue Reading →


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Over on Tumblr, some historical photographs from the Americas

first boat people canada

mynahwings:

My brother just found this old article from The Toronto Star. My dad is the guy in the front row with his head down. He was one of the first “boat people” who landed in Canada.

Vietnamese religious procession in Versailles, 1975

Vietnamese religious procession in Versailles, 1975. Photo Credit: Archdiocese of New Orleans

Caption:

The name “Versailles” refers to “Versailles Arms Apartment,” the New Orleans East public housing project where a tight-knit group of Vietnamese refugees was first resettled in 1975. The refugees have fled their homes twice already in their life time—first from North to South Vietnam to escape communist persecution in 1957, and then to New Orleans from the war in 1975.

Continue Reading →


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Temple conflicts in suburbia

Photo: Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times.

Photo: Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times.

Earlier this year I wrote about what Anna from I Heart Cabramatta calls “house temples,” suburban residences turned into places of worship for Vietnamese Buddhists. Today’s Los Angeles Times has a story on the issues that these house temples are raising in their communities. Neighbors say they are primarily concerned with the amount of traffic that these temples bring, but there is also more than a small amount of xenophobia in the air.

Even though the face of central Orange County began changing decades ago with the arrival of Vietnamese immigrants, the tiny neighborhood temples sometimes seem foreign to residents when they spring up.

“There’s no question where you’re confronted with something you don’t understand or are unfamiliar with, you’re uncomfortable,” Kennedy said.

Often stereotypes about a culture or its images — such as the Buddhist swastika or Sikh turbans — can “color our thinking” about a neighbor, Kennedy said.

Orange County, about an hour south of the city of Los Angeles, is home to one of the largest concentrations of Vietnamese Americans in the country. Orange County’s Little Saigon is centered in the cities of Westminster and Garden Grove.

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