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Younger Vietnamese are moving out of Little Saigon to South OC

Community leaders in Little Saigon for years have watched their offspring go outside the enclave for entertainment and shopping. Now, like other parts of Orange County, Little Saigon is losing residents to South County.

“People like the amenities, larger houses and safer neighborhoods,” said Fi Nguyen, a doctor who lives in Lake Forest and practices in Irvine.

Unlike their immigrant parents, many younger Vietnamese don’t need the support of Little Saigon’s grocery stores, eateries and other shops that cater to recent arrivals.

“The people who aren’t that assimilated and don’t speak much English and need the services of Little Saigon are the ones who stay there,” said Quang Pham, chief executive of Newport Beach pharmaceutical information provider MyDrugRep Inc.

Housing is a big factor. With Westminster, Garden Grove and other Little Saigon-area cities largely built out, South County is proving to be just as much a draw for Vietnamese as it is for others.

“People are going to go where the homes are,” said Pham, who lives in Mission Viejo. “Little Saigon does not have the growth rate of new homes like Los Flores, Talega, Mission Viejo and San Clemente.”

Other popular areas for Vietnamese-Americans include Irvine, Lake Forest, Laguna Hills and Aliso Viejo.

“A lot of people like the better schools in South County,” said Van Tran, a Garden Grove councilman. “It’s less crowded there too,there’s more open land.”

Westminster Councilman Tony Lam and other Vietnamese-American businesspeople and community leaders estimate as many as 50,000 Vietnamese now live in South County alone, out of a total of around 300,000 living throughout the county. The latest Census figures put the number of ethnic Vietnamese in OC at 135,548, though community leaders contend the figure is low.

Even taking the smaller Census figure at face value, the Vietnamese in Little Saigon and other parts of OC make up the largest concentration anywhere in the world outside Vietnam.

MyDrugRep’s Pham said he doesn’t believe the migration to South County hurts Little Saigon.

“I haven’t seen that much growth of things like (Vietnamese) restaurants in South County,” he said. “Most of the Vietnamese businesses I use are still in Little Saigon.”

Still, South County is seeing some Vietnamese businesses pop up, including restaurants and nail salons,a small sector of the economy dominated by Vietnamese.

Compared to counterparts in Little Saigon, though, these new South County outlets tend to be more accessible to “mainstream” Americans, because the proprietors themselves have assimilated into society to a greater extent, according to Garden Grove’s Tran.

“These shops try to cater to everyone, not just Vietnamese people,” Tran said.

Westminster’s Lam said he believes revamping Little Saigon’s shopping centers could help stem the outflow of area residents to South County and elsewhere.

“We’re losing more and more middle class and upper class income earners,” Lam said. “And we’ll keep losing them unless we turn Little Saigon into more of a tourist hub. You can’t blame younger people for wanting more of an American lifestyle.”

And while Little Saigon has a relatively low crime rate, it can’t match South County.

“There is still plenty of crime in Little Saigon,” said Philip Lam, a Mission Viejo resident and son of Tony Lam. “People tend to prey on each other.”

Then there’s the politics of Little Saigon. Tony Lam said he had to sell his Dana Point house in 1999 to pay legal fees incurred getting a restraining order against demonstrators who protested at his restaurant for several months that year.

The protesters claimed Lam was a communist sympathizer because he did not participate in protests against Truong Van Tran’s Hi-Tek Video store in Westminster at that time. Tran made waves when he put up a portrait of former Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh. n

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