On a weekday morning along Brookhurst Street, the smell of star anise drifts out of pho kitchens before the bakeries have finished their first trays of baguettes. The Vietnamese in Garden Grove built this stretch of Orange County into something a refugee in 1975 could scarcely have imagined: a working capital of the Vietnamese diaspora, where you can live an entire day in your mother tongue and never once feel far from home.
The Place
Garden Grove sits in the flat heart of northern Orange County, a city of roughly 172,000 people that grew up around strawberry fields and citrus groves before the freeways arrived. For decades it was an unremarkable Southern California suburb of tidy postwar tract homes.
Then the refugees came. Today Asian residents make up about 42 per cent of the city, and Vietnamese Americans are by far the largest group among them. With around 57,000 Vietnamese residents, Garden Grove holds the second-largest Vietnamese population of any city in California, behind only San Jose.
The city shares the famous Little Saigon district with neighbouring Westminster. The two run together so seamlessly that most visitors never notice where one ends and the other begins. Together they form the largest concentration of Vietnamese people anywhere outside Vietnam itself.
How It Became Vietnamese
The story does not begin in Garden Grove at all. It begins forty miles south, in a marine base, in the spring of 1975.
Camp Pendleton, 1975
When Saigon fell in April 1975, the United States took in roughly 130,000 Vietnamese refugees and routed them through four military bases. The largest of these reception centres was Camp Pendleton, between San Diego and Los Angeles, where a tent city rose almost overnight.
From April to October 1975, Camp Pendleton housed, fed and clothed more than 50,000 refugees, more than a third of everyone who arrived in that first wave. Before a family could leave, it needed a sponsor, and Orange County churches urged their congregations to step forward.
That single logistical fact, the need for a local sponsor, helped decide where a generation of Vietnamese Americans would put down roots. Many never left the county where they had first set foot on American soil. The early sponsors were often Catholic and Protestant parishes, and the faith communities they created would outlast the camps by decades.
Why Garden Grove
The refugees who settled nearby chose Garden Grove and its neighbours for an unglamorous reason: rent was cheap. Within their first five years, more than 18,000 Vietnamese moved into a cluster of six cities that included Garden Grove, Westminster, Santa Ana and Anaheim.
By the end of 1976 around 12,000 Vietnamese already lived in Orange County. One Garden Grove apartment complex alone reportedly housed up to 700 of them, packed in while families found their feet, learned the language and looked for work.
Not everyone welcomed them. A bumper sticker that circulated in those years read, with bitter sarcasm, “Will the last American to leave Garden Grove bring the flag?” More than a hundred petitioners in Westminster tried to deny business licences to Vietnamese newcomers. The community grew anyway.
The Birth of a Business District
The commercial heart took shape just over the city line, on Bolsa Avenue, where since 1978 Vietnamese entrepreneurs had been opening pharmacies, groceries and restaurants. The pioneering developer Frank Jao would later anchor the district with the Asian Garden Mall, which opened in 1987 just inside Westminster.
Garden Grove had its own firsts. The original 99 Ranch Market, now a nationwide Asian supermarket chain, opened in the city in 1984. By the mid-1980s thousands of Vietnamese immigrants had settled across Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Westminster.
The state made it official in June 1988. Governor George Deukmejian recognised the area as a major commercial and cultural centre, and freeway signs went up designating the Vietnamese business district in both Westminster and Garden Grove as “Little Saigon.” For a people who had lost a country, a name on a highway sign meant a great deal.
A Second Corridor on Brookhurst
As Bolsa Avenue filled up, the community spread east into Garden Grove proper along Brookhurst Street. Today Brookhurst is its own dense Vietnamese corridor, lined with restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets and jewellery shops.
By one count, of the roughly 280 restaurants in the wider Little Saigon area, around 158 sit within Garden Grove. The city is not a junior partner in Little Saigon. It is half of it.
The Landmarks
Cao Dai California Temple, 8791 Orangewood Avenue. One of only a handful of Cao Dai temples purpose-built in the United States to follow the sacred blueprint of the Mother Church in Tay Ninh, Vietnam. Its design borrows the nave and apse of a cathedral, the ascending levels of a pagoda and the flourishes of Taoist and ancestral temples, all at once. The Orange County Cao Dai congregation numbers in the thousands.
Banh Mi Saigon, 13861 Brookhurst Street. Serving hot baguettes and sandwiches since 1996, on the corner of Brookhurst and Westminster Avenue. Regulars argue it makes one of the closest things to a real Vietnamese banh mi you will find outside the country, the bread crackling, the pate and pickled daikon in proper balance.
Banh Mi & Che Cali, 13838 Brookhurst Street. A fixture of the Garden Grove Shopping Plaza, known for cheap sandwiches and sweet che desserts ladled into plastic cups. The kind of counter where a few dollars buys lunch and a queue forms regardless of the hour.
Pho Vinh Ky 2, 14390 Brookhurst Street. One of the corridor’s well-loved pho houses, the sort of place measured in steam and ladled broth rather than decor. The clientele skews local and Vietnamese, which in Little Saigon is the only review that matters.
St. Callistus Parish, Garden Grove. A Catholic parish that became home to a multilingual congregation, holding regular Mass in English, Spanish and Vietnamese. Catholic faith ran deep among the first refugees, many of whom had already fled south once before, from North Vietnam in 1954.
Christ Cathedral, 13280 Chapman Avenue. The glass landmark formerly known as the Crystal Cathedral, since 2019 the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. It serves a diocese in which Vietnamese Catholics are a large and visible presence, their feast days and processions part of the local rhythm.
The Brookhurst median. Each year the city posts the American flag alongside the yellow-and-red flag of the former South Vietnam in the street median of Brookhurst Street, a practice Garden Grove formalised in a 2003 resolution. The flag is heritage, not politics, for a community that still mourns the republic it lost.
Where They Came From
The first wave that arrived in 1975 was, broadly, the people closest to the fallen South Vietnamese government: military officers, civil servants, professionals, Catholics and others with reason to fear the new regime. Many came from Saigon itself and from the cities of the south.
The waves that followed were harder. Through the late 1970s and 1980s came the boat people, refugees who fled by sea in overcrowded fishing vessels, surviving pirates, storms and refugee camps across Southeast Asia before reaching America. They came from a wider span of Vietnam and from humbler backgrounds than the first arrivals.
Later still came family members brought over through sponsorship and the Orderly Departure Program, and former political prisoners released from re-education camps. Each new arrival had reason to head for the one place in America where the language, the food and the faith were already waiting.
Garden Grove Today
Little Saigon is now half a century old, and it has aged into something rare among American ethnic enclaves: it is still growing, still commercially vital, still unmistakably itself. The Vietnamese in Garden Grove did not assimilate into the suburb so much as remake it.
Walk Brookhurst Street and the signage is Vietnamese first, English second. The supermarkets stock durian and live fish, the bakeries sell banh mi by the dozen, and around Tet, the lunar new year, the whole district fills with flowers, lion dancers and red envelopes. The Tet festivities here are among the largest of any Vietnamese community in the country.
Fifty years on from the fall of Saigon, the district is thriving rather than fading, a fact noted in coverage of the anniversary. A second and third generation now runs many of the businesses their parents started, some heading off to careers elsewhere, others choosing to stay and keep the corridor alive.
The community has spread, too. Garden Grove now sits within a constellation of Vietnamese neighbourhoods across California, from the original enclave next door in Little Saigon in Westminster and the families who settled in Fountain Valley, to the larger population up north in San Jose’s Little Saigon and the sprawling district of Evergreen in San Jose. The story has many capitals now, but Garden Grove holds one of the oldest claims.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Vietnamese people live in Garden Grove, California?
Garden Grove is home to around 57,000 Vietnamese residents, the second-largest Vietnamese population of any city in California after San Jose. Vietnamese Americans are the largest group within the city’s Asian community, which makes up roughly 42 per cent of the population.
Why did so many Vietnamese settle in Garden Grove?
The Vietnamese in Garden Grove trace their roots to the refugees processed through nearby Camp Pendleton after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Affordable rent and Orange County church sponsorships drew thousands to Garden Grove and neighbouring cities, and a Vietnamese business district soon took shape.
Is Little Saigon in Garden Grove or Westminster?
Both. Little Saigon straddles the two cities, with its commercial core running along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster and a second dense corridor along Brookhurst Street in Garden Grove. The 1988 state designation and freeway signs covered both cities.
Where is the Asian Garden Mall?
The Asian Garden Mall, also known as Phuoc Loc Tho, sits just over the line in Westminster, opened in 1987 by developer Frank Jao. Although it is technically in Westminster, it serves as the symbolic heart of the whole Little Saigon district, Garden Grove included.
What is the Cao Dai temple in Garden Grove?
The Cao Dai California Temple at 8791 Orangewood Avenue is one of only a few Cao Dai temples in the United States built to follow the sacred design of the religion’s Mother Church in Tay Ninh, Vietnam. Caodaism is a faith that originated in southern Vietnam in the 1920s.
What is the best area for Vietnamese food in Garden Grove?
Brookhurst Street is the heart of Vietnamese dining in Garden Grove, with roughly 158 of Little Saigon’s restaurants located within the city. The corridor is packed with pho houses, banh mi bakeries and che dessert counters, many open from early morning.
If your family’s story passed through Garden Grove, or any of the places Vietnamese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the tent city at Camp Pendleton to a banh mi counter on Brookhurst Street, to wherever you are now.