Drive east along Story Road on a Saturday morning and the signage changes before the language does. Pho, bun bo Hue, ca phe sua da, jewellery shops glinting behind security glass, a green welcome arch that reads Little Saigon. The Vietnamese in San Jose did not just settle here. They rebuilt a country’s worth of habits in the eastern flats of Silicon Valley, and made it the largest Vietnamese community of any city outside Vietnam.
The Place
San Jose is the tenth largest city in the United States and the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley, a sprawl of low rooflines and tech campuses at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Its median household income sits around 150,000 dollars, among the highest of any large American city, and roughly 55 per cent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The wealth is real but uneven. The eastern half of the city, where most Vietnamese families first put down roots, was once orchard land and remains more working and middle class than the moneyed western suburbs.
It is here, between Interstate 280 and Highway 101, that the community built its commercial heart. Story Road and the streets around Tully and Senter became, over four decades, one of the densest Vietnamese marketplaces in the country.
How It Became Vietnamese
The fall of Saigon and the first refugees
The story begins in April 1975, with the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. In the two years that followed, more than 175,000 Vietnamese refugees fled to the United States, and California absorbed the largest share of them.
San Jose was not an obvious destination at first. The refugees arrived through camps such as Camp Pendleton in southern California, then dispersed as sponsors and agencies placed them. What pulled many of them north to the South Bay was a combination of work and price: assembly jobs in the emerging electronics industry, and housing that was, by Bay Area standards, still affordable.
The agencies that did the resettling
The machinery of resettlement was largely religious and voluntary. Catholic Charities began refugee work for Southeast Asians in 1975, and between 1975 and 1982 helped resettle hundreds of Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian refugees in the region.
The International Rescue Committee opened its San Jose office in 1979 specifically to handle the mass influx then arriving. That office has since resettled nearly 25,000 refugees from around the world, with a single peak year of 1,916 arrivals in 1991, a measure of how steadily the pipeline kept flowing.
The boat people and the second wave
The first arrivals tended to be the connected and the educated, people with ties to the former South Vietnamese government or the American war effort. The second wave, through the late 1970s and 1980s, was different. These were the boat people, families who had fled by sea, often after time in re-education camps, often with nothing.
One of them was Le Van Chieu, who settled in San Jose with his family in 1980. Taking English classes and eating from catering trucks, he noticed an opening. He started a mobile food business, and in June 1983 his parents began selling banh mi at the corner of 6th and Santa Clara streets, near San Jose State University. That small corner operation became Lee’s Sandwiches, eventually one of the fastest growing fast food chains in the western United States.
From enclave to institution
Through the 1980s and 1990s the community thickened into something permanent. Grocery shops, restaurants, herbalists, jewellers and tax preparers clustered along Story Road and around the King and Tully intersection in East San Jose. Buddhist nuns built temples. Catholic parishes added Vietnamese masses.
By the time the city took its census measure, San Jose held roughly 180,000 Vietnamese residents, about a tenth of the population, more than any city on earth outside Vietnam itself. The South Bay had quietly become the centre of gravity for Vietnamese America, rivalled only by Orange County’s Little Saigon to the south.
The fight over a name
The community’s clearest coming of age was, fittingly, an argument about identity. In 2007 the city moved to officially name the Story Road business district, and the obvious candidate was Little Saigon, the name the community itself used.
The council instead voted 8 to 3 in November 2007 for the blander Saigon Business District, a compromise pushed by council member Madison Nguyen. The reaction was immediate and fierce. The activist Ly Tong staged a hunger strike at City Hall, recall efforts gathered against Nguyen, and on 4 March 2008, after a public meeting drawing more than a thousand people, the council reversed itself 11 to 1 and rescinded the name. Little Saigon it became, and Little Saigon it remains.
The Landmarks
Grand Century Mall, 1111 Story Road. The first great indoor bazaar of San Jose’s Little Saigon, home to around 100 businesses: restaurants serving regional Vietnamese cooking, nail and hair salons, tax and legal offices, jewellery counters, herbal medicine shops and stalls selling everything from flowers to Vietnamese pop CDs. It anchored the district before the district had a name.
Vietnam Town, Story Road. The newer, larger plaza, with more than 250 units lining the busy stretch between Grand Century and the neighbouring Walmart. Boba shops, professional offices, restaurants and retail fill a more modern arcade that signals the community’s move from survival commerce to settled enterprise.
Lee’s Sandwiches, original location near 6th and Santa Clara streets. Born as a weekend banh mi stand in 1983 and moved to King and Tully roads in 1988, Lee’s became in 2005 the first Vietnamese deli-cafe to franchise. The European-style baguette and the Vietnamese iced coffee travelled out from this corner across the American West.
Duc Vien Buddhist Community Pagoda, 2440 McLaughlin Avenue. Founded in 1980 by the nun Thich Nu Dam Luu, who had fled Vietnam by boat, the pagoda is one of the few Buddhist centres in the United States run by nuns. She began in a small house and spent the next two decades raising money to build the temple of classical design that stands today, just south of Tully Road. She died in 1999.
St. Maria Goretti Parish. Formed in July 1961 from orchards off Senter Road and dedicated in March 1963, this Catholic parish became one of the spiritual homes of the Vietnamese community as the neighbourhood around it changed. It offers mass in English, Spanish and Vietnamese, a small map of the East San Jose that the refugees joined.
The Little Saigon welcome arch, Story Road. The green gateway sign that marks the district was the prize at the end of the 2008 naming fight. It is the closest thing the community has to a civic monument, the moment a refugee marketplace became an officially recognised piece of the city.
The San Jose Tet Festival. For decades the Vietnamese New Year celebration was held at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds on Tully Road, billed as the biggest annual event for the region’s Vietnamese Americans, with lion dancing, fashion shows, music and fireworks. In recent years it has moved to the Eastridge Center, still drawing the community together each February.
Where They Came From
The first San Jose Vietnamese came overwhelmingly from the south, from Saigon and the Mekong Delta provinces, people whose lives were upended by the change of regime in 1975. Many had served the old government or worked alongside Americans, and their flight was a matter of urgency.
The boat people of the late 1970s and 1980s came from a wider geography, including the central provinces, fleeing economic ruin and re-education camps by sea through Southeast Asian refugee camps. Religious life carried its own map: the nun who founded Duc Vien came from Ha Dong province in the north, a reminder that the diaspora drew from the whole length of the country.
What united them was less a region than a moment. They were people who had lost a country and chose, against long odds, to assemble its texture again in the orchards east of a California freeway.
San Jose Today
Today the community is generational. The refugees’ children and grandchildren have moved into the professions that define the valley, software, engineering, medicine, law, and many have moved up the income ladder into the city’s more comfortable neighbourhoods. In the southeast and Evergreen districts, Vietnamese is the most common non-English language spoken at home, and the most common jobs are software development and engineering.
That success has been quiet but profound. The grandchildren of boat people now write code in the same valley that once offered their grandparents assembly work. Some have spread out to Evergreen on the city’s eastern hills, others to neighbouring Milpitas, and the ties south to the original Garden Grove and Irvine communities of Orange County remain strong.
Little Saigon itself faces the strains of any older commercial district. Grand Century Mall has struggled in recent years as shopping habits shift and a generation that grew up online drifts elsewhere. Yet the district endures, alive at Tet, busy on weekends, sharing East San Jose with the city’s large Chinese community and other Asian neighbours. Half a century after Saigon fell, the Vietnamese in San Jose are no longer refugees in a strange valley. They are one of the things the valley is made of.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Vietnamese community in San Jose?
San Jose holds roughly 180,000 Vietnamese residents, about a tenth of the city’s population. That makes the Vietnamese in San Jose the largest Vietnamese community of any city outside Vietnam itself.
Where is Little Saigon in San Jose?
Little Saigon is centred on Story Road in East San Jose, between Interstate 280 and Highway 101. Its commercial heart includes Grand Century Mall at 1111 Story Road and the neighbouring Vietnam Town plaza.
Why did Vietnamese refugees settle in San Jose?
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, refugees were drawn north to the South Bay by assembly jobs in the emerging electronics industry and by housing that was relatively affordable. Agencies such as Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee, which opened a San Jose office in 1979, handled much of the resettlement.
What was the Little Saigon naming controversy?
In 2007 the city council voted 8 to 3 to call the Story Road district the Saigon Business District rather than Little Saigon. After protests, a hunger strike and recall efforts, the council reversed itself on 4 March 2008 and officially adopted the name Little Saigon.
What landmarks define the Vietnamese in San Jose?
Key landmarks include Grand Century Mall and Vietnam Town on Story Road, the Duc Vien Buddhist Community Pagoda on McLaughlin Avenue, St. Maria Goretti Parish, and the annual Tet Festival. Lee’s Sandwiches, the banh mi chain, was also founded in San Jose in 1983.
When is the San Jose Tet Festival?
The Vietnamese New Year Tet Festival is held each February. For decades it ran at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds on Tully Road and in recent years has moved to the Eastridge Center, featuring lion dancing, music, fashion shows and fireworks.
If your family’s story passed through San Jose, or any of the places Vietnamese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the boats that left the Mekong Delta and the central provinces, to a green arch on Story Road, to wherever you are now.