Before the sun was fully up on Bolsa Avenue, the gold counters at Phước Lộc Thọ were already open, and pho was steaming in a hundred kitchens between Magnolia and Brookhurst. Outside, on lampposts and shopfronts and car windscreens, the yellow flag with three red stripes hung in the soft California morning. It was the flag of a country that had not existed since April 1975.
Down the street, in a quiet park, a bronze American soldier stood beside a bronze South Vietnamese soldier, looking south, toward home. This is Little Saigon. The largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam, built on a stretch of Orange County suburb by people who arrived with almost nothing.
Little Saigon, The Place
Little Saigon sits in the centre of Orange County, California, a flat grid of suburban streets about an hour south of Los Angeles. The cultural and commercial spine is Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, running between Magnolia Street and Brookhurst Street, though the Vietnamese community extends through Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and parts of Santa Ana.
It is not a dense urban quarter. There are no rowhouses, no tenements, no subway. Little Saigon is single-storey strip malls, low apartment blocks, wide streets built for cars, palm trees, and Vietnamese signage as far as you can see. The 405 and the 22 freeways frame it. Caltrans erected the official “Little Saigon” exit signs in 1988.
How Westminster Became Vietnamese
Before the Vietnamese
Westminster was founded in 1870 as a temperance colony by a Presbyterian minister, on what had been Mexican rancho land before that. For most of its first century it was farmland, then suburbia. Strawberries, sugar beets, lima beans. In the 1920s the world’s largest goldfish farm sat roughly where the Asian Garden Mall stands today.
The city incorporated in 1957 with about 10,000 residents, a quiet, mostly white commuter town pinned between the coast and the new freeways. By the early 1970s, the stretch of Bolsa Avenue that would become Little Saigon was tired commercial property: failing strip malls, vacant lots, cheap rent. Nothing about it suggested what was coming.
The Vietnamese Arrive
On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. In the last days of South Vietnam, the United States launched Operation Frequent Wind, evacuating South Vietnamese officials, soldiers, journalists and their families by helicopter. Roughly 130,000 Vietnamese were flown out in that first wave.
About 50,000 of them were processed at Camp Pendleton, just down the coast in San Diego County. The Marine base was converted into “Tent City”, eight separate camps that at peak housed nearly 20,000 people in canvas barracks. Refugees stayed an average of three months while American sponsor families were found.
Many never went far. Sponsors in nearby Orange County took in families and they stayed. The weather was warm. The coast looked, faintly, like the South China Sea. And Westminster had something the surrounding cities did not: a swath of cheap, undervalued commercial property on Bolsa Avenue, available to anyone willing to take a risk on it.
One of the first to take that risk was Frank Jao. Born Triệu Như Phát in Haiphong in 1949, he had escaped Saigon with his wife Catherine on the second-to-last American transport plane. By 1978 he had founded a real estate firm, Bridgecreek Development, and was buying empty lots on Bolsa. He has been called, in print and without irony, the Godfather of Little Saigon.
Little Saigon at Its Peak
The second wave arrived through the back of a boat. Beginning in 1978, as the new communist government in Hanoi sent hundreds of thousands of former South Vietnamese soldiers, civil servants and Catholics to reeducation camps, the exodus turned maritime. These were the boat people.
Between 1978 and the mid-1980s, an estimated one to two million Vietnamese left the country in fishing boats and overcrowded freighters, mostly heading for refugee camps in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that between 200,000 and 250,000 died at sea, of storms, of thirst, of pirates. The survivors were processed for resettlement, and tens of thousands ended up in Orange County, joining family members already there.
By 1980 there were about 20,000 Vietnamese in Orange County. In 1979, Bolsa Avenue had thirty Vietnamese shops. By 1981 it had a few hundred. By 1987, when Frank Jao opened the Asian Garden Mall at 9200 Bolsa Avenue, the area held more than 550 Vietnamese businesses. Weekend traffic was 20,000 to 50,000 shoppers.
On 17 June 1988, Governor George Deukmejian signed a bill granting the area official designation as Little Saigon, and authorising thirteen Caltrans signs along the 405 and 22 freeways pointing the way in. It was the first officially recognised Little Saigon in the United States.
A third wave followed in the 1990s through the Orderly Departure Program and the Humanitarian Operation, which brought former reeducation camp prisoners and Amerasian children of US servicemen. By 2000 Orange County’s Vietnamese population had passed 130,000. By 2020 it was almost 242,000, roughly 10 percent of all Vietnamese Americans.
The Change
The first generation is now aging out. Many of the men who built Little Saigon in their thirties and forties are in their seventies and eighties, and their children, raised on Bolsa, have moved on.
The second generation lives in Garden Grove, Fountain Valley, Irvine, and increasingly in the wealthier coastal cities. Some have moved north to San Jose, which has a competing claim to the title of largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam. The Bolsa shops are still here, but the customers driving in often live ten or twenty miles away now.
Newer arrivals from Vietnam still come, but in smaller numbers and under different rules. Family reunification, student visas, marriage. The refugee era is over. The community that Little Saigon was built to house has, in a real sense, outgrown it.
The Landmarks of Vietnamese Little Saigon
Asian Garden Mall (Phước Lộc Thọ), 9200 Bolsa Avenue. Frank Jao opened it in 1987 as the first Vietnamese American shopping mall in the country. The Vietnamese name translates as Fortune, Prosperity, Longevity, the three deities of traditional Sino-Vietnamese belief. Inside: gold jewellery counters, jade dealers, herbalists, fortune tellers, a food court of pho and bun bo Hue. On Tet, lion dancers fill the central courtyard.
Westminster Vietnam War Memorial, Sid Goldstein Freedom Park, 14180 All American Way. Dedicated on 27 April 2003, the memorial features bronze statues of an American GI and a South Vietnamese ARVN soldier standing shoulder to shoulder, with an eternal flame between them. The communist government of Vietnam objected before its dedication, asking the city to replace the South Vietnamese figure with a North Vietnamese one. The request was refused.
Người Việt Daily News, 14771 Moran Street, Garden Grove. The first Vietnamese-language daily newspaper in the United States, founded in December 1978 by Yến Ngọc Đỗ, a former combat correspondent who fled Saigon in the final hours. He started it in his garage with four thousand dollars. It is still publishing.
Phở 79, 9941 Hazard Avenue, Garden Grove. Opened in 1982 by Thọ Trần and Liễu Trần, who had arrived as boat people in 1979 and named the restaurant for the year they made it out. One of the first places in California to serve pho. Three generations of the same family still cook there.
Lee’s Sandwiches, 9261 Bolsa Avenue. Chieu Le started selling banh mi out of a food truck in 1981 in San Jose. The Westminster shop opened in 2001. The Le family chain now has dozens of locations and has done more than any other business to introduce banh mi to mainstream America.
Chùa Việt Nam and Chùa Bảo Quang. The major Vietnamese Buddhist temples of the area, where families come for Vu Lan in August and for funerals year round. Chùa Bảo Quang, on Newhope Street in Santa Ana, has been a spiritual centre of the community since the 1980s.
St. Polycarp Catholic Church, 8100 Chapman Avenue, Stanton. Vietnamese Catholics, many of them descended from the northerners who fled south in 1954, have made parishes like St. Polycarp and Blessed Sacrament in Westminster their own. Mass is celebrated in Vietnamese; Christmas Eve fills the church.
The Tết Parade and UVSA Tết Festival. Every February the Tết Parade runs down Bolsa Avenue with lion dances, marching bands, ARVN veterans in their old uniforms, and the yellow flag everywhere. The UVSA Tết Festival, run for over three decades by the Union of Vietnamese Student Associations, is the largest Vietnamese Lunar New Year festival in the country.
Where the Little Saigon Vietnamese Came From
The Vietnamese of Little Saigon are overwhelmingly southern. Saigon itself, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, sent the largest share: the urban middle class of teachers, civil servants, soldiers, journalists and shopkeepers who had served the Republic of Vietnam and had the most to fear from the new regime.
Beyond the city, the Mekong Delta provinces fed the community heavily, especially Long An, Tiền Giang, Bến Tre, Vĩnh Long and Cần Thơ. These were rice country, fishing country, the rural heartland of the south. Many of the boat people slipped out from the delta’s tangled river mouths.
Central Vietnam sent smaller but visible communities, especially from Huế, the old imperial capital, and Đà Nẵng, the coastal city that had been a major US base. A distinct northern Catholic strand came from families who had already fled the communists once, in 1954, moving south after the partition of Vietnam, and then fled them a second time in 1975.
The Hoa, ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, are a community within the community. Concentrated for centuries in Chợ Lớn, the Chinese quarter of Saigon, they were targeted for expropriation by the new regime in 1978 and pushed out in huge numbers. Frank Jao himself is Hoa. Many of the gold dealers, jewellers and import-export merchants of Bolsa Avenue carry that double heritage.
Little Saigon Today
Little Saigon in 2026 is a working ethnic district, not a museum. The pho shops are full at lunch. The gold counters at Phước Lộc Thọ are still polishing wedding sets. Người Việt is still printing. On Sunday mornings the church car parks at Blessed Sacrament fill up, and on weekday mornings older men gather at the cafes to read the Vietnamese papers and argue about politics in Hanoi.
The politics are real and they are visible. The yellow flag of the former Republic of Vietnam flies on private homes, in shop windows, on the parade floats every February. When officials from Hanoi pass through Southern California, the protests come out, and the community organises with the same anti-communist intensity that defined the Hi-Tek incident of 1999, when 15,000 people stood outside a video store on Bolsa Avenue for fifty-three days to demand the removal of a Ho Chi Minh poster.
But the children of the founders are increasingly American in ways their parents never were. They speak English at home. They have moved to Irvine for the schools. Some have intermarried. The Vietnamese language press is shrinking; the Vietnamese restaurants are increasingly run by second-generation owners who learned the recipes from grandmothers. Little Saigon is becoming, slowly, what every immigrant district eventually becomes: an anchor for a community that has dispersed around it, the place you go back to for the food, the funeral, the New Year, and the flag.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Vietnamese refugees settle in Little Saigon, Westminster?
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, around 50,000 South Vietnamese refugees were processed at Camp Pendleton, a Marine base in nearby San Diego County. Many were taken in by sponsor families in Orange County and never left, drawn by the warm climate and by cheap commercial property on Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, where the first Vietnamese businesses opened in the late 1970s and grew into Little Saigon.
Is Westminster still Vietnamese today?
Yes. Almost 200,000 Vietnamese Americans live in Little Saigon, with Westminster (30.7 percent Vietnamese) and Garden Grove (21.4 percent) the most concentrated cities. The first generation is aging and the second generation has dispersed to Fountain Valley and Irvine, but Bolsa Avenue remains the cultural, commercial and political anchor of Vietnamese America.
What are the most famous Vietnamese landmarks in Little Saigon?
The Asian Garden Mall (Phước Lộc Thọ) at 9200 Bolsa Avenue, opened in 1987, is the centrepiece. The Westminster Vietnam War Memorial at Sid Goldstein Freedom Park, dedicated in 2003, honours US and South Vietnamese soldiers together. Người Việt Daily News, Phở 79 in Garden Grove, Lee’s Sandwiches, and the annual Tết Parade down Bolsa Avenue are all defining landmarks of the community.
Where in Vietnam did the Little Saigon Vietnamese come from?
The community is overwhelmingly southern, with the largest share from Saigon itself and the Mekong Delta provinces of Long An, Tiền Giang, Bến Tre, Vĩnh Long and Cần Thơ. Smaller groups came from the central cities of Huế and Đà Nẵng, alongside northern Catholic families who had already fled south in 1954, and Hoa (ethnic Chinese Vietnamese) from Chợ Lớn in Saigon.
When did Vietnamese refugees first arrive in Westminster?
The first wave arrived in 1975 immediately after the fall of Saigon, processed through Camp Pendleton and resettled with Orange County sponsor families. The community grew rapidly with the boat people wave from 1978 to the mid-1980s. By 1988 Governor Deukmejian had officially designated the area Little Saigon, and Caltrans erected freeway exit signs along the 405 and 22.
If your family’s story passed through Little Saigon, or through Camp Pendleton, or through a boat to Bidong Island, or through any of the places the Vietnamese made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Saigon, or Huế, or the Mekong Delta, to Bolsa Avenue, to wherever you are now.