Little Saigon didn’t really look like much, it looks like a strip mall. My San Diego cousin was puzzled why I asked her mom and brother to take us there. When I travel I like to get in there, see every nook and cranny. July 4 2021, we went to Philly and while we waited for our train home, a Vietnam War vet started chatting with us. He got me in the mood to learn about the Vietnam War. I tried reading about it a few times over the years but wasn’t in the mood. That’s why I love traveling… meeting strangers that I’ll probably never talk to again but they affect my life in a big way. After reading that California has a very large Vietnamese population, I HAD to check it out.
We’ll call my guy cousin, Dude. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want his name written. He’s really great at picking yummy authentic food places. For lunch, he took us to Brodard. We thought the Vietnamese food would be similar to what we had back home. I’m not even sure how to describe it! It seemed a bit fancier, gourmet maybe. It was delicious and I can’t wait to go back. I messaged my sis in law back in NY about our food experience, she’s Vietnamese from Vietnam. She said that CA has a very large Vietnamese community and we will see things out there that we won’t find on the east coast.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures, it was a strip mall looking place. In fact, they took us to another Vietnamese Mall after lunch. It’s true, I could find that stuff back home (stuff at the shopping mall) but we don’t have a large Vietnamese community. The Asian communities are more mixed in NYC so we feel it’s more like a Little Asia, especially Flushing, NY which is known as a satellite Chinatown, we have a lot less space and are smushed in and piled on top of each other.
What stresses me out about CA travel is how spread out everything is. What I like about NYC is how accessible things are. We also feel it’s more diverse, like we can see all sorts of people all the time. It feels more segregated to me out in CA. Like I know redlining and other policies created a lot of segregation but the driving culture does too in a different way. I wouldn’t have known about the community if it wasn’t for my Vietnamese American history book talking about their west coast community. We have so little space in NYC, we have no choice, we cross peoples paths. Like our trains go through so many different types of neighborhoods ethnically. If we take a bus or walk through them we can see so many types of people and there’s more opportunities to interact with people who don’t look like ourselves. In a car, you drive by. My Aunt’s a big fan of driving local because you get to see more of the neighborhoods compared to highway driving.
It’s also nice hearing cousin, Dude, wanting to plan activities. He’s bipolar and it’s hard for him to go out and do things. Next time he wants to take us to the Cheech Museum so we can see Chicano art. That sounds fantastic, it’s the largest collection of Chicano Art in the country. It is interesting seeing CA through his sister’s eyes and his. We’re a bit more like him when it comes to exploring. She wants him to take us to the Nixon Library, we aren’t so keen on this suggestion.
I have a silly goal: to get my 86 year old Aunt to take a selfie with us outside a weed store. She wouldn’t this time but she did tell me she drove Dude there a couple times. HA. My family can be a lot of fun sometimes. We have different relationships than Vic and my other Asian friends do with their parents and elders. We sit there and have conversations, tell stories, debate, play jokes on each other, etc. Kind of like we’re friends; in their households it’s like not like that, the elders and kids aren’t on the same level. It’s hard to describe. We tried to get her to go in with us. In 2021, NY voted to legalized it but our legal recreational weed stores seem like they’ll never open so I asked them to take me. Curiosity. (As you see I wrote this a while back, 3 legal stores are open now). We took a selfie with Dude, he thought it was fun, he doesn’t get to socialize much. He’s 20 years older than me. I don’t know my cousins well because I’m one the youngest in my generation. He was always a pothead. I remember him coming home saying, “Look at all this good shit I got today, Ma.” I know not everyone is ok with legal weed, we are. I don’t understand the stigma because I know a lot more volatile drinkers. I know so many belligerent and angry drunks; I just don’t get it. All the potheads I know are chill, wanna eat, and watch tv. Sometimes they get paranoid but they know how to handle it, they’re potheads. To be lazy and chill sounds better than getting drunkenly angry. Also, the potheads I know know how to use the bathroom, can’t exactly say that for the drunkards we know. But to each, their own. I’m not here to lecture anyone.
It was this trip that it hit me that things are ok with my CA family and I need to move on from past grudges for the sake of me. My childhood friend’s husband recently died. He was 49 years old, at the height of his career in cardiology, and had 2 toddlers. A few months ago he went in for a routine procedure and that’s when they found stage 4 bile duct cancer. The kind that doesn’t show symptoms until its too late. It’s very rare and aggressive, he died within 3 months. Him getting sick, made me realize I need to move on. Life is too short. It took his diagnosis and this trip to get to this conclusion. My CA family reminds me to stay mentally healthy. I hope with time my guilt will ease as I try to grow as a healthy individual and start making boundaries with the unhealthy people in my life.
Jebus Mews & Andrea 
So much to possibly comment on regarding your writing in this post. thanks for sharing so much interesting personal detail. I’ll just say the food angle reminded me of when Vietnamese Boat people arrived in a part of south-east London I was living in during the 1980’s. The restaurant they opened was such a great addition to the available cuisines. it was always occupied by many Vietnamese people and quickly became a favourite place to visit.
I love the idea of getting your 86 year old aunt to pose outside of a weed store… I look forward to seeing that pic! As for anything with the name Nixon attached… I’m with you in avoiding that.
I have a feeling the Nixon library is going to come up again. We looked it up thinking maybe it’s a magnificent looking building, it’s not. Sigh.
The pie pictures have me craving pie now! A lot of the mom and pop bakeries in my area, which were known for their home-style baked from scratch pies, closed up during the pandemic and never reopened. Others moved out of the neighborhood into the suburbs, so getting my home-baked pie fix isn’t as convenient as it used to be.
Re the segregation of Asian neighborhoods, are you referring to Vietnamese neighborhoods separated from Chinese from Japanese [and so on]? I think it depends on the city: Sacramento, for instance, doesn’t have an actual Chinatown anymore, partly because most of the Chinese residents and their kids moved to the suburbs, partly because city “beautification” projects in the 1960s tore down most of the old buildings downtown where Chinese-owned businesses used to flourish. (Funny that they demolished the Chinese-owned buildings and not the white-owned ones closer to the capitol.) Postwar Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants started businesses along a corridor in South Sacramento in the 1970s and 80s, which got dubbed “Little Saigon” by the local media. There are however ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who speak both Vietnamese and Cantonese and who opened Chinese-centric restaurants and markets in Little Saigon. All of them shop at the Chinese mega markets/malls that have opened up in the last 12 years, drawn by the large Asian population here. (No H Mart here yet, sorry to say.)
“Little Tokyo” essentially ended with the internment during World War 2. There are still a few Japanese restaurants, shops, and confectionaries on a small block near downtown, but like the Chinese residents here, most of the Japanese Americans moved to the suburbs. Yeah, the car-centric infrastructure contributed to the death of urban Chinatowns and Little Tokyos, though if I understand correctly, there’s been a renaissance of both in LA. But I see smaller versions cropping up in the smaller satellite cities around the big urban centers: one suburb here is known for its huge number of Asian restaurants, which include South Asian and Afghan cuisine.
But I’d agree, if you don’t have a car or can’t drive in California, you’ll have a heck of a time getting around. Public transportation here hasn’t kept up with demand: a lot of service workers have been forced to buy cars because the bus service is terrible here. In my town the buses don’t run after 8 p.m., leaving hospital and late-night hospitality workers with no way of getting home. It’s been especially devastating for seniors who can no longer drive and who don’t have a younger family member to ferry them around. You have to book a ride with the city’s disability shuttles, which are notoriously late, or call a ride share service or taxi, which are expensive and don’t always show up. I realize NYC’s subway system is having issues post-pandemic, but I still think the city’s residents are lucky to have that as an option to get around without a car.
Mostly referencing car culture type segregation. People not crossing each others paths. That’s how it feels to us outside of cities. Although, we do have our versions of it in NYC. There’s a lot of people that never leave their neighborhoods. I do appreciate you telling me about the Asian communities out there. There’s so much history to read it’s overwhelming!
I want pir so bad. We’ve tried a few places here and we prefer Coco’s.
Some people feel things are back to normal, I feel they aren’t. They seem safer than during the pandemic but not as safe as before the pandemic.
The food looks delicious! And I agree about NYC–I have never owned a car, never needed one. Not many places you can say that about.