28-04-2025
They grew a ‘Little Saigon' in the shadow of the Pentagon
Dodging artillery fire and the blooms of fiery explosions, the family of 10 ran fiercely toward the promise of America.
'It was to find freedom,' said Vinh Nguyen, who was 15 when his family almost died while fleeing Saigon 50 years ago. And 'liberty.'
By car, on foot, by boat and several planes, they made their way to Northern Virginia, in the shadow of the Pentagon, where a tiny Vietnamese enclave had been growing since the 1960s — the manifestation of decades of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.
U.S. involvement with what was then called Indochina began after World War II, both to allocate aid to cities damaged in the war and to begin building a strategy of containment against encroaching communist influence. Soon enough, the CIA was tasked with implementing that strategy.
A marketing plan started in 1950 helped establish trust. A shrewd government worker named Charles 'Mark' Merrell wanted Vietnam to know exactly where the Marshall Plan's allocation came from.
From sewing and road-making machines to penicillin and pencils, the aid that Merrell steered to Vietnam through the Commerce Department was branded with a symbol that prominently included the American flag, Andrew Friedman wrote in 'Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia.'
'He wove the symbol into blankets to cover shivering refugees in the northern mountains. He printed it on armbands worn by DDT spray teams,' Friedman wrote. 'He even insisted upon the symbol's presence on notebooks, pencils etc. for schoolchildren.'
That connection was imprinted on many refugees. They linked help and safety with America.
'The CIA agents who created the very shape of South and North Vietnam, who laid the groundwork for the U.S. empire in Vietnam, either came from Northern Virginia or returned to settle in McLean,' Friedman wrote. 'Over a twenty-five year period, these agents went to and from Vietnam and Virginia so many times it would be hard to call one or the other place their home.'
In the years leading to the bitter end to the war in Vietnam, when South Vietnamese engineers, officials, officers or diplomats left for America, they usually settled near the people they knew — the government operatives in Northern Virginia.
There, a small Vietnamese community of around 3,000 was built in part by years of collaboration with the U.S. government.
'When communists took over a city, the flag comes up and the flare goes up,' Lieu Nguyen said in a Virginia Tech oral history project, Echoes of Little Saigon, by Elizabeth Morton and Judd Ullom.
She was 10 years old when the flags and flares got close enough for her parents to decide it was time to run.
They loaded up their car in Danang to head to the place where they would meet a helicopter pilot they had paid to get them out. But when they arrived at a field with about 20 helicopters, they ran from pilot to pilot, offering the password they were given.
They got blank stares in return.
There were eight children, the youngest just a year old. Their 7-year-old sibling could not walk. 'He was handicapped, so I had to carry him plus two bags,' said Vinh Nguyen, who was was 15, the second-eldest sibling.
'If you remember 'The Sound of Music,' the part where they're escaping in the middle of the night? ' said Ava Nguyen, who was 3 when they fled. 'We were not as smooth.'
It was more like 'the movie 'Saving Private Ryan,'' her big brother said. 'Explosions, missiles coming in everywhere, very terrifying. And that's why everybody ran for their life, and that's why the family got split up.'
They reunited and headed to the river, to make their escape by water.
Plucked from a dodgy barge in the mouth of the Mekong Delta that nearly capsized, shuttled through a stop in the Philippines and then Guam, the family kept pushing and pushing, as far as they could get from their fallen city and to the United States — to 'liberty,' as Vihn Nguyen remembers.
And for the Nguyen family, the U.S. meant Washington. It looked far. And safe. Familiar, even. The father, Minh Nguyen, knew someone in Washington who worked for Voice of America.
'My dad said, 'We live where the president lives because it's the safest place,'' said Bich-Lien Kaldahl, who at 13 was the third-oldest Nguyen child.
Other refugees took different paths to America. Thu Bui accepted an offer to earn a university degree in the U.S. on a USAID scholarship over a promotion in the South Vietnamese navy. It was his reward for working with American naval forces, training more than 27,000 sailors.
Bui, now 90, came in 1973. His wife and children followed him on one of the last airlifts evacuating Saigon in 1975. Eventually he became an assistant principal at George C. Marshall, one of Northern Virginia's big high schools.
For most Vietnamese refugees who arrived in 1975 and the years immediately after, immigration was not a long-standing dream, an aspiration or a carefully composed plan. They just fled, some in a matter of hours.
The Nguyen family arrived in America with only six small satchels. Arriving with so little, the security of an enclave in a new world was important.
They settled in McLean, in a neighborhood with a 'Saigon Road' that was developed by Merrell after he left his government job and became a major real estate developer in Northern Virginia.
The Nguyen family of 10 bought a red Volkswagen Beetle, sent the kids to schools filled with the offspring of government workers and began looking for their place in this new community.
They saw the Vietnamese population of Northern Virginia double, then triple as the kids entered schools and learned American customs.
The Nguyen parents, who owned several businesses and a hospital in Danang before they lost everything in the war, saw an opportunity. 'They hit the ground running,' said Kaldahl, 63.
There was a marketplace for Vietnamese products. Like the entrepreneurs who built their wealth selling pickaxes and pans to the prospectors chasing riches during the California gold rush in the mid-1800s, the Nguyen family found success selling fish sauce and rice noodles to their fellow homesick refugees.
They found a cheap lease in an aging shopping center in Clarendon, a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. Within a few years, that strip of shops anchored by the Nguyens' store became known as 'Little Saigon,' the 'Mekong Delta' or even the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail,' according to a Sept. 29, 1979, story in The Washington Post.
'In vivid contrast to their established neighbors, the Vietnamese shops are an island of sights, scents and language unfamiliar to most Americans — except GIs and journalists who once knew Vietnam,' The Post's Sandra G. Boodman wrote.
'After 20 years as a bustling neighborhood crowded with mom-and-pop stores that reflected Arlington's nearly all-white bedroom community character, Clarendon has become one of the largest Indochinese commercial centers on the East Coast.'
At the time, Arlington had the third-largest population of Vietnamese refugees in the nation behind California and Texas, where some of the large refugee camps were established in 1975.
'We exchanged advice to each other, how to survive in America and how to be happy — how to learn to be American,' longtime Northern Virginia resident Kim Cook said in a video from 'Echoes of Little Saigon.'
The Mekong Center store became a hub in for the Vietnamese community across the eastern seaboard, said Ava Nguyen, who was 3 when the family left Saigon. Customers would leave messages on a bulletin board to try to find lost loved ones or to get messages to those back home.
Little Saigons have flourished in other parts of America, their raison d'être more geographic than political.
The largest is in Orange County, California, with nearly 200,000 Vietnamese Americans, a vibrant enclave with thousands of businesses. The hospitals have signs in English and Vietnamese.
New Orleans was a natural draw for Vietnamese refugees because of the semitropical climate, the fishing and shrimping industry along the Gulf Coast, and the French and Catholic influence. A significant portion of the gulf's fleet is run by Vietnamese American fishing workers, and the Vietnamese American bakery Dong Phuong has won a James Beard Award and currently makes the favorite king cake in town.
Little Saigons can also be found in Houston and Dallas, Boston and Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Diego and Seattle.
In Northern Virginia, rising real estate prices and the opening of a Metro stop led the Vietnamese immigrants to another displacement. Little Saigon in Clarendon perished, but the shops and culture resurfaced in a new location in nearby Falls Church. Eden Center became a vibrant magnet for both Vietnamese Americans and non-Vietnamese foodies.
In 2021, the Falls Church City Council outlined a sweeping development plan that included Eden Center. This time, it was the children and grandchildren of those 1975 immigrants who banded together to create the Viet Place Collective to help fight another potential displacement. They lobbied to have a block renamed Saigon Boulevard and persuaded the city to preserve Eden Center.
'It really feels like walking through a Vietnamese neighborhood,' one of the organizers, Jenn Trần, said to The Post in 2023. 'There's people selling fruit and there's yelling and karaoke and so much life that wouldn't exist if it were just a handful of stores.'
She takes her mother to see the clock tower there, modeled after one that stood in Saigon's oldest market, and to see couples drinking coffee with condensed milk and counters selling banh mi.
She says it reminds her of home.
