First step to organizing within the Sacramento Vietnamese community
I’ve reorganized my blog to add a new section, Diary of a Community Organizer, to document my journey into organizing within the Vietnamese community in the Greater Sacramento region. Yes, the name is inspired by one of the podcasts I listen to, The Diary Of A CEO.
I met up over tea with President Nikki Nguyen of Community Partners Advocate of Little Saigon Sacramento (cPALSs), a nonprofit whose “mission is to engage in community development and enrichment by supporting and connecting community partners with residences, resources, recreations, and referral resources, such as local business services, statewide government assistance programs, and other community resources to local under served communities.” In other words, it was aiming to be a community development corporation (CDC).
We talked over a number of topics, first introducing ourselves, and my interest in learning more about cPALSs. We spoke earnestly about some of the projects co-hosted by cPALSs, but especially on the struggling leadership capacity, whose voluntary members were on the border of experiencing burnout. I was introduced to Nikki through Mai Nguyen, cPALSs co-founder, whom I spoke with over the phone earlier in the week. I had a brief glimpse into what Mai wanted to accomplish with the organization in improving the well-being of the Vietnamese American community, as well as her current situation in having to step down from the board. Both Mai and Nikki were proud in being part of cPALSs’ advocacy for the “Little Saigon” business district designation in 2010.
But over the years, the area has seen challenges. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Mai was instrumental in assisting the Vietnamese businesses in the Little Saigon district in adapting to delivery-based services, as businesses were prevented from allowing patrons to congregate into their spaces for fear of spreading infections.
Months ago, I stumbled across an article published in 2021, “A Neighborhood In Transition: Sacramento’s Little Saigon Grapples With Culture And The American Dream”, which painted a stark reality. I’ll paraphrase the article:
[Linda] Lui grew up in Sacramento’s Vietnamese American neighborhood known as Little Saigon, and has been involved with this [IndoChina Friendship Association] Buddhist Temple since she was a young child. Now, she’s the president, and has been working to give out free food and face masks to community members since the start of the pandemic. But many of the volunteers and those involved in the Temple’s efforts are aging or elderly — Lui said this is in part because many of the younger families in this neighborhood have moved away to suburbs like Elk Grove.
Linda Park grew up along Stockton Boulevard but, like many other children of immigrants in Little Saigon, she has since moved to one of Sacramento County’s many suburban cities to raise her kids. She says the Tet celebrations are what she missed most about living in the neighborhood.
Park says it was meaningful for her to grow up around people who were like-minded and “grew up eating the same things.” But she said crime and low performing schools in South Sacramento brought her to the suburbs.
But she still brings her kids to the area to visit Vietnamese restaurants.
“I think it’s more like a destination now, like we’ll go there to do things,” Park said. “I don’t see it as home anymore. Sometimes I feel a little disconnected.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Little Saigon businesses were some of the first to see the impact. Some believe it was partially spurred by the racist rhetoric about Asian people spreading the virus, and many of the businesses experienced a downturn early.
“Since the pandemic hit and being that the virus came from China and us being in Little Saigon, we’re a high population of Asian business owners,” Nguyen said. “To some of the business owners they felt like they were a target for that. They noticed the number of customers decreased and this was back in February.”
Andrew Leong is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston who studies Asian ethnic enclaves across the country. He said that this move outward from these neighborhoods is something that happens in almost every Asian enclave in the country.
“Growing out of — whether it's Chinatown, whether it’s Little Saigon — means the upward mobility into professional jobs and into the white suburbs in order to achieve the sensibility of whiteness,” Leong said. “So the transformation of that takes you out of the urban enclave and into whiteness in the burbs.”
One of those suburbs is Elk Grove. The city in the southern part of the county is actually one of Sacramento’s most diverse suburbs, and nearly a third of its residents are Asian American. But conceptually, Leong sees the suburbs as inherently a “white space” where preserving cultural heritage can be difficult.
He adds that the main concern with this generation growing up and out, is that it means fewer children will take over legacy businesses or take on the mantle of keeping the community alive. He said it’s typical for an enclave like Little Saigon to either become a “Disney-fied” version of itself — one that’s outward facing to cater to tourists — or it could slowly be taken over by a newer group of immigrants.
While it’s natural, he adds there is a loss to Asian American identity that happens when an enclave like this is lost.
“What's the impact of the second-, third-generation, becoming professional and starting to live ‘white’ in the burbs? They lose that self identity, they lose a piece of themselves,” Leong said. “The question that's often asked of me is, ‘Why do we need to save these ethnic enclaves, whether it’s Little Saigon, whether it’s [Japantown], whether it’s Koreatown?’ My answer is, it's about belonging. White people have their space already created by the government. That's called suburbia.”
It’s unclear what the next generation of Little Saigon might look like.
The neighborhood may have changes on the horizon, and for other reasons aside from younger generations moving out. The city of Sacramento hopes to revitalize the Stockton Boulevard Corridor as an extension of its redevelopment efforts around Aggie Square, the $1.1 billion project that would expand the UC Davis Health campus at the northern end of Stockton Boulevard.
It’s still unclear how the Stockton Boulevard Plan could impact the Little Saigon community. What is clear is that many of its business owners don’t want their children to take over their businesses along the Boulevard. Instead, they want their children to strive for Leong’s idea of the white suburban American dream.
Tony Tranh, who owns Wonder Cafe at 65th Street and Stockton Boulevard, says his parents moved to Sacramento for the next generation.
“They came here mainly just for us — the kids,” Tranh said. “They feel it’s better for the second generation to grow up in America and have a better life.”
He said he doesn’t plan to pass his business down to his children and would encourage them to find a career doing something else.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Phung has lived his entire life along Stockton Boulevard in the Little Saigon neighborhood. He said he stays to take care of his aging parents, but he acknowledges the younger generation’s desire to move elsewhere.
“Well, most of the time they want more freedom, because South Sacramento is very small, it’s not an ideal environment for everybody,” Phung said. “The type of community we have in South Sacramento hasn’t really changed, the businesses are the same. It’s not made for people who want to do more with their lives and progress forward. It isn’t built for youth.”
Su Ying Plaskett is the co-owner Vinh Phat Supermarket, one of the flagship Vietnamese grocery stores in Little Saigon. For 40 years, it has sat at the corner of Lemon Hill Avenue and Stockton Boulevard, which is the at the far end of the soon-to-be revitalized corridor.
She opened her market as a way to provide employment for family members who weren’t able to get a job elsewhere because of their limited English skills.
But now, she’s looking at retiring. Initially, she said her son didn’t want to take over the business because he wanted to pursue a career in medicine.
She explained, “I say if you don’t take it over, I don’t have the heart to sell that thing.” Eventually, he relented. Soon, Plaskett will transition ownership and store duties to her son.
Plaskett knows the younger generation is moving out, but she believes this area will always mean something to Vietnamese Sacramentans.
Nikki felt like she hit a wall that she couldn’t get past. The events that cPALSs were organizing were not well-planned, or even fiscally solvent. And the organization, running on a skeletal crew, lacked a lot of organizational infrastructure, such as being able to onboard volunteers into cPALSs. And the volunteers—bless their heart—but they don’t have sufficient skills to run a CDC, such as having an MBA degree.
Furthermore, the Little Saigon district, the heart of the metropolitan area’s 42,000 Vietnamese Americans (2019), is situated in an economically challenged area.
Nikki and I talked about why we got involved in the Vietnamese community. I told her it was like someone handing me their heart into my hands, and I didn’t want to let it drop. I could have just dropped it, and move on with my life. But I knew the history of the Vietnamese American experience so well, that the heart of all the people in that community was in my hands, and I just couldn’t let it go. I think about my daughter, and the dreams of my wife and I in wanting to raise her to be proud as a Vietnamese American, a capable and happy adult later in life, and perhaps even to form a loving relationship with her only cousin in Vietnam who is by all accounts separated from her geographically, economically, politically, culturally, and by an ocean of intergenerational trauma. Furthermore, as I have lived in Sacramento for 3 years so far, I’ve started to fall in love with the ethnically diverse neighborhoods, and the rich history of the area, even as some people would tell me that there wasn’t anything amazing about Sacramento. While it’s true that it might not have the dynamism as Silicon Valley, I’ve always believed that with anything in life, play to your strengths. Sacramento, along with being the capital of California, is the City of Trees, and the heart of the California gold rush.
I told Nikki, the first step was to assess the current situation with input from the team. I needed to get an honest view from the voluntary officers of what their vision is, and their perception of the current state of affairs, and what they think is the process or next objective in moving towards that vision. From there, I may be able to engineer a strategic path forward, based on everything I know about organizational studies, leadership studies, Silicon Valley startup methodology, coalition-building in the Vietnamese youth community, human capital management, mental health, emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, behavioral economics, marketing, UX design and product management, business analytics, community operating systems, human-computer interaction, technology trends, Vietnamese and Asian American studies, anthropology, geopolitics and global economy. And if I didn’t know enough, I will find someone who does.
My greatest fear, is despite having all that knowledge, I will have failed. That maybe I should’ve just gone with the flow, just move to wherever felt most convenient, and just focus on only what’s best for my family. Maybe I’m a stubborn idiot. Or do I try to plant my roots, and practice what I preach onto others, as Neil Barringham, an Australian mental health trainer and community worker once said, “The grass is greener where you water it.”