8th Annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration

Welcome to San Francisco’s Little Saigon Cultural and Commercial District

By Philip Nguyen

Pass the Asian Art Museum on Larkin and McAllister Streets and a green and yellow banner that reads, “Welcome to Little Saigon,” greets you warmly. You are now in the Little Saigon Cultural and Commercial District of the Tenderloin where approximately 3,000 Vietnamese and 2,000 other Southeast Asians are residing!

Little Saigon is the preferred name given to any of several overseas Vietnamese immigrant and descendent communities outside Vietnam. Saigon is the former name of the capital of the former South Vietnam, where a large number of first-generation Vietnamese immigrants originate.

The Vietnamese came to San Francisco three decades ago, mainly settling in the Tenderloin as the last affordable housing area in a neighborhood that wasn’t already claimed by an immigrant or ethnic group. It also practically adjoins Chinatown, which made many Vietnamese comfortable because the Chinese and Vietnamese share the same cultural roots. Cambodians and Laotians then followed the Vietnamese to the central part of the city.

San Francisco’s Little Saigon vividly exemplifies the efforts of the Vietnamese community to gain recognition from San Francisco’s city government. They lobbied for the official designation of Little Saigon as far back as the days of Mayor Art Agnos in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In 2003, then-Supervisor Chris Daly of District 6, which includes the Tenderloin, worked with a number of the city’s Vietnamese community-based organizations, including the Southeast Asian Community Center (SEACC), to sponsor a resolution designating the area along the Larkin Street corridor from McAllister Street to Geary Boulevard as Little Saigon. The Board of Supervisors passed this resolution unanimously on September 23, 2003.

In 2008, the City approved funding to erect two pillars at the corner of Larkin and Eddy Streets and a sign saying, “The Gateway to Little Saigon”

To us, Little Saigon is not only a cultural and commercial area of the city’s Vietnamese American community but more importantly, it serves as a reminder of our roots and why we are here.

The number of Vietnamese American businesses in the Tenderloin is estimated to be 300, with 20 percent of them in Little Saigon. Most of these businesses are retailers or service providers, such as restaurants, travel agencies, acupuncturists’ and doctors’ offices, nail salons, barber shops and immigration services. City officials, community leaders, developers and Vietnamese American merchants hope that the Little Saigon name will bring in more visitors to the area and help develop the Tenderloin.

In fact, the annual  Vietnamese Lunar New Year Festival in Little Saigon and the Asian Heritage Street Celebration, the nation’s largest-pan Asian street fair organized by the AsianWeek Foundation have been held in this neighborhood with this objective in mind.

The Vietnamese American community in San Francisco will make every concerted effort to seek support and funding to develop Little Saigon to be on a par with San Francisco’s Japantown and Chinatown.

Philip Nguyen is one of the founders of Little Saigon in Westminster City, Orange County, the first and the biggest Little Saigon. He became the Executive Director of the Southeast Asian Community Center in San Francisco in 1997 and helped establish San Francisco’s Little Saigon, where he resides .