The San Jose Little Saigon controversy and its impact on Vietnamese American politics

In the San Jose Mercury News today, there’s an article on the impact on Vietnamese American politics and politicians in San Jose. Madison Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American to ever be elected to San Jose’s city council despite the city having one of the largest populations of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam, found herself in the middle of a controversy last year over whether or not to name of a strip in San Jose called Little Saigon, which raised the ire of conservative Vietnamese Americans across the city. The controversy quieted down after she relented and allowed the strip to be called Little Saigon, but not without exposing the relative political immaturity of the Vietnamese American community.

While the obvious impact of Communism on the Vietnamese American community is very apparent to those who know about this community, the frankly petty fights over whether to call certain areas of Vietnamese American communities Little Saigon, such as in Orange County, San Francisco, etc. have exposed how incredibly short-sighted many of these “activists” are. Many non-Vietnamese in San Jose grew tired of all the infighting, and were left wondering whether Vietnamese Americans are able to actually govern without letting this be a dominant issue, time and time again. Many Vietnamese American political hopefuls who tried to run in San Jose City Council using ONLY the Little Saigon controversy as their only political issue found themselves unable to raise any significant money and placed last or close to last in the most recent elections.

This isn’t just restricted to the Vietnamese community. Speaking from personal experience and what I’ve seen in the Filipino American community,for example, we are so caught up in regionalism, and conflating Filipino with Asian, that we often lose sight of the fact that we can’t just pander to our own ethnic communities if we’re going to gain any real political power. I’ve seen Filipino American political newbies in Daly City and San Francisco spit out slogans, saying what they’ll do for the Filipino community, not realizing that there are other constituencies that they’re responsible for with the obvious result being that they lose the election. Why should a non-Filipino vote for these candidates if they’ve shown that they know next to nothing about them? In San Jose, why should a non-Vietnamese person vote for a Vietnamese candidate whose only issue is about one little strip of road?

I think it’s high time for many of these politicians to realize that it takes a lot more than representing one small population in order to win an election. I think it’s also time for the Vietnamese American community to start having dialog about confronting their past and learning how to use that past to their advantage politically, and not use it to balkanize each other.