PreservationNation

Written by Kim A. O’Connell

When I was a child, my mother, a Vietnamese immigrant, would often drive us from our home in suburban Maryland to the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, Va., to go shopping. There, in an enclave of markets, boutiques, and restaurants known informally as “Little Saigon,” she could speak in her native language to shopkeepers and fellow customers. We would gorge ourselves on spring rolls—called cha gio—and have sweet sesame balls filled with bean paste for dessert. To an American-born girl like me, the sights, smells, and sounds were fascinating. To my mother, it was like going home.

Today, hardly any trace of Virginia’s Little Saigon remains. Arlington County, as a close-in suburb of Washington, D.C., has become increasingly urbanized in the last three decades, especially along its busy transit corridors. Washington’s Metro subway system had played a direct role in the development of Little Saigon, but it eventually hastened its demise as well. Researching this history has become both a personal and a professional quest of mine.

When my graduate preservation program encouraged projects that promoted cultural diversity, I saw an opportunity to study Little Saigon and learn more about my own heritage at the same time. In addition to doing archival research, I interviewed several former refugees—people like Nguyen Ngoc Bich, who often served as a community representative in the 1970s, and Anhthu Lu, who arrived in Arlington as a teenager and helped her aunt run a gift shop in Clarendon. They and others revealed a common struggle to retain their traditions while assimilating into American life, a phenomenon that a Vietnamese priest once described as “catching two fish with two hands.” In their voices, I heard my mother’s voice too, and felt new empathy for her experience.

A Powerful Drawing Force

In 1980, about 245,000 Vietnamese lived in the United States, with about 91 percent of the population having arrived in the five years since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Most Vietnamese settled in California, with other large populations developing in Texas, Louisiana, and northern Virginia. About 3,000 Vietnamese had settled in the Washington area before the end of the war—mostly war brides, students, military officers, or relatives of diplomats—and this became a powerful drawing force once war refugees poured into the States.

The establishment of Little Saigon added another layer of significance to a historic commercial district. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Arlington’s Clarendon neighborhood had been the premier shopping area in northern Virginia. Several two-story buildings in the neighborhood were built in the Colonial, Art Deco, and Streamline Modern styles, with retail on the ground floor and offices or meeting rooms upstairs.

By the early 1970s, however, Clarendon had fallen into a period of decline, as new highways drew shoppers out to large regional malls. Once construction began on the Metro line that would eventually run through the neighborhood, even more shopkeepers moved out. Landlords charged low rents to willing takers, allowing Vietnamese to establish businesses in the historic buildings. One of these, the Pacific department store, quickly became the social center of Little Saigon, with goods sold on the first floor and a billiard hall and café upstairs.

Ongoing Transformations

But the early 1980s brought the completed Metro through the county, and Arlington began its ongoing transformation from a rural and suburban area into a thriving urban center. Rising rents caused many Vietnamese business owners to move from Little Saigon west to the city of Falls Church, Va. There, community leaders developed a new shopping complex known as Eden Center, which today remains the centerpiece of the Vietnamese community in the greater Washington area and beyond. Although a few Vietnamese restaurants still exist in or near Clarendon, the era of Little Saigon was over by 1982.

Today, Clarendon is increasingly characterized by high-rise buildings and chain stores. The few old buildings that remain have been adaptively reused as new restaurants and shops. For example, a circa-1929 building that once housed Saigon Market and was one of the first two Vietnamese stores to open in Little Saigon, is now a CVS drug store.

Despite these changes, opportunities for interpretation still exist. As an offshoot of my research, I am now working with Anhthu Lu and others in the Vietnamese community to commemorate Little Saigon either through a historical marker or some other means. So far, we have formed a steering committee and are collecting the necessary materials to make our case. “There’s a little park there [near the Clarendon Metro plaza], where you could have some kind of monument that showed the face of the old Clarendon, so that at least there is something that marks that the Vietnamese had come there and flourished,” Mr. Bich said in an interview. “It’s part of Arlington history, not just Vietnamese history.” And it’s part of my history too.

Kim O’Connell is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Va. Her work has appeared in Preservation, Traditional Building, National Parks, America’s Civil War, and other publications. She holds a master of arts in historic preservation from Goucher College and blogs at www.traditional-building.com/Kim_OConnell.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under asian pacific american heritage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.