Tony Lâm holds his life’s history inside a glass display case. It’s the centerpiece of his home in Westminster, California, and towers over the dining table. Family photos, military badges, awards and portraits exhibit a biography in kaleidoscopic form. And one morning last December, he pointed to one portrait in particular, a framed photo of a smiling, younger Tony Lâm with coiffed black hair and a perfectly pressed suit. A capture of a time when he still felt almost naive; unaware of the mark he’d leave on the world. Its prizes and prices.
It’s been half a century since the fall of Saigon in April 1975, when Lâm and his family left their native Vietnam for a new life in the United States, away from communist rule. He’s lived several different lives during that time. He’s been a gas station attendant, a life insurance salesman and a restaurateur. He made history, experienced political triumphs and political failures, and witnessed the birth of Southern California’s Little Saigon, a cultural and economic hub that’s home to the largest and oldest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam. Now he’s one of few remaining first wave émigrés to leave Vietnam at the end of the war, confronted with the reality that time will march on without him.
When the war ended, refugees moved to the U.S. by the millions. The nation is now home to the largest Vietnamese diaspora in the world. Almost 40 percent of those immigrants ended up in California, more than any other state. And just like Chinatowns or Little Italys or Little Havanas that have cropped up around the country, Little Saigons gradually appeared to preserve Vietnamese culture. None is more influential or symbolic than Orange County’s. About 30 miles south of Los Angeles, Little Saigon spans the cities of Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Westminster. The ethnic enclave has brought hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Americans to live in Orange County, where they now account for 10 percent of the national Vietnamese American population. There are Vietnamese supermarkets, restaurants and banks; Vietnamese newspapers, television channels and radio stations all in the native language. A rarity for a demographic that makes up less than 3 percent of the country at large.
The fall of Saigon
Despite its prefix, Little Saigon is the only Saigon left. When Northern Vietnam won the war, the new government renamed the original “Hồ Chí Minh City” after the north’s communist leader. That leaves this California counterpart as the world’s last remaining glimpse into a pre-war Vietnam. “It’s drawing Vietnamese people from all over the globe. Little Saigon is a magnet, a hub for the Vietnamese community everywhere. … Going there is like taking a pilgrimage,” says Phuong Nguyen, a professor of U.S. history at California State University, Monterey Bay and author of “Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little Saigon” who left Vietnam shortly after the war. “The reason it’s so well known is because it’s pretty much the cultural center of the Vietnamese diaspora, kind of like Hollywood and New York and Washington, D.C., all put into one.”
The events that brought Lâm to this community have never appeared as clearly as they do to him now. Throughout his adolescence and into adulthood, he confronted the greatest of unknowns. Loss, life and death, invention and reinvention. Now, sitting in his dining room, glancing at his own portrait, he appeared adrift in those memories.
“Little Saigon is a magnet, a hub for the Vietnamese community everywhere. Going there is like taking a pilgrimage.”
One jacket, one shirt, one pair of shorts. Lâm couldn’t waste time packing more. It was December 1946, the onset of the First Indochina War, and his family needed to evacuate their home in Hải Phòng, a coastal northeastern city near the border with China. Power struggles between Nationalist Vietnamese leader Hồ Chí Minh and colonial French forces had turned the metropolis to a pile of ash and rubble. Bombs sent smoke billowing from the port. Bullet shells and casings littered the streets. But it was only when the French placed the city under military occupation that leaving became inevitable.
Lâm was 10 years old, about to seek refuge with his parents and six siblings in a village in the nearby countryside, but somewhere in the shuffle of thousands of people escaping the city, Lâm lost his family. He didn’t know where to go. All he knew was to keep pushing south. He wandered forests outside the city limits, slept in caves for several nights along the way and washed his clothes by hand like his parents taught him to do. He walked through foggy cemeteries strewn with the deserted bodies of alleged spies and realized, all too young, that he had to do whatever he could in order to survive.
It took him months to find his brothers, and several years to reunite with the rest of his family. Yet even though he no longer had to confront the cost of war alone, he found himself caught in a mental fog. His mind kept returning to the deserted corpses. They haunted him in a sort of waking nightmare. He thought of their families and their fears, of how the only difference between the living and the dead was some combination of luck and grit.
He’d become a refugee for a second time a decade later, in the summer of 1954, when his country split in half to create a communist north supported by the Soviet Union and China and an American-supported south in the leadup to the Second Indochina War — or, as most Americans know it, the Vietnam War. As the Soviet Union and China funneled more weapons and supplies to the north, military personnel and combat units from the United States multiplied in tandem. America became more involved in the war because it functioned as an extension of the Cold War, as a fight against the growth of communism on a global stage.
Lâm, meanwhile, had just embraced capitalism. He fled south to escape the communists with his family, joined the Navy, served for three years and learned enough English to pursue work for a U.S. government contractor after his discharge. It took him decades to build his first fortune. But by the mid-1970s, now with a wife and six kids, Lâm owned a two-story villa in central Saigon’s French quarter and hired a personal chauffeur to get to work each day. He’d carved a life for himself beyond survival.
Still, the war raged on — and not in a way that benefited the side Lâm had hitched his fate to. The communist forces were prevailing. The U.S. was pulling out. In the spring of 1975, the military began evacuating anyone affiliated with the American government or South Vietnamese Army, the most vulnerable targets for assassination or imprisonment in the event of enemy takeover. Lâm among them. His family was scheduled for the first flight out of Saigon on April 23.
Just like when he fled his home for the first time at 10, he packed a knapsack for each of his six kids with a single set of clothes. They boarded a crowded American military aircraft bound for Guam, 2,400 miles away. “My parents tried to hide that we were not coming back, that there was a war and we were going to lose the country,” says Lâm’s eldest daughter, Cathy, 12 at the time of the escape. “I did not know the details. I just knew it was chaotic.”
Camp Asan in Guam had held a leper colony in the 19th century and German prisoners during World War I. Even through the blur of dusk and exhaustion, Lâm, his wife Hop and six children could see abandoned barracks, overgrown grass, broken toilets and piles of rubble. Most recently, the camp housed B-52 bomber crews tasked with dropping explosives over Vietnam. That spring, it housed refugees of the same war.
The camp functioned as part of Operation New Life, a federal program to temporarily host and eventually resettle Vietnamese escapees. Rather than take the first opportunity to move to America with his family, Lâm chose to stay behind with his wife and kids and run the camp as a volunteer manager for three months. When the tens of thousands of refugees at Camp Asan learned that seven days later, Saigon fell to communist control, Lâm cried alongside his countrymen. But then he sprung to action.
He brought in priests and monks to offer spiritual counseling. He organized outdoor movie screenings. For the Fourth of July, he hosted a dance party with live music, a beauty pageant and a volleyball competition. Whatever he could to build community. It made a difference; his neighbors reported feeling “comfortable and free,” and U.S. military officers later lauded his leadership as “outstanding.” He learned that even if he could never go home again, he could find a way to carry it with him. He could make a new one.
Just like Chinatowns or Little Italys or Little Havanas around the country, Little Saigons gradually appeared to preserve Vietnamese culture. None are more influential than Orange County’s.
The birth of Little Saigon
Lâm couldn’t recognize his wife. It was now the fall of 1975 and he’d driven to the same Southern California shop where he’d dropped her off earlier, but when she walked up to the station wagon, she appeared almost ghostly. Her black hair was covered in ash from sanding down guitars and her face was coated in a thin layer of dust. Lâm burst into tears at the sight of her. He could hardly recognize anything about his life anymore.
After three months of running Camp Asan, Lâm and his family decided to start building their new lives in America. A commanding officer Lâm had formerly worked with offered to sponsor his family in Florida, where they moved for a brief stint in July. They quickly realized they could barely afford the $450 a month in rent, even with Lâm and his wife working full time.
Lâm’s brother invited him to move his family to Huntington Beach, California, and stay in a four-bedroom house crammed with more than 20 people — at least until he could afford to rent a place of his own. So they headed West, to start over again.
Lâm worked as a gas station attendant in the evenings so he could take his kids to school, bring his wife Hop to her day job in the mornings and pick her up before his shift. The refugee camp had at times been bleak, but it could also be fulfilling. Plus it ensured his family’s needs were met. Their first month in California, however, felt demoralizing.
It took two years of saving, scraping and borrowing for Lâm to buy a single-story house on a corner lot in Westminster. Even then, the city mostly consisted of mobile home parks, tire shops, deserted strawberry fields and scrapyards. Just over a dozen Vietnamese businesses existed in the entire county. Lâm drove his family an hour north to an Asian market in Los Angeles to shop for groceries. Options for restaurants with recognizable cuisine were just as scarce, a predictable byproduct of a refugee dispersal policy that dictated how the U.S. government resettled immigrants after the end of the war. The idea was to spread new citizens across the country — in cities and towns across Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and elsewhere — rather than dump large populations in concentrated areas. Avoiding ethnic enclaves was believed to promote more streamlined assimilation and avoid placing undue pressure on existing communities. Though in practice, and certainly for Lâm, it also meant many felt isolated and lost without familiar neighbors or resources.
Today, it’s more commonly understood that ethnic enclaves actually benefit refugee communities. A Stanford study from 2019 found that refugees are at least 6 percent more likely to become employed within their first three years in a new country if they live in a community that has a large share of others with the same nationality, ethnicity or language. Another study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported in 2019 that Asian American enclaves had less poverty, less crime and higher rates of health care access than non-enclaves.
Lâm didn’t know the impact his entrepreneurship would have on Little Saigon. All he knew was that if he felt homesick for his native food and culture, others likely did, too. He decided to open a Vietnamese restaurant in 1984. Viễn Đông in Garden Grove started out serving beef jerky and rice batter crepes before graduating to a larger menu of crab noodles, escargot noodles, sweet potato and shrimp stir-fry — all northern Vietnamese cuisine, the food Lâm grew up with. The 48-year-old greeted guests at every table and poured tea as they sat; his children bused tables or filled out paperwork; his wife simmered massive pots of stock in the evenings after work to serve in soups like phở the next day. “My dad had always wanted to build Little Saigon,” says Cathy Lâm. “He was one of the first few people to open a business.” Though many more quickly followed.
The second wave of immigrants who fled by boat in the late 1970s and the third wave who escaped in the 1980s gave Orange County a population spike of about 1,000 new refugees every month. Vietnamese businesses ballooned from vacant lots to more than 700 in a single decade, and Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, officially recognized Little Saigon as a cultural and commercial landmark in 1988 by erecting 13 signs along freeway exit ramps declaring the area as such. Though that’s around the same time locals and city council members pushed back. “It was the very first time in the history of the U.S. that the Americans lost a war. So the country was still questioning itself,” says Tung Bui, co-author of “The Making of Little Saigon: Narratives of Nostalgia, (Dis)enchantments and Aspirations” and a former Vietnamese refugee. “There was an integration issue.”
Longtime residents resented the rapid transformation. A group of more than 100 Westminster residents signed a petition pleading with the city to “deny granting any license to any Indochinese refugee attempting to set up any business in this Viet town area.” A popular bumper sticker began appearing across central Orange County that read “Will the last American to leave Garden Grove bring the flag?” When immigrants tried to create a South Vietnamese Armed Forces Day parade to honor fallen soldiers and veterans, many of whom had fought alongside U.S. troops, politicians shut it down as un-American. “It’s my opinion that you’re all Americans and you’d better be Americans,” City Councilman Frank Fry told the organizers in 1989. “If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam.” Fry eventually released a public apology for his comment, but those words ate away at Lâm. So much so, they made him run for city council in 1992.
His “Tax Fighter, Crime Fighter” motto appealed to both the majority Republican Vietnamese American community and county at large. His campaign had the backing of the police department and the mayor, and most of his supporters were non-Vietnamese. He received a winning total of 6,500 votes in a city where only 2,000 Vietnamese Americans were registered to vote. And at 56 years old, Tony Lâm became the first Vietnamese American to hold elected office in the United States.
He spent his free time conducting outreach to register more Vietnamese American voters and help parents register their children for schools. And he advocated for the beautification of the enclave, even when colleagues shot down his efforts as a waste of funds. One of his favorite accomplishments was finding black antique French streetlights to line the streets of Little Saigon, like how they had in the old country. They’re still standing.
Lâm ran two more times, in 1994 and 1998, for a total of three terms and 10 years. Twenty-four Vietnamese Americans have run for political office in Orange County since the start of Lâm’s political career. “I think Tony created a path for us. I wasn’t involved in politics at all in the beginning,” says Hugh Nguyen, Orange County’s clerk-recorder who also arrived in California as a Vietnamese refugee. “Now I look back and see that he created a path for all of us in the new generation to be part of that team.” Lâm’s precedence and impact reverberates on the local, state and national level. In November 2024, Derek Tran became the first Vietnamese American elected to represent Little Saigon in Congress. A new first for a new generation.
Lâm had chosen to enter politics because he believed in the American dream and loved his adopted country. Its complications, its Constitution, its citizens. Even when they sent his new career crashing down.
At 56 years old, Tony Lâm became the first Vietnamese American to hold elected office in the United States.
‘My heart has been torn apart’
A sea of bright yellow, red, white and blue roiled under a golden glow of streetlamps and spilled across the strip mall. Most protesters wore or waved the flag for South Vietnam or the United States. Some hung, burned and stamped on effigies of Vietnamese Communist Party founder Hồ Chí Minh. Others held signs that read something along the lines of “OUR WOUNDS WILL NEVER HEAL! BE AWARE! COMMUNISTS ARE INVADING AMERICA!” All had gathered to demonstrate against a Westminster business owner’s choice of window decor.
Trường Văn Trần, a former Vietnamese refugee who owned the video store Hi-Tek, had hung a flag of Vietnam’s communist government above a poster of Hồ Chí Minh in his storefront on Jan. 17, 1999. He claimed to do so out of reverence for the First Amendment. What ensued was 53 days of protests that drew about 15,000 people, made its way onto national news and inspired similar demonstrations in San Jose and Houston. Police in riot gear arrested dozens of protesters in Orange County, including several who jeered from behind barricades outside the video store. Eggs were thrown at him and loudspeakers blasted sounds of machine-gun fire to psych him out. It became a microcosm of the same war that had formed this community in the first place. History had repeated itself. Except this time, the South would win.
Lâm found himself in a challenging position. He was north Vietnamese, originally, and more sensitive to the threat of communism than most. He’d fled it three times just to find the kind of freedom the Constitution enshrines. He saw Trần’s display of the flag and poster a mockery of these freedoms, but the city attorney advised him and his peers on the city council against attending any protests out of fear it would be interpreted as city approval of the event. With the risk of violence and property damage, that would mean inviting lawsuits against the city. Plus, as controversial as his actions were, the First Amendment protected Trần’s right to display whatever messages he wanted on his property. Lâm avoided attending the two months of protests to prevent any accidental endorsements. It made rational sense to him, but being as visible of a community member as he was, his constituents took notice of his absence and framed him as a communist sympathizer.
The protests moved to Lâm’s restaurant and lingered there for 73 days. Demonstrators picketed his business, harassed his family and deterred his customers. At a city council meeting in late February, he shared that the havoc strained his community standing, career, personal relationships — even his marriage. “My heart has been torn apart,” he said at the meeting. His voice cracked as he fought back tears. “It’s truly tearing me down.” He chose to get ahead of any future recall movements and ended his political career with the close of his third term in 2002. He claims not to regret his decision. He understood the inherent challenges of occupying a position in politics. Yet for years, he found himself lying awake at night, anguished over what he saw as a public misunderstanding of his character. An unjust downfall.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” about, in part, Vietnam and its aftermath, has written that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” For first wave immigrants like Lâm who carry those memories firsthand, the war in many ways rages on. The division of northern and southern Vietnam that led to it all hasn’t dulled. But younger generations of Vietnamese are more distant from the days of war and less hung up on the demarcations that caused it. As of 2023, the United States and Vietnam are diplomatic partners. Almost 70 percent of Vietnam’s population was born after the war — the first generation to grow up in an independent country without conflict. More than 40 percent of Vietnamese Americans say they’re on the way to achieving the American dream, and nearly 30 percent say they already have it. “In 10 more years, the first generation of incoming refugees will be all gone, and then the future of Orange County is going to be very different,” says Bui, the “The Making of Little Saigon” co-author. “All of this is slowly becoming history.”
On the morning of May 3, 2022, two decades after his political fall, an 85-year-old Lâm experienced that attitude shift for himself. He arrived with his family at Park West Park in Westminster for something like vindication. More than 100 people gathered under cypress and sycamore trees to celebrate the park’s new name and identity. Bordered by brick pillars, a sign chiseled in bold black letters reads: “TONY LAM PARK.” The city dedicated the open space to the former councilman on behalf of his accomplishments as both a politician and fierce advocate of Little Saigon. Community members and politicians delivered speeches in recognition of Lâm, from council members to former state senators. Then they waited for him to speak.
The honoree ambled up to the podium, cane in hand. An American flag pin on the lapel of his black suit winked in the sunlight. He spoke of his political career, his trajectory as a business owner, his time as a refugee camp volunteer. And he joked. “In my life span, I don’t know why, I always end up as a volunteer with no pay,” he quipped, met by knowing chuckles from the crowd.
Honoring the past
The morning sun had harshened to an afternoon glare by the time Lâm finished sharing his story. His eyes moved from mine, to the glass case, to the garden and the trees he planted himself. Some have stood since 1977, when he first bought the property. This stucco house on a corner lot in Westminster, California, is Lâm’s first and only American home. He’s lived in it with his family for nearly half a century. Longer now than he lived in Vietnam.
Little Saigon, this independent enclave built by refugees turned business owners, now brings in almost a billion dollars in annual sales. And, even as the area grows and changes over time, it’s still honoring the past that shaped it. Every April, during the week of the 30th, Westminster recognizes Black April Memorial Week to mourn the fall of Saigon. It’s the first city in the world to formally do so. The Tết Festival that Lâm helped start in 1982 — a Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration that includes a parade complete with dragon dances and marching bands — brings in more than 15,000 attendees each year.
Despite having no formal engagements, Lâm, now 88 years old, still wears crisp buttoned shirts and dress pants, still meticulously coifs his hair, but his stature has shrunk, his hair has grayed. “Old age is like a shipwreck,” he joked. His days now are filled with games of mahjong against friends and family. Dinner three times a week with one of his daughters. Working out at the gym. Anything to structure his time as he braces for the future, whatever shape it takes. “The Vietnamese have a tendency not to sit around.”
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.