Vietnamese American communities and their commercial and cultural enclaves have developed all over the United States since the early 1980s. Vietnamese Americans are now the fourth-largest Asian American group in the country (after immigrants from China, India, and the Philippines in order of size). According to the 2007 Survey of Business Owners report, the percentage of Vietnamese Americans who own businesses has increased by 56 percent since 2002, compared to the 40 percent increase of other Asian groups. The oldest and largest of these enclaves is Little Saigon in suburban Orange County, California. Situated in a historically white community lined with orange groves in Southern California, Little Saigon has helped bolster the region’s economy with tourism and business. According to 2010 Census figures, the Vietnamese American population in Southern California is 271,000, by far the largest concentration outside of Vietnam. Little Saigon sprawls out from the city of Westminster to adjacent cities of Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, and Santa Ana.

The lunar new year is arguably the most important holiday for Vietnamese, whether in the homeland or overseas. Known as Tê´ t Nguyên Dán, or simply Tê´ t for short, the holiday can be divided into three periods: Tê´ t Niên (before New Year’s Eve), Giao Thù’a (New Year’s Eve), and Tân Niên (the New Year). The customs and traditions associated with Tê´ t have changed for Vietnamese Americans, as with other cultural forms that have endured international migration.

Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Vietnamese Americans have utilized their refugee status as a form of political and cultural thread stitching together a sense of identity and community out of displacement and loss. Among those classified as anti-Communist ethnic minorities by social scientists, Vietnamese in the United States are often compared to Cuban Americans who have been able to collectively align with the Republican Party to leverage representation and power in mainstream politics. With South Vietnam’s collapse and the exodus of Vietnamese refugees from the homeland after the Communist takeover, overseas communities that formed in the wake of the war have been staunchly anti-Communist and vigilantly opposed to the new unified Vietnam under a socialist regime. Given the outcome of the Vietnam War, anticommunism has been the dominant community politics for Vietnamese Americans. This political ideology has often erupted in violence and controversy in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Vietnamese American anticommunism cannot be simply absorbed under the broader umbrella of Cold War McCarthyism that pervaded much of American politics in the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1989. This form of ethnic politics should be understood as a particular minority discourse fraught with tension and irresolution. Vietnamese American anticommunism ideologically opposes socialism in general, but must be historicized as a discourse emerging from the North Vietnam/South Vietnam civil strife, the evacuation of the South’s urban elites in 1975, the exodus of the boat people from the late 1970s to mid- 1980s, and the reeducation camp experiences of men and women from the former South Vietnam. These particular historical events frame and help to reinvigorate anticommunism as a social movement in the United States.