UC Riverside

During Tết Lunar New Year and other cultural events, multiple lion dance companies maneuver their way through the Asian Garden Mall in the heart of Little Saigon in Orange County, California. These groups perform outside of individual shops and for crowds gathered to celebrate Vietnamese culture. Storeowners within the mall hire companies such as the Anê Thành Lion Dance Troupe from Westminster, claiming that lion dancers bring luck and prosperity to their businesses through the ritual. While the dances seem to provide unmediated cultural expression, lion dances reveal additional narratives—ones that align with capitalism and multiculturalism. I argue that lion dances are integral to the economic ecosystem within the Asian Garden Mall, especially during New Year festivities, because they enable the sale of culture through their stimulation of an affective response tied to consumption. Furthermore, the choreographies present in the cai qing, or “getting the greens” portion of lion dances fit within economic agendas specific to the sociopolitical matrix of Little Saigon, allowing lion dances to become easily integrated as major cultural performances of the Vietnamese diaspora. In addition to their incorporation into the economic sphere, many aspects of lion dances simultaneously challenge dominant discourses surrounding economic ideologies and symbolic cultural spaces. I focus on the Asian Garden Mall as a microcosmic example of these complex forces to tease out their implications for lion dance companies and other cultural workers performing culture in ethnically designated locations.