I have one simple, humble request this new year for Orange County’s Little Saigon politicians: please stop trying to rename streets.
Or “honorarily designating” them. Whatever it technically or legally is, Little Saigon politicians just need to put the brakes on this practice. (As is the case with most headache-inducing phenomena in the area, the source of the issue is mostly, although not entirely, among the Westminster City Council.)
Look, I get it. Vietnamese people have faced a lot of racism in Orange County, so we want to, quite literally, make a place for ourselves. Our families were displaced and we want to construct a sense of belonging.
But creating Little Saigon should mean more than slapping nice-sounding Vietnamese names on placards. Growing political power for Vietnamese Americans should mean more than gaining the power to designate a street after Charlie Kirk. [CHARLIE KIRK, WHY??? – ed.]
There’s a lot of examples that make me sigh when I drive past them, but there’s two that initially come to mind when I think of this unfortunate phenomenon – and this was before the Charlie Kirk Way debacle.
The first is our Vietnamese “media row” on Moran St. in Westminster. The designation isn’t terrible (Duong Tu Do, or Freedom Street) and it certainly does hold weighty significance in relation to the area given its history, but ever since the street sign was installed, I’ve been lamenting the potential for a different street designation. It could be designated after Trung Duong, of the first co-op newspaper in South Vietnam, or Doan Viet Hoat, a South Vietnamese journalist who was imprisoned in a re-education camp after the end of the Vietnam War. Maybe it’s just me, but if you’re going to go through the whole process and pay money to honorarily designate a street, might as well go beyond vague platitudes and gestures. I also recognize that the more generic name may have been a compromise, but it’s a bit of a sad compromise if so.
The second is every single street that has been honorarily designated after a Vietnamese military figure and/or king, like Le Loi or Tran Hung Dao. It’s like renaming every street after George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, or Ulysses S. Grant, as if whoever decided to redesignate all these streets couldn’t think of anyone else in history except the top ten names they learned about in elementary school history class. Vietnamese history includes more than military leaders, and there are also scores of other important women in Vietnamese history aside from the Trung sisters or Ba Trieu, such as Phung Thi Chinh. Sticking primarily to military figure or kings for street designations makes Vietnamese history seem so sadly one-dimensional. Again, I get that we all learned about Emperor Quang Trung as kids so perhaps his name is less potentially controversial, but I’d like to think our children would get to gain an even broader view of Vietnamese history in the same way I think a good U.S. history education isn’t limited to just the accomplishments of a handful of presidents.
And I know Garden Grove Councilmember Joe DoVinh has some kind of bizarre personal vendetta against Westminster, but if he really wants to be “better” than that clown car council, he should stay away from copying their bad habit of borderline abusing honorary street redesignations – as he proposed to do during the most recent Garden Grove City Council meeting.
To be clear, I’m not saying I don’t see any point to Vietnamese street designations, or think they’re inherently bad. I understand their significance, acknowledge that they might help Vietnamese-speaking residents or visitors orient themselves, and appreciate their role in making Little Saigon the place it is. But the lack of diversity among the street designations evokes a politics in which any kind of Vietnamese “representation” is supposed to be enough for our community. We’ve been in this country for over 50 years, yet all our Orange County enclave’s senior (and not-so-senior, in the case of Westminster Councilmember Amy Phan West) politicians want to do is squabble over street designations instead of doing more to directly address the fact that people in our community are getting deported, being evicted, having their wages stolen, facing mental health crises, struggling with educational and economic mobility, and so many other critical issues.
Spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on a fancy street sign, or try making sure everyone can afford to live in Little Saigon? Too many Little Saigon politicians keep picking the former in the name of “the Vietnamese community” while letting the actual Vietnamese community suffer.
Westminster, perpetually dysfunctional.