Growing Community in The Bay

The pinnacle of Vietnamese culture in San Jose is located in a small community on Story Road, called Vietnam Town. With over 180,000 residents, San Jose has more Vietnamese residents than any other city outside of Vietnam.

It is a giant shopping center with many places to buy drinks, food, and other items. The shopping center was built in 2007 and is still expanding and adding stores to this day.

Vietnam Town is the home to the Vietnamese community that wants to preserve and keep the culture and traditions alive by doing yearly events for future generations to come and see.

One employee that works at Vietnam Town, Randy Tran, said, “The shopping center holds yearly events and it brings the Asian community together to celebrate those events.”

The biggest event that happens at the shopping district is Tết, which is Vietnamese Lunar New Year, and it is the most important holiday in Vietnamese culture. Tết always starts in the month of January or February depending on the Gregorian calendar, so in 2022, Tết will start on February 1st. They enjoy celebrating the holiday so much, they celebrate it for that whole week Tết is on.

During Tết, they play loud Vietnamese music, they gamble their money, they do dragon dances with the drums, and most importantly they have the loud firecrackers to blast your eardrums.

The community is trying to increase their publicity and make the shopping center larger by adding new stores that attract all kinds of people. Even though it’s a Vietnamese shopping center, there are other kinds of Asians in the area like Malaysians, Cambodians, Chinese and more. The community would love to include different Asian communities and expose people to new cultures.

“Of course I would like to have other Asian communities in Vietnam Town. It’ll give us different varieties of Asian cultures and their food.” said Brian, an active customer at Vietnam Town.

They are already adding more varieties of different Asian cultures into the shopping center. For example, Kesho Social is a ramen and tea restaurant that has Japanese aspects and Little Lamb Hot Pot & BBQ has Chinese and Mongolian. These different restaurants will transform and shape the shopping center as an oasis for Asian culture and bring everyone together.