Little Saigon

[James A. Landau]

"Little x" for an ethnic neighborhood in the US goes way back---I recall "Little Italy" from circa 1960 and I'm sure it wasn't new then.

In the late 1970's a Vietnamese neighborhood sprang up in the "Clarendon" section of Arlington County, which is across the river from Washington DC.  (Clarendon is the shopping area around the intersection of Wilson and Washington Blvds.  I recall a rug store there with a big sign in the window reading "Bare Floors Are Obscene!").  This area quickly became known as "Little Saigon".  There was a movement to have the Metro stop at Clarendon (which, if I remember correctly, opened in 1980) named "Little Saigon" (Metro, less imaginative than the residents of Little Saigon, who were also into Vietnamese-language vanity plates, chose the bland "Clarendon" as the name of the stop.)

I'm sure there are numerous similar examples in other cities.

On another topic, I first heard "kung fu" in 1961 when someone in my eighth grade class answered a magazine ad.  He said he was disappointed---"it is just Korean dirty fighting".  I agree it was years before the term came into general use.  Except for judo, Oriental martial arts were not widely known circa 1961, at least among my classmates.

    - James A. Landau

"White people have no souls"  - Baron Munchausen


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