By Andrew Lam, New America Media
This week, Bao Nguyen takes office as mayor of Garden Grove. He is the city’s first Vietnamese American mayor and its youngest ever to hold that office, having beat out his opponent and six-time incumbent Bruce Broadwater by just 15 votes.
Bao Nguyen
For Vietnamese residents his win points to a change in the politics of Little Saigon – the heart of Garden Grove’s sizable Vietnamese community – which have long been defined by Cold War memories and simmering hatred of the government in Hanoi.
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in California, Nguyen got a taste of Little Saigon politics when he organized a protest against then presidential-hopeful John McCain, who traveled to the area to rally support among Vietnamese Americans in 2000. Appearing with fellow students from UC Irvine, Nguyen showed up wearing a t-shirt scrawled with the words “American Gook” across the front.
“We are Americans, not gooks!” Nguyen screamed through a bullhorn, recalling McCain’s oft-repeated description of his captors as a POW in Hanoi. It’s a phrase McCain has refused to apologize for.
A scuffle broke out at the rally, with McCain’s Vietnamese supporters pushing Nguyen and his group into the street.
“They were pinching us, throwing dirt at us,” Nguyen recalled for the 2004 PBS documentary “Saigon, USA.” He added, “Here’s my community – the people pushing me out into the street were older Vietnamese Americans.”
Departing from the ‘old script’
Some 14 years later Nguyen is now the mayor of that same community, though getting there involved reaching beyond ethnic loyalties.
“Other elected [Vietnamese American] officials have banked on locking up the Vietnamese vote, [then hoping] for a good enough percent among other ethnicities,” explained Hao-Nhien Vu, a long time insider of Little Saigon politics and former editor of the Vietnamese language newspaper Nguoi Viet.
Not Nguyen. His victory marks a departure from the old script.
Nguyen began his political career by first reaching out to the Latino community, learning Spanish and working with the Centro Cultural de México, a community space for the area’s Latino residents. His efforts won him a seat on the Garden Grove Unified School District in 2012, and again paid dividends last November.
Local media took note of the young candidate’s strategy of diversifying his support base. The OC Weekly reported that Nguyen switched from Spanish to English and Vietnamese as he addressed a crowd of mostly young supporters made up of Arab Americans, Latinos, whites and Vietnamese.
The paper compared that to Republican Janet Nguyen (no relation), who won the 34th district state senate seat in Orange County, and who made her career by “pitting Vietnamese and Latino voters against each other.”
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