South of The 626 and Los Angeles, there are established towns in Orange County that serve as enclaves for thriving Vietnamese American communities. Garden Grove and its adjacent sister city Westminster constitute a region known as Little Saigon. These cities are famous locally for their lit late-night boba shops, Pho, and Vietnamese cafes. I’ve driven forty minutes South to Garden Grove and Westminster after work just to meet up with a friend over boba and it’s always been so worth it. Little Saigon is also situated in a region with high accessibility to many different local colleges, resulting in a youthful and vibrant vibe.

Asian diaspora, come home

When I was younger, my family traveled far around the country for new jobs and I experienced all sorts of racism: I was called “chink” by many of my commenters and fans on YouTube vlogs, bullied and harassed in school, taunted on the street, and dealt with passive-aggressive treatment at anywhere from convenience stores to upscale restaurants. Whether the area was very white, poor, safe, or wealthy, it didn’t matter because I ultimately never felt at home. As a result, I developed identity issues while growing up. But the past two years of enclave living restored my confidence in my identity and gave me a sense of fulfillment I hadn’t known before.

Political Scientist Robert Axelrod proves the effectiveness of minority enclaves with game theory in his seminal piece, “The Evolution of Cooperation”⁵:

“Suppose that everyone has either a Blue label or a Green label. Further, suppose that both groups are nice to members of their own group and mean to members of the other group. … from any disparity in the numbers of Blues and Greens, creating a majority and a minority … the members of the minority group suffer more. To see why, suppose that there are eighty Greens and twenty Blues in a town, and everyone interacts with everyone else once a week. Then for the Greens, most of their interactions are within their own group and hence result in mutual cooperation. But for the Blues, most of their interactions are with the other group (the Greens), and hence result in punishing mutual defection. Thus, the average score of the minority Blues is less than the average score of the majority Greens. … No wonder minorities often seek defensive isolation.”

In an incredible study showing the impact of living in enclaves on mental health, researchers Emily Walton and David Takeuchi found that unlike integrated communities, Asian ethnic enclaves “concentrate structural and social advantages” while protecting their residents “from the detrimental health effects of community poverty”⁶. This suggests that staying connected to one’s ethnic community may be the best way to access material and moral resources that would be hard to find otherwise.

If you’re an Asian American or recent first-generation immigrant who feels lost, lonely, or going nowhere in a city that treats you like you’re invisible, then please consider moving to L.A. It doesn’t matter who you are; you don’t have to be a YouTube celebrity, well-paid engineer, endowed fuerdai, or high powered executive. Sure, rooftop swimming pools are great, but they’re just icing on the cake at the end of the day. It’s the people, culture, awareness, and mutual respect that truly make The 626 (San Gabriel Valley) and Koreatown, L.A. special. L.A. is a big place with many people, and there are plenty of cool and affordable places to live if you’re willing to do your homework and search for them.

If you’re telling yourself, “Oh, I don’t know… twenty years ago my parents took me to a rundown Chinatown when I was a kid and it was kind of awkward”, then realize that this is something completely different.

If we only talked about numbers, the San Francisco Bay Area actually has a greater percentage of Asian people than SoCal does — 23.2% to 14.7% via an outdated 2010 census — but having lived in that area for two years, I can attest that none of the cultural pleasures and idiosyncrasies found in SoCal exist in Northern California. There is something about SoCal that somehow allowed for the development of strong, protective, and insular Asian enclaves. I suspect it has to do with the sprawling geography of the South and the demographic makeup of the immigrants. NorCal has a lot of highly educated and skilled H1B immigrants that mostly work in engineering and seem, to me at least, indifferent towards preserving in their own culture. They have a lot more of an assimilation mindset there than in the boisterous and spirited immigrant groups prospering in SoCal.