A Tet parade, celebrating the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, is already being planned in Westminster, but a second one could be held the same weekend in Garden Grove.
The Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California and several other organizations plan to appear at the Garden Grove City Council meeting of Tuesday, Nov. 12, to seek permission to hold a Tet parade in that city. The proposed date for the Garden Grove event, Jan. 26, would come a day after a Tet parade that’s already scheduled in Westminster.
UPDATE: Two Tet parades in Orange County? Garden Grove says yes
The Federation group, which has organized the Tet Parade in Westminster since 2013, was recently booted from that role by the Westminster city council.
Garden Grove Councilman Phat Bui, who heads the Federation group, plans to ask his colleagues for permission to hold a second parade the same weekend. He said they will not be competing events, as they will be held on subsequent days.
A Tet celebration, he argued, is a cultural event that does not belong to any one city.
“The right to have the Tet parade doesn’t reside with the city. It resides with the community,” Bui said Monday.
“Little Saigon doesn’t belong to Westminster,” he added. “It encompasses different cities, including Garden Grove and Fountain Valley.”
On August 14, a majority on the Westminster council voted to grant a parade permit to a newly formed group, the Little Saigon-Westminster Tet Parade Organization. The leader of that group, Duy Nguyen, argued to the Westminster council that the Tet parade had become commercial and geared for business promotion. His group, he said, will hold a parade that centers on Vietnamese history and culture.
Nguyen said he had experience organizing festivals. He also told the Westminster council that he did not want to charge businesses for entering floats in the parade, though he did not provide specifics about how he would raise the money to pay the city for police and other services provided at the event. The Tet parade typically features thousands of participants and draws some 15,000 attendees along Bolsa Avenue.
But Nguyen’s group is not listed as an approved non-profit organization in California. He told the Westminster council members that the non-profit status is in the works while one of the co-sponsoring groups has an approved 501C3 status.
Nguyen could not be reached for comment.
Bui said the Westminster council approved the new Tet parade because of politics. Bui said he is perceived as driving the effort to recall the majority on that city council, Westminster Mayor Tri Ta and council members Kimberly Ho and Chi Charlie Nguyen. Bui said that while he supports their recalls he is not organizing those efforts.
Ta, Ho and Nguyen were the three council members who voted to grant the new group a parade permit. Councilman Nguyen said at the time that he wants “to see something better.”
Meanwhile, Bui said he’s confident that he can come up with the estimated $70,000 needed for the city’s cost to hold a parade in Garden Grove. That parade could take one of three routes — one, along Garden Grove Boulevard from Nutwood to either Main Street or to Euclid Street, a second route along Westminster Avenue, from east of Brookhurst to Taft Street, or a third option on Euclid Street, from Chapman Avenue to Garden Grove Boulevard.
In 2013, the Federation headed a coalition that rescued the Tet parade when the Westminster City Council, facing a budget crunch, decided to scrap it. In about two weeks, Federation leaders raised the money needed to continue hosting the large-scale parade.
So after Westminster officials granted the parade permit to the newly formed group, leaders from various Vietnamese American organizations met during a town hall meeting and unanimously voted to have the Federation and the Assembly of the Republic of Vietnam Veteran Association Oversea propose a parade in Garden Grove, according to Bui.
If approved, the new Garden Grove parade could include something that was not feasible on the crowded Bolsa Avenue in Westminster: two skydivers descending from the air while holding large flags representing the former government of South Vietnam and the United States.
The Tet parade in Westminster has attracted millions of viewers across the United States and overseas via livestreams and news accounts.
This isn’t the first big event in Orange County’s Vietnamese American community that has seen a potential splintering. In 2015, the community hosted concurrent two-day Tet festivals, one in Little Saigon and one in Costa Mesa. Some saw the dueling festivals as a sign of division within the community while others said it signaled an interest in Vietnamese culture that runs beyond the traditional boundaries of Little Saigon.
With hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Americans in Southern California, and many others interested in Vietnamese culture, Bui believes there’s also room for more than one Tet parade.
“I strongly believe there is room in the county for even three parades.”