Immigrants have changed the face of Westminste

Vietnamese immigrants have made this city a wonderful place to live. They brought many things to the area and are now a major part of the city, with members on the city council too. DP

Most residents -- including Mayor Margie Rice, who's lived there for more than 50 years -- say the mass assimilation of Vietnamese Americans has made the city bigger, stronger and more diverse.

By Dana Parsons, LA Times

Margie Rice lived in Westminster before it had a grocery store. Or a Vietnamese heritage. If both historical notes now seem hard to imagine, it just goes to show what has happened to the once sleepy white-bread community of 92,000.

Westminster/Little Saigon?

You talk about a twain that you'd never think would meet.

But they did meet and, as a Times story noted Sunday, the city soon will be the first in the country to sport a Vietnamese American majority on its council.

As an elected mayor set to begin her fifth term and a Westminster resident since 1956, Rice has seen it all unfold.

In the early days of the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s, she was a school board member. The newly arrived schoolchildren didn't know what was expected of them and couldn't speak the language. Some eschewed indoor restrooms, using the school yard instead, and were unfamiliar with knives and forks in the lunchroom. Rice remembers a young Vietnamese boy flushing a goldfish down a toilet. "He never realized he'd never get it back," she says.

Today, it'd be fair to speculate that some of those same children now define the city. Which leads me to ask Rice if she foresaw that 30 years ago.

"Never," she says.

And becoming future political leaders and significant players in the city's commercial vitality?

Out of the question. "We were just coping with day-to-day stuff," she says.

Hard to believe today, but Rice says she wasn't convinced then that the new arrivals would stay very long. "I thought they were just coming over to stay until the war was over and then they'd want to go back to their own country. That was my thought at the time, that we were giving them safe haven here. But they've brought so much to our city."
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