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Tet Festival Rings in the New in San Jose

By Brian Kluepfel | Special to Asian Week

Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, has many parallels with its Chinese counterpart. The feast of renewal begins on the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar, as in China. In Vietnam, the New Year celebration lasts three days, with the first day dedicated to family and ancestors, the second to teachers and the third to friends. While customs have been modified in the United States, the overwhelming feeling at San Jose’s annual parade and festival on Feb. 2 was that of family and community.

The parade featured student groups from around the Bay Area in their finest, shouting out “Happy New Year” in English and Vietnamese to the crowd, as dragon dancers snaked back and forth. A contingent from the UC Berkeley Vietnamese Student Association spoke with AsianWeek about the importance of Tet.

“I come here every year,” said Quyem Le, a freshman at Cal. “We don’t get it first-hand because we were born here [in the United States], but it’s a way to recognize that we’re a unique culture.”

She compared the event to Thanksgiving, with its emphasis on family.

“A lot of us born in America don’t know what our true culture is,” said Tram Nguyen, another UC Berkeley student. “So we try to interact with the community in San Jose where our parents and the older generation live.”

Nguyen organizes the student association’s annual culture show on the Berkeley campus.

Meanwhile an energetic group of drummers gathered outside the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, urging another set of dragon dancers into the encircling crowd, who proffered the traditional gifts of money in red envelopes. Children seemed alternately thrilled and terrified by the approaching jaws, and warily held out their gifts, hoping that the first lucky happening of the new year would be not losing their hands.

Kim Dang, a hair stylist who has lived in California for 17 years, eagerly fed a lucky red envelope to the marauding dragon. She took the day off from her Hi Tech Beauty Salon to attend, “because I really love the festival!” she said. She gave the dragon a dollar, but laughted that “if I know you, you might get fifty dollars.”

“Every year our whole family gets together, it’s very emotional for us,” said Eric Do, a computer technician who was born in Saigon. He was keeping an eye on his daughter and son, Patricia Ngo 2, and Henry Ngo, 5, who were dressed in bright red silk from head to toe. Do said that his Buddhist family’s commemoration of the event began solemnly at a San Jose temple on Friday evening, ending with a home celebration at midnight.

Anhthy Nguyen, a web developer, tried her hand for the first time this year selling floral arrangements at the festival. Her company, Four Seasons Florist, offered both the bright-yellow flowers (hoa mai, or “luck” plants) common to the warmer Southern Vietnam, and the cherry blossom branches associated with the North. Nguyen is from the city of Can Tho and settled in San Jose after living in Texas for three years.

“People buy these flowers to bring luck to their family. It only blooms around the New Year,” she said. Nguyen said another custom she practiced on the final day of last year was the ritual cleaning of her home, which symbolizes a fresh start. Elsewhere, she cut some corners. “I don’t make any traditional food,” she admitted, “but I got some from my mom!”

Children delighted in throwing the ‘snap’ firecrackers at the Market Street sidewalk, while some adults had more serious matters on their mind. Long Nguyen manned a table that held petitions, urging the city of San Jose to recognize and identify its nearly quarter-million Vietnamese population by changing the name of Senter Road to Saigon Road. Nguyen noted the renaming of the town of Little Saigon in Southern California as an historic precedent, and he gathered more than 2,000 signatures in downtown San Jose before heading off to another Tet Festival at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.

“We try to petition for this because we feel the majority of the people in District 7 (are Vietnamese) and we want something to reflect that,” he said.

Nguyen noted that there are about 240,000 people of Vietnamese descent in the Bay Area, “but we have no name to stamp ourselves in the community yet.” He said that such a street name would help visitors to the area locate the heart of the Vietnamese population, as well.

A mixing of American and Vietnamese traditions was taking place on the stage, as a disco-flavored band cranked out songs in Vietnamese along with Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” and Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff.” As bowls of pho were consumed beneath the twin sets of American and Vietnamese flags in the bright South Bay sunshine, it seemed like a day that paid some sort of homage to each generation, regardless of where they were born.