This story was reported and written by Boston University students Mitch Fink, Frankie Puleo, Audrey Tumbarello and Ella Willis. The students were participants in the Fall 2023 Race and Gender in the Media Class in the College of Communications. Photos are by Mitch Fink.
The Vietnamese-American community has long been a thriving force in Fields Corner. They have raised families, built businesses and transformed a busy Dorchester Avenue stretch into Little Saigon, rich with cultural experiences.
But aside from cuisine and smattering of events, the city’s Vietnamese community has been largely invisible in the local news. Coverage has been lacking on pressing social issues and is often misrepresentative of the rich cultural experiences of the people who call the area home.
In fact, news reports center mostly on the food, with little depth on the Vietnamese-American people who have transformed that area, according to an analysis of media reports and interviews with Asian-American civic and political leaders.
“In terms of the day to day, I would probably say it’s pretty rare to find any kind of coverage of the Vietnamese community,” said Tri Tran, former co-chair of the board of the Vietnamese Community of Massachusetts. “Anything specific to Fields Corner, anything specific to the Vietnamese community has been minimal, I would say, unless there’s something extraordinary of note to mention.”
The end of the Vietnam War in 1975, many Vietnamese immigrants found refuge in Fields Corner. They transformed the area, building homes and new businesses and becoming an essential part of the community. Vietnamese-Americans are 75% of the AsianAmerican population in Dorchester, according to Vietnamese American Initiative for Development, a nonprofit, community building organization.
Fields Corner, a diverse mix of Irish, Black and Asian people, holds the fifth largest Vietnamese population in the U.S. and is newly the fourth-cultural district in Boston.
Today, Fields Corner is home to more than 13,000 Vietnamese residents. The Little Saigon District was officially recognized by Boston in 2021.
Despite this official recognition, the media coverage generally ignores key issues that affect the Vietnamese community in particular, such as housing, healthcare, and city policies that affect residents’ daily lives.
Local news coverage of the neighborhood — including in the Boston Globe and other prominent outlets — is often incomplete.
The neighborhood newspaper, the Dorchester Reporter, has provided adequate coverage adequate of the Vietnamese community, but local leaders say there is a lack of Asian American and Pacific Islander journalists covering the community overall, which means their issues don’t often get pushed to the fore.
According to a 2021 study by the Asian American Journalists Association, Boston is one of 13 designated U.S. market areas that underrepresents AAPI people. The study also notes that Boston’s WFXT — a local news channel affiliated with FOX — has no Asian American on-air staff.
A multipart series by WGBH, called The State of Race, is one example. While the project highlighted “Black and brown” disparities, it only included one Asian American expert and that person was not from Vietnam.
The harm of such underrepresentation assumes that the Vietnamese community has few disparities worth reporting, local leaders say. Coverage informs studies — if issues like adequate housing and civic services go uncovered, then policies will correspondingly neglect these issues, said Andrew Leong, a law professor at UMass Boston.
Undercoverage of distinct communities renders them invisible to a city’s policy development and larger public view issues relevant to the Vietnamese community.
The media is also often late in its reporting. For instance, Khoa Pham was appointed to his position as a former city liaison to the Vietnamese community in 2016 but didn’t receive coverage until a year and a half later.
These lapses suggested that “reporters wouldn’t cover anything that wasn’t hot off the press and didn’t want to attend the civil meetings,” said Pham.
Lack of Political Representation
Minimal political representation is largely responsible for the lack of Vietnamese media coverage in Fields Corner, according to Tran.
Tran said other communities have been able to rally around Boston lawmakers — such as City Councilors at-Large Ruthzee Louijeune, who is Haitian American, and Julia Mejia, who is from the Dominican Republic. But there has been no Vietnamese person elected to the council. In fact, Tram Nguyen, who was elected in 2018 to represent the 18th Essex District, was the first Vietnamese American woman elected to the state’s House of Representative.
“The Vietnamese community is the only major community in Boston that doesn’t have political representation,” Tran said. “I’d probably attribute the lack of coverage to that, as well. And that also attributes to the Vietnamese community’s kind of unassuming, low-key role within the city.”
Without representation in office, some in the Vietnamese community do not vote. Indeed, voting turnout has been a longstanding issue in Fields Corner, Tran said, plus the community hasn’t united around a political candidate — at least, not yet. “The Vietnamese community in Fields Corner hasn’t really found someone yet to be that standard-bearer,” said Tran.
Pham added participating civically can be a challenge for many Vietnamese residents of Boston.
“Coming here fighting gentrification, fighting cost of living, and just trying to make ends meet and you don’t get a chance to participate,” said Pham.
Lack of Disaggregated Data
Leong, the UMass Boston professor, said a lack of sampling data on the community is responsible for underreporting in healthcare and other matters in the Vietnamese community.
“We need to disaggregate much better in order to make sure that we serve our different communities in different ways,” said Leong.
He highlighted a 2022 study — “Data from the 2020 Decennial Census and American Community Survey” — from UMass-Boston’s Institute for Asian American Studies as an example of how researchers are still aggregating data on the Asian American population in Boston. “They’re not teasing it out,” he said. “They’re not disaggregating for folks in Chinatown versus in Fields Corner.”
Leong said specificity is important to understand the precise needs of a particular community.
He said he’d like to see more coverage of the effect of chemicals on Vietnamese men, many of whom work in floor refinishing businesses and Vietnamese women who operate nail salons.
The coverage of nonprofit organizations, like Vietnamese American Civic Association and VietAID are also lacking. “It was in the media, but it only came up for the most part when there was trouble,” Leong said. He emphasized a general theme of coverage appearing only surrounding negative events.
Leong brought up an assault involving actor Mark Wahlberg that occurred in Dorchester in 1988. Wahlberg assaulted two Vietnamese men while trying to steal beer and explicitly insulted them with Asian slurs. This incident, which sent one of the men to the hospital and Walhberg to prison, is representative of some of the violence faced by the Vietnamese community in Fields Corner, which at the time was a part of a growing refugee resettlement process, he said.
“I remember specifically going on one of these local television programs…and talking about this particular incident,” Leong said. “But that informs you, when do we actually have a voice? When shit hits the fan right, when violence happens, when hate happens.”
Life on the line and he State of Race
In the past decade, three major stories on race and poverty documented key social justice issues of the time. But they each lacked Asian American voices.
In 2011, a Globe team chronicled poverty in Boston that featured the struggles of George Hyunh, then in high school, and his brother as they dealt with poverty while being raised by a Vietnamese mother who did not speak English. But besides the brothers, there were no other voices explicitly from the Vietnamese community in the series or highlighting the AAPI community directly.
Hyunh, who now leads VietAID, participated as a teenager and now looks back at the coverage with some discomfort, even though he and the reporter, Billy Baker, became friends.
“I’m not sure what to say about our representation there and how accurate it was,” Hyunh said. He didn’t understand why his story was important and had to be convinced to participate.
Another multi-part series of in-person and virtual forums about racial issues, “The State of Race” was produced as a partnership between GBH News, the Globe and NAACP Boston. The project includes more than 10 subtopics, including “Environmental Justice,” “The Latino Housing Crisis” and “Equity in Business Ownership.”
But Asian American issues — not to mention Vietnamese issues, specifically — were not mentioned.
Leong said he feels “The State of Race” highlights the “erasure and invisibility of the Asian American communities.”
According to Leong, Shirley Leung, a reporter at the Boston Globe, is one of the only Asian American voices represented in the series.
He said he sees a circular relationship between the media and the data on Asian American communities. “If they’re underreported, they’re underserved,” said Leong.
Hope for Little Saigon
Huynh and Annie Le are two new faces of Vietnamese leadership in Fields Corner. While certain coverage has improved in the area since May 2021 with the establishment of the Little Saigon Cultural District, both Huynh and Le have visions for future coverage.
Passionate about preserving and promoting Vietnamese culture, Le is the board president of Boston Little Saigon. In the past, she noticed the media would cover the Vietnamese in Fields Corner when it was related to crime.
“I feel like the media covering Dorchester as a whole focused more on the negativity than on the positive that was happening,” said Le. “There used to be a lot more coverage about shootings and crimes.”
Le would prefer to see “more coverage around the policies that affect us.”
As executive director of VietAID, a community development corporation founded in 1994 that provides economic and civic services for the Vietnamese community of Fields Corner, Huynh pointed to positive coverage when Asian-American journalists are probing the community.
Huynh highlighted a 2021 article in the Globe by reporter Deanna Pan that covered an Asian American self-defense course at VietAID in response to recent attacks on AAPI elders. Huynh the article accurately showed how Asian American students often feel overlooked and left out.
Huynh said he would like to see coverage around youth activism in the community. “It would be great to cover some of the actions that our community is taking to foster a new wave of young leaders whether in the community, youth development and climate resilience work,” said Huynh.
Pham, the community liaison, expressed a desire to see more news about what’s going on in the Vietnamese community, such as community organizations that provide food assistance in future coverage.
“Every day I see people waiting in line for hours just to get some groceries, like basic needs for them, especially the elderly community, but you know, that is not something that you would see in the media,” said Pham.
