Asian Southerners
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

A highly visible Vietnamese population is the biggest surprise of Southern life.

When my parents told me they were moving from our home in California to Alabama, I envisioned a sparsely populated vacuum infested with greasy deep-fried cuisine and decrepit vinyl one-stories. In the front porch of these sad little structures would be an old man in overalls sitting on his rocking chair, drinking from a whiskey flask.

Turns out, apart from that last dramatization and a few colorful distortions, my vision wasn’t too far off base.

Alabama is a state with boundless land and a crepe-thin population, where the largest conglomerate of people at any given point in time will inevitably be in the produce aisle of Walmart and the only business that rivals these street-littering giants is the yellow-brick endemic better known as Waffle House. There are also a fair share of vinyl houses and although no inebriated grandpas sit in front as popular folklore would have you believe, you will notice a considerable display of cows, horses and just about any animal unseen in California unless you are at a zoo or driving down a highway to Bakersfield.

The only detail of the Alabama experience I hadn’t counted on was the pint-sized but close knit Asian American populace. Did anyone know there were Asians in Alabama? I certainly didn’t.

The distribution of these Asian Americans, however, came as a bit of a shock. Aside from certain areas of highly concentrated Chinese or Koreans, the Asians in California are pretty evenly distributed across the board. If you’re an anti-hermit in a densely populated AA community, you probably won’t last two days without encountering at least three different types of Asians.

The Asians in Alabama, however, are about 75% Vietnamese, followed by a light drizzle of Japanese and Chinese. This is particularly evident not only by the sheer number of Vietnamese Americans I’ve encountered, but the number of times I’ve been mistaken for being Vietnamese as opposed to California where I am Korean most of the time, Chinese sometimes and occasionally Japanese.

Despite the lack of diversity, it’s fascinating to see the type of life Vietnamese Americans have built for themselves not only in Alabama, but in the bordering states of Louisiana and Mississippi as well. Even more interestingly is how comfortably they fit into the Southern landscape. They are no longer the stereotypical owners of nail salons and run-down convenient stores, but active members of local politics and, with the emergence of Anh “Joseph” Cao, even national politics. I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen such high political visibility for an AA in California, where the Asian population towers over that found in the three southern states combined. And even though I’m not Vietnamese, I can’t help but feel proud to see such soaring achievements from my fellow Asian Americans, especially in a region historically known for prejudice and white supremacy. With all this progress and Vietnamese Americans busy making a name for themselves, the only drawback is that I can’t seem to find one decent pho place anywhere in the South, but I guess that’s a sacrifice I can live with.