In partnership with Boston University students, Where Mainstream Media Fails is a four-part series highlighting critical issues in underserved communities across Boston that have gone underreported. This series comments on how mainstream media continues to ignore or misrepresent Boston’s racially and ethnically diverse communities.
Each piece is merely a starting point for MA Latino News’ reporters, and hopefully other Boston-centered newsrooms, that inspires a deeper dive into complex issues that uniquely impact diverse and historically underrepresented communities across the city.
PART 4: FIELDS CORNER’S VIETNAMESE COMMUNITY
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—a diverse district, rich with cultural experiences.
However, aside from cuisine and a smattering of events, the city’s Vietnamese community has been largely invisible in 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.”
At 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 became an essential part of the community. Vietnamese-Americans are 75% of the Asian American population in Dorchester, according to Vietnamese American Initiative for Development, a nonprofit, community-building organization.
Today, the neighborhood is home to more than 13,000 Vietnamese residents. Fields Corner holds the fifth-largest Vietnamese population in the U.S. In 2021, the Little Saigon District was officially recognized as Boston’s fourth-cultural district.
Despite this official recognition, media coverage has generally ignored 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 of the Vietnamese community. However, local leaders have emphasized that there is a lack of Asian American journalists covering the community, which means their issues often don’t get pushed to the forefront.
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.
The harm of such underrepresentation assumes that the Vietnamese community has few disparities worth reporting, local leaders say. News coverage impacts local studies—if issues like adequate housing and civic services go uncovered, then policies will correspondingly neglect these issues, said UMass Boston Law Professor Andrew Leong.
Larger media outlets are also often late in their reporting of Little Saigon. 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 oversights and delays suggest that “reporters wouldn’t cover anything that wasn’t hot off the press and didn’t want to attend the civil meetings,” said Pham.
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Lack of Political Representation
Minimal political representation is largely responsible for the lack of media coverage on Fields Corner’s Vietnamese community, 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 Representatives.
“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.”
This lack of Vietnamese representation may be a key reason for Fields Corner’s low voting turnout, which has been a longstanding issue within the community, said Tran. She added that the community hasn’t found a political candidate to unite around—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 that civic participation can be a challenge for many Vietnamese residents in 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 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 unique needs of a particular community.
He said he would like to see more coverage on the effect of harmful chemicals on Vietnamese men who work in floor refinishing businesses and on Vietnamese women who run and work at nail salons.
Leong added that media coverage has commonly mentioned or focused on the local Vietnamese community when it is related to negative events.
Leong mentioned 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. At the time, hate-motivated crimes were closely connected to the 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 the State of Race
In the past decade, three major stories on race and poverty documented key social justice issues in Boston. But they each lacked Asian American voices.
In 2011, a Boston 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 that highlighted the AAPI community directly.
Hyunh, who now leads the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development (VietAID), participated as a teenager and now looks back at the coverage with some discomfort—although 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 in a partnership between GBH News, the Boston Globe, and NAACP Boston. The project includes more than 10 subtopics, including “Environmental Justice,” “The Latino Housing Crisis,” and “Equity in Business Ownership.”
But issues important to Asian American residents were not mentioned.
Leong said he feels “The State of Race” highlights the “erasure and invisibility of the Asian American communities.”
According to Leong, Boston Globe Reporter Shirley Leung 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.”
VietAID Executive Director Huynh said he has noticed more positive coverage of the community when Asian-American journalists report on the area.
Huynh highlighted a 2021 Boston Globe article by reporter Deanna Pan that covered a self-defense course at VietAID in response to recent attacks on AAPI elders. Huynh said 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,” he said.
Pham, Fields Corner’s Former Vietnamese community liaison, hopes to see more consistent coverage of the community, such as local organizations’ efforts to provide residents with food assistance.
“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.
This story was reported and written by Boston University students Mitch Fink, Frankie Puleo, Audrey Tumbarello, and Ella Willis. It was first published in Sampan.org. 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.