Culture
J U LY 2 0 2 2 50
THE
HANNA LOUIS
LITTLE VIETNAM OF NEW ORLEANS S T R A LT S OV A , T H E N U M B E R ARMSTRONG'S CHOSEN
2
E A S T // 5 4 W H O
O D E S TO S U M M E R
STILL WATCHES
RANKED WOMAN WATER
SKIER
IN
THE WEATHER?
THE WORLD
// 5 7
THE
// 5 5
MEET
HISTORY OF
BIRTHDAY
EAST MEETS WEST
The Village of Versailles A WORLD WITHIN A WORLD IN NEW ORLEANS EAST Story by Jason Christian • Photos by Emily Kask
In response to a wave of job loss in the community of Versailles after the BP oil spill in 2010, community leaders sought out ways to fight food insecurity. One of the resulting initiatives was VEGGI Farmers Cooperative, a garden at the heart of the village, where aquaponics, greenhouses, and Vietnamese farming tradition meet to grow produce enjoyed throughout the community and across New Orleans.
E
very Saturday morning, the vendors arrive to the market in Village de l’Est long before the sun breaks over Bayou Sauvage. They line both sides of the Ly’s Supermarket parking lot on Alcee Fortier Boulevard, their wares arranged in ice chests, on tables, or on the ground atop cardboard or tarps: blue crabs, dried shrimp, garden starts, house plants, prepared meals, produce, and herbs—coriander, lemongrass, water spinach, Thai basil, bitter melon, and snake gourds as long as your leg. It’s a tradition that goes back more than forty years—overseen by the Ly family, who in 2005 received the Southern Foodways Alliance Guardian of the Tradition award for their role in spearheading its inception and ensuring its continuation. By now, these vendors are the elders of the New Orleans Vietnamese community, as are many of their customers. They show up with flashlights, hoping to snag the choicest offerings, and they continue to trickle in until around 8:30 or 9, at which time everyone packs up and heads home. On a recent such Saturday, just after 50
dawn, I drove twenty minutes east from my home, down Chef Menteur Highway, to the fabled market to see it with my own eyes. It was still cool at that hour, but the heat was threatening to come on strong. Customers and vendors were quietly chatting, perhaps haggling, and nearly everyone was speaking Vietnamese. Money and goods exchanged hands. Most of the vendors were elderly women. They wore loose blouses and pants and many donned a nón lá, a conical Vietnamese hat made of palm leaves. A seafood vendor named Thong Q. Phan told me that after the harvest one should expect more vegetables on display. It seemed to me there was already enough there in boxes and baskets to feed several families. Phan came to this country, to this neighborhood, in 1978, he said, at a time when waves of his fellow countrymen and women were fleeing on boats and finding their way to the United States. Over the years, he saw the area grow into a formidable community, with a thriving fishing industry, which has, unfortunate-
J U L 2 2 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
ly, been knocked around and greatly diminished—first by Hurricane Katrina, and later by the BP oil spill in 2010. Phan said that sales have been even slower lately, and he speculates that’s because gas prices have risen in recent months. “The people have a certain amount of money,” he said. “They cut down eating to save money for gas.” As if by some karmic justice, a moment later, he sold a bag of frozen king mackerel to an older Black gentleman who lives nearby. The fish was cleaned and ready to cook. “Good eating,” the customer told me. He added that, besides fish, he buys his live chickens and ducks at the market, too. Although Vietnamese Americans live in virtually every corner of New Orleans these days, the community’s heart and soul has always been in Village de l’Est. But you won’t hear anyone refer to the neighborhood by that name. Instead, everyone calls it “Versailles,” named after the Versailles Arms apartment complex, a housing project that housed many of the
first arrivals from Vietnam. (The property was badly damaged after Hurricane Katrina and transformed by developers into the current 2 Oaks Apartments.) The Village of Versailles is one of the densest enclaves of Vietnamese-Americans in this country. The neighborhood opened in 1964, a six hundred-acre section of drained marshland in the much larger development known as New Orleans East or “the East.” After the 1975 fall of Saigon, refugees began to resettle in the predominantly Black neighborhood. About one thousand families came first, nearly all of them Catholics (the Buddhists came later); the US government and Catholic organizations helped sponsor the move. The refugees were escaping persecution and seeking better lives, and they continued to arrive over the next several years, until the Vietnamese population peaked at roughly five thousand by the year 2000. Then came Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that resulted in community-wide devastation due to floodwaters and dispersion of its residents across the
