The textured mat is already on the table as Tony Lam sits down to shuffle the polished tiles. He is here to participate in a ritual that he observes four days a week, a pursuit that keeps his “head in shape.”

On this day, sitting in his daughter’s house, he is competing against his wife, son-in-law and grandson, all of whom build a wall of game pieces in front of them.

It’s mah-jongg o’clock, and he’s ready.

One by one, they roll the dice to begin their match, dealing and betting a collection of quarters. Lam, quietly fierce with a booming laugh, studies the spread, and then … his cellphone pings. The original influencer of Little Saigon has been invited to another event — one of dozens each year — a commemoration of the Vietnamese immigration experience in America.

He snares a suite of tiles and wins a coin within 11 minutes. Nothing seems to faze him. But as he prepares to make his next move … ping! It’s an invitation to an informal coffee shop meet-up, followed by a business groundbreaking.

Lam, 88, has been a prominent figure in Orange County’s Little Saigon for decades, but his election to the Westminster City Council in 1992 — the first Vietnamese American to win political office in the United States — cemented that status. After 10 years, he announced his retirement from politics, but his continuing activism, even into his 80s, helped set in motion a series of political movements and cultural upheaval in Southern California.

Tony Lam with his wife, Hop Lam, and three of his children.

(Courtesy of the Lam family)

On April 30, the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, his community will be in the spotlight, as news reports highlight the growth and influence of the Vietnamese community in Southern California. In Orange County, where 2020 census data show nearly 242,000 residents of Vietnamese heritage, there are Vietnamese Americans on the city councils in Westminster — the original home of Little Saigon —Fountain Valley, Garden Grove and Santa Ana.

“He’s part of a wave of people that transformed California,” said Jeffrey Brody, a retired professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton who’s writing a social history of the origins of Little Saigon. “The reason the public pays attention to this group, especially locally, is because the community has invested in the building blocks of democracy.”

Lam was there from the start — opening doors, collecting awards, trying to thread the needle in controversies that threatened to destabilize his community — and he’s still filling his calendar with events — a reminder that his role as a trailblazer has not been forgotten.

A CIA employee helps Vietnamese evacuees onto a helicopter half a mile from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975.

(Bettmann Archive via Getty)

Lam grew up in northern Vietnam and made his way south after the country was split into two states. In the south, he held a series of jobs that brought him in contact with U.S. entrepreneurs and diplomats. At 28, he teamed up with an older sibling, Dean, to manage their Lam Brothers Corp. They were independent contractors unloading ammunition, building supplies and auto parts for the military at Cam Ranh Bay, one of the busiest ports in the world. Lam had learned English from his service in the Vietnamese Navy, and later, through job connections, he got his wife and six children on a flight out of their homeland before the fall of Saigon.

Lam says he stayed behind to help evacuate others. Then U.S. officials sent him to Guam, where he was “assisting in the management of the newcomers there.” After three months, he flew with his family to Camp Pendleton, where a large portion of refugees were sent. Lam was 37 years old and he, his wife, three sons and three daughters bunked in barracks on the base.

He signed on as camp coordinator, trying to bring order to the confusion around him as thousands of adults and children immersed in resettlement. Eventually, he found an American sponsor “and we had the proverbial fresh start,” he recalled, moving briefly to Florida before returning to the West Coast and renting an apartment in Huntington Beach.

In Vietnam, Lam had owned three companies. In Orange County, he took a job pumping gas, and then as a supervisor in shipping and receiving for a firm that produced practice bombs for the Navy.

“It was such irony,” said Lam, who had fled a war just months before.

His wife found work sanding guitars. When Lam picked her up after her first day, he said, he didn’t recognize her right away because her head was covered with dust. Then he burst into tears.

By the end of 1980, about 20,000 refugees were living in Orange County. Like their earlier counterparts, they had fled the communist regime, most of them drawn by news of relatives who had chosen to relocate there. Danh’s Pharmacy, the first Vietnamese-owned business in the area, had opened its doors in 1978 in Westminster, a town that would quickly balloon into a bustling immigrant community, dotted with produce markets, noodle houses, jewelry stores and bakeries.

Lam established a life insurance agency and an import-export business, and in 1984 opened Vien Dong, a restaurant in Garden Grove that quickly gained a following.

The Little Saigon community expanded into neighboring cities, and in the 1980s, its restaurants, cafes, jewelry and fabric shops and grocery stores started to attract attention throughout California. The first 99 Ranch Market opened in Westminster in 1984.

In 1985, when an 8.0 magnitude earthquake hit Mexico City, killing almost 10,000 people, Lam organized a fundraiser. He was one of the founders of the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce and the Vietnamese American Lions Club in Westminster. A law and order conservative, he joined the Republican Party.

Hop Lam, who has been married to him for 64 years, says he moves forward “always with an eye to the past. He learns and he remembers.” He was among the first organizers of the local Tet Festival to celebrate the Lunar New Year — which eventually became the largest celebration outside of Vietnam. He nurtured his businesses and was appointed to serve on Westminster’s traffic commission in 1989.

A campaign sign is posted for Lam, who won a seat on the Westminster City Council in 1992.

(Courtesy of the Lam family)

In addition, “he befriended the white families, the Mexican families and everyone he talked to,” Brody said. When he ran for City Council, “to win, he had to have the support of the Caucasians and the Latinos as well as the Asians.”

Lam’s daughter Cathy Lam said: “When there was something to be done, my father never hesitated. Public service for him is a way to include everyone in decisions and solving problems.”

His community was bound together by family, tradition and staunch anti-communist sentiment — which, in a few years, fueled a controversy that foreshadowed a political shift in Little Saigon.

Lam delivers a speech while campaigning to be the first Vietnamese refugee elected to public office in the U.S.

(Courtesy of the Lam family)

In 1994, the U.S. lifted its trade embargo against Vietnam, and resumed diplomatic ties the following year. Longtime residents of Little Saigon were incensed and organized anti-communist protests. That anger, however, was not universal, evidenced by the interest among a few local merchants in the possibility of expanding their market by doing business in Vietnam.

A few years later, in January 1999, Truong Van Tran posted a Communist flag and a photo of Ho Chi Minh, the late Communist leader, in his video store, which was located on Bolsa Avenue, Little Saigon’s main thoroughfare. Community protests started immediately.

On Jan. 21, an Orange County judge temporarily ordered Tran to remove the items, but she soon reversed herself on Feb. 10, saying the flag and the photo constituted protected speech. The demonstrations continued for 53 days. At one point the crowd grew to about 15,000.

Lam did not join them. He said he understood the anger, but City Atty. Richard D. Jones told him and Westminster officials to stay away; they needed to stay neutral to avoid legal action.

Because Lam was a no-show, protesters picketed outside his restaurant for 73 days. He was called a communist sympathizer, and political rivals vilified him. He hired a lawyer in an attempt to stop the chaos in front of the restaurant. Speaking at a council meeting in February of that year, he said his “heart had been torn apart.” He left office in 2002.

Lam dines with his wife, Hop, and other family members on April 9.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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It was the greatest trial of his political life, Lam said, remembering his efforts to balance his loyalty to his Vietnamese community with the city’s interests.

During the tumult, some younger members of the Vietnamese community, already questioning their status on the sidelines of a local political infrastructure that didn’t include them, inserted themselves in the conversation.

Lan Quoc Nguyen, who’d been an attorney for only three years, got involved by “negotiating with city staff and police to allow the protesters to stay” around the store property for hours on end. “Pretty soon, we realized that in order to gain respect, to be listened to by people who run the greater society, we had to have a seat at the table…. We started digging in,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen, along with Van Tran, the first Vietnamese American elected to the Garden Grove City Council in 2000, described the movement as “political empowerment.” They gathered volunteers for massive voter registration drives, one after another in consecutive elections. Offering Cokes and banh mi and often free entertainment from top refugee musical acts, the inaugural “Rock N Vote” and get-out-the-vote gatherings were staged at UC Irvine and parks with one constant element — handy translators to interpret English-language materials.

Leading figures in the arts, business, education, politics and cultural preservation were honored at a celebration in Westminster’s Little Saigon in early March. Among them was Tony Lam, right.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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“This is what cemented political power,” Brody said. “Not having anyone to recruit their opinions or participation, the Vietnamese organized themselves into a powerful voting bloc and from then on, you saw all kinds of candidates running for all kinds of seats.”

In 1975, when the Vietnamese came over, Cathy Lam said, “we all worried about putting food on the table. Over the years, as our kids got older, as all of us understood more about U.S. history — the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Water Act, the Affordable Care Act, what the EPA stands for — we became a little less conservative, a little more moderate. At the end of the day, the community sees it’s making money. They have to give back by getting deeply involved in politics.”

Today in Orange County, there are at least 24 Vietnamese Americans in city and county offices, and there are others on school boards, sanitation and water boards and in Orange County Superior Court. Tri Ta, Westminster’s first Vietnamese American mayor, is serving in the state Assembly, and last year, Derek Tran became the first Vietnamese American from California elected to federal office, representing the 45th Congressional District.

Tran met Lam at his swearing-in ceremony in December. “I’ve known his name for a long, long time,” said Tran, who ousted Republican stalwart Michelle Steel in the competitive congressional race. “His daughter and her son walked the neighborhoods and knocked on doors for me, helping me get elected. Without having someone like him, it would not have been possible for me to have my seat here. He truly blazed the trail.”

During the event, Lam kept pulling Tran aside to say how proud he was of the younger man, prompting the new congressman to add, “It makes me so happy to hear that from someone of his stature.”

Terry Rains, an activist who launched the Westminster Buzz Facebook page and has been a steady presence at council meetings since 2019, says she expects to see more Tony Lams in office, “but you can’t ignore the Andrew Do thing.”

Last October, Do, a former Orange County supervisor, admitted guilt in funneling more than $10 million in federal pandemic funds through a nonprofit linked to his daughter. He received more than $550,000 in bribes from money slated to buy meals for elderly Little Saigon residents — shocking the political establishment of the county.

Lam called it a “tragedy,” but his phone still pings with political newbies scheduling appointments to visit with him for advice, an endorsement or a donation. He kept his profile “as one of the originals in Little Saigon,” said Van Tran, who ascended to state office as the first Vietnamese American elected to California’s Assembly. “He inspires because he’s outspoken and true to himself.”

“My intention is to help everyone,” said Lam, at a recent playground dedication in Westminster’s Tony Lam Park. “That’s how I operate.”