Suying Plaskett is in Vinh Phat, her sprawling South Sacramento grocery store, inspecting a spray of lilies bound for a local temple. It\u2019s the Chinese goddess Guanyin\u2019s birthday, and the shopkeeper has a sliver of time to talk before sprinting off to pay her respects. As we walk along, Plaskett, a straight-backed 77-year-old in hoop earrings and a denim jumpsuit, stops to softly pat the elbows of \u00adregulars pushing carts full of vegetables.<\/p>\n
Half a dozen staffers work the meat counter alone, and even niche items such as mam tom (fermented shrimp paste) command multiple shelves. In my favorite corner, staff stack banh mi beside hanging roast pork belly and barbecued ducks, meaty stalactites leaking droplets of their golden fat. Vinh Phat is, in more ways than one, an oasis.<\/p>\n
Plaskett arrived in the United States just as the Vietnam War was coming to an end. In 1974, she married a U.S. Air Force officer and became one of fewer than 15,000 Vietnamese nationals living in the country. A year later, Saigon fell. In the ensuing years, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees fled to the U.S.<\/p>\n
In 1978, Plaskett received a letter: Her family, along with 350 refugees, were on a boat on the Thailand-Malaysia border, and they were running out of supplies. She hurried to Thailand to meet them. When Plaskett saw her father wasting away on a beach, his fingers and legs swollen from exposure to the elements, she wept bitterly. \u201cI have never seen anything like that,\u201d she recalls.<\/p>\n
Through determination and a bit of luck, Plaskett managed to evacuate her family and some of their fellow passengers back to Sacramento, where she became their de facto social worker, confronting exploitative landlords, navigating legal dilemmas, and everything in between.<\/p>\n
Soon small Vietnamese businesses started \u00adpopping up in the neighborhood\u2014banh mi shops, coffee houses, and wire transfer outposts\u2014but there was no Asian grocery store. \u201cI thought, \u2018Open a market. Everybody will have a job!\u2019\u200a\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
In Vinh Phat\u2019s 40 years of business, the \u00addistrict has transformed from a neglected corridor to what\u2019s now lovingly known as Little Saigon. The clientele has changed, too: The refugees\u2019 descendants have embraced \u201cthat U.S.A. culture,\u201d Plaskett says of the locals now wandering the aisles in designer clothes and UC Davis swag.<\/p>\n
The new generation\u2014Plaskett\u2019s children and her cousin\u2014will eventually take over the business, but the owner doubts she\u2019ll ever really leave. \u201cPeople still want to see me!\u201d she says. \u201cWhat am I going to do, stay home? Here I can stop by the cash register, keep an eye on \u00adeverybody. I\u2019m happy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Suying Plaskett is in Vinh Phat, her sprawling South Sacramento grocery store, inspecting a spray of lilies bound…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[97489,121,123,122],"class_list":{"0":"post-212004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sacramento","8":"tag-feature-photo","9":"tag-sacramento","10":"tag-sacramento-headlines","11":"tag-sacramento-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}