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September 27, 2000

San Jose City Council Gives a Home to the Vietnamese Cultural Center at Kelley Park

By Janice Rombeck
San Jose Mercury News

A Vietnamese cultural garden and community center that has been planned for 13 years has found a home at San Jose's Kelley Park and could be under construction as soon as next summer.

With the San Jose City Council's approval of the site Tuesday, the Vietnamese Cultural Heritage Garden Association will push ahead with raising the estimated $6 million it will cost to develop the four acres containing a garden, a 7,000-square-foot museum and 4,500-square-foot community hall.

The non-profit association has raised $400,000 in cash and another $400,000 in donations, said Liem Nguyen, association president. He's hoping an October fundraising event will net an additional $100,000. The group is also seeking city, county and state funding.

The project was first proposed in 1987 at Capitol Expressway and Lone Bluff Way, but that site was set aside for a city golf course.

Last year, the association began looking at Kelley Park, settling on a site at Story Road and Roberts Street. The city spent $88,500 to survey the area east of Coyote Creek and found it suitable for a garden complex.

Nguyen, who has devoted seven years to the project, sees it as a way to preserve and share Vietnamese culture, history, art and traditions. ``We want to bring Vietnam to the United States,'' Nguyen said.

He also feels it will add to the diverse flavor of the park, which already has a re-created Victorian village, a Chinese temple, a Portuguese Museum, a Japanese Friendship Garden and a children's zoo.

To ensure that the center will be authentic, Nguyen traveled to Vietnam in 1993 and 1995 to talk to ``common people,'' not experts, about what should be in a cultural garden and how the building should look.

The garden will be designed as a place of tranquility, where visitors can walk along bamboo paths and enjoy peach blossoms, yellow quince flowers, and other native plants. It will also include ornamental features that reflect some of Vietnam's 5,000 years of history. ``It's difficult to do a cultural garden and condense everything into it,'' Nguyen said.

The museum will be adorned with 18 dragons and a ceiling that depicts scenes of ancient Vietnamese daily activities. The interior will also feature hand-carved beams and painted rafters. Half of the building will house a permanent exhibition of antiques and artifacts, and the rest will be used for cultural presentations.

The community hall will be rented out to provide income for maintenance of the garden. It will have a double-tier traditional roof and glass walls that look out onto the garden.

The site also will have a place for the South Vietnamese flag, a venerable symbol for many that now is flying from a stand on Capitol Expressway. The flag was to be moved to a temporary location at Prusch Park on Story Road, but Nguyen said the move will now wait for the cultural garden site to be developed.

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