Pressed, Preserved, and Priced: Inside the Booming World of Vietnamese Music Collectibles in America

In a climate-controlled storage unit in Fountain Valley, California, there are approximately 4,000 records. Not just any records — Vietnamese pressings from the 1960s and early '70s, many of them still in their original sleeves, some of them featuring cover art that no digital archive has ever catalogued. The unit belongs to Tommy Phạm, a 58-year-old retired electrician who has spent the last three decades quietly assembling what may be one of the most comprehensive private collections of pre-1975 Vietnamese popular music in the United States.

"People think I'm crazy," he says, flipping carefully through a crate of 45s. "My wife definitely thinks I'm crazy. But these are the only copies left of some of these songs. If I don't keep them, who does?"

Tommy isn't just a collector. He's an accidental archivist, a cultural custodian, and — whether he likes it or not — a central node in a growing underground economy of Vietnamese music merchandise and memorabilia that has found a surprisingly robust home in the Vietnamese American community.

The Market Nobody Noticed

For most of the past two decades, the trade in Vietnamese music collectibles happened quietly, at the margins. Estate sales in Little Saigon, swap meets in San Jose, boxes of cassettes at the back of Vietnamese grocery stores. The prices were low, the buyers were few, and the mainstream collector world had absolutely no idea any of this existed.

Then eBay got better. Then Facebook Marketplace took off. Then a new generation of Vietnamese Americans — people in their 20s and 30s who grew up watching their parents play these records and tapes — started hunting.

"It went from being a thing that old guys did to being a thing that everyone does," says Jenny Lê, a 31-year-old graphic designer in San Diego who runs a popular Instagram account dedicated to Vietnamese music ephemera. She posts photos of vintage concert programs, rare tape covers, and original pressings of classic albums alongside brief histories of the artists and the context in which the music was made. She has over 40,000 followers. "I started it because I couldn't find this information anywhere else. Now people send me stuff they find. It's like crowdsourced preservation."

Jenny also sells. Not always — she's selective — but when she comes across duplicates or items outside her core focus, they go up on her page with prices that would have seemed absurd five years ago. A 1968 pressing of a well-known Saigon-era vocalist recently sold for $340. A hand-illustrated concert poster from a 1972 show in Đà Lạt went for $510.

What People Are Actually Collecting

The scope of the Vietnamese music memorabilia market is broader than most outsiders would guess. Vinyl records — particularly pre-1975 pressings from South Vietnam — are the prestige category, the ones that command the highest prices and the most passionate bidding wars. But they're far from the only game in town.

Cassette tapes from the post-1975 diaspora era — recorded in refugee camps, pressed in garages in California and Texas, distributed through Vietnamese community networks before the internet existed — have developed their own devoted collector base. These tapes are, in many ways, more historically significant than the vinyl. They represent the music of survival, made with almost nothing, passed hand to hand across a scattered community trying to remember who it was.

"A lot of those tapes are in terrible condition," says David Trương, a 44-year-old audio engineer in Houston who digitizes Vietnamese music recordings as a side project. "The magnetic tape degrades. The cases crack. But people want them anyway, even broken, because of what they mean."

Beyond recordings, the market encompasses concert posters, promotional photos, signed album covers, vintage fan magazines, and even clothing from landmark Vietnamese music festivals and shows held in American cities during the 1980s and '90s — events that drew thousands of Vietnamese Americans to arenas and outdoor stages across California, Texas, and Virginia.

The New Entrepreneurs

Where there's demand, there's business. A handful of Vietnamese Americans have turned their passion for collecting into genuine commercial operations — some full-time, others as lucrative side hustles that have quietly outpaced their day jobs.

Kevin Hoàng runs an online shop called Saigon Groove out of his home in San Gabriel. He started buying and reselling Vietnamese vinyl about six years ago, mostly to fund his own collection. Now he moves roughly 80 to 100 pieces a month through his website and social media, ships internationally, and has a waiting list for certain sought-after titles.

"The demand surprised me," Kevin says. "I thought it would be mostly older people. But I get orders from 25-year-olds in Oregon, in New York, in places that don't even have Vietnamese communities. They heard something on YouTube or found a song on Spotify and wanted the physical object. They wanted to hold the history."

Kevin is careful about sourcing. He attends estate sales, maintains relationships with older collectors who are starting to downsize, and occasionally travels to Vietnam — where a parallel but legally complicated market exists — to seek out items that haven't made it to American shores.

The ethics of the trade are something he thinks about. "These aren't just products. Some of this stuff belongs in museums. I try to make sure things go to people who will take care of them, not just flip them."

Preservation as Resistance

There's a political undercurrent to all of this that's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. Much of the music being collected and preserved — particularly the pre-1975 South Vietnamese material — was suppressed after reunification. Songs were banned, masters were destroyed, artists were imprisoned or fled. The act of keeping these records alive is, for many Vietnamese Americans, an act of cultural resistance as much as personal nostalgia.

Tommy Phạm puts it plainly: "They tried to erase this music. It's still here. I'm still here. Every record I keep is a small argument against forgetting."

Jenny Lê frames it differently but arrives at the same place. "When I post a photo of a 1971 album cover and tell people who this singer was and what happened to her after the war, that's history. That's something a textbook won't tell you. Music is how we remember ourselves."

The Future of the Market

As the original generation of Vietnamese immigrants ages, the volume of material entering the market will only grow. Collections that took lifetimes to build will be sold, donated, or — in the worst cases — discarded by heirs who don't know what they have.

The challenge for the community is creating structures to receive and preserve this material thoughtfully. A few Vietnamese American cultural organizations have started acquiring collections, and university libraries in California have shown increasing interest. But the bulk of the work is still being done by individual collectors like Tommy, entrepreneurs like Kevin, and digital archivists like Jenny — people who decided, without being asked, that this stuff mattered.

Back in the storage unit, Tommy pulls out a 7-inch single in a plain white sleeve. He holds it carefully, the way you'd hold something fragile and irreplaceable, because that's exactly what it is.

"I don't know who'll want all this when I'm gone," he says. "But I know it needs to exist. Someone will want it. Someone always does."