Seattle's Ragin' Asians

"I've converted everyone to the Goose," Sahn "Junior" Pham boasts as he opens a bottle of Grey Goose. It's the only liquor he and his friends are willing to take shots of. He nods along to the Three 6 Mafia song blasting on the stereo as he pours a dozen orange-flavored vodka shots.

Photos by Garrett Mukai

Venom's female patrons must contend with "Asiaphile" white guys.

Somealear Mom says, "You can't be in my family and not be hot."

Details

Slideshow: An Evening in the Asian Nightlife Scene

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• Junior Pham
• Wayne
• Tony Truong
• Belltown
• Houston (Texas)

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His loyalty to "the Goose" is evidenced by close to 100 empty fifths of the premium vodka meticulously lined up on various surfaces in the living room. A sign on the wall reads: "I love Grey Goose." Pham sets several glasses of pink lemonade—"for chaser"—and a giant bag of Sour Patch Kids alongside the shots.

Quang Nguyen takes one, and then tries strumming a ukulele he's picked up off the floor. "I just wanna get drunk and play this shit!" he exclaims. He fumbles with the instrument for a few minutes, then loses interest and goes outside to smoke a cigarette.

It's a Diddy soiree on a tighter budget. The guests are partying in a three-bedroom condo, where Pham lives with a roommate, just a couple miles away from Southcenter Mall, instead of a boat in the Hamptons. And everybody's getting—as he puts it—"ragin' Asian."

Pham is Vietnamese. He's invited several friends to his Tukwila townhome that Friday to pre-funk before going out to one of their favorite Seattle clubs: Venom. All the 20-somethings pre-funking at his house are also Asian—most of them Vietnamese or Cambodian. Almost every weekend, they hit up Venom, a Belltown dance club that draws a predominately Asian crowd.

At 29, Pham is older than most of his club-going friends, but he looks younger. He was a homebody in a serious relationship during his early 20s who's now making up for lost time—something he has a lot of these days, since getting laid off from his job as an IT consultant earlier this year. Regardless, Pham is in good spirits. He's handsome and charming, and effortlessly plays host to ensure everybody has a good time.

The gaggle of girls at his house could easily pass for sisters—sorority sisters, anyway. They're wearing strikingly similar dresses from Forever 21. Two of them—identical twins—look like they're in middle school, but are actually 20. They plan to get into Venom by waiting outside the club for a friend who's already gained entry to return with the IDs of those inside. (It can get so crowded at the rope that the bouncer won't notice an ID is being used twice.)

Nightlife photographer Luis Ongpin of streetpaparazzi.com, a local Web site devoted to photos of club-goers, often witnesses the operation go down while shooting at clubs like Venom and the War Room. "One Asian girl brings 10 with her. And to people that don't know them, they look similar enough to pull it off," he says.

Of all the girls at Pham's house, an attractive Cambodian girl named Somealear Mom stands out. The 22-year-old, whose cousin is married to the ukulele-strumming Nguyen, dons high heels and a skimpy purple get-up that stretches down to her mid-thighs, which she admits is actually just a long shirt. Mom just graduated from Seattle University, and is putting her job search on hold so she can enjoy one last responsibility-free summer.

"I have some white friends who won't even go [to Venom]," Mom says, laughing. "It's too Asian for them. For us, it's like family. Everybody knows each other there."

That's exactly what club promoters targeting the Asian demographic are going for. The nights that draw the most Asians are the ones that have a crowd within "two to three degrees of separation," according to Tony Truong, managing partner of the Seattle office of Visionshock, the largest Asian-American nightlife company in the country. Its Seattle branch, which throws events at clubs like Ibiza and Heaven, employs 30 promoters who use word of mouth, online social networks, and text-messaging to develop its clientele.

"Asians are like neon tetra fish—they travel in schools," Truong says. "You always see masses of them together. Once you get the group leader to come, you get the entire group. Then you get the friends of people in that group, and so forth."

The trend has become increasingly visible in Seattle's Asian nightlife scene over the past several years. Promoter Nam Ho of Steady Productions organizes weekly parties at Venom, War Room, and Sea Sound Lounge—all notorious hot spots for Asian club-goers. He attributes the rise in popularity of these parties to the fact that Asians have long had to create their own nightlife scene.

"A lot of Asian-Americans that you see out there don't go to a four-year university or have a scene they really fit into," Ho explains. "They aren't going to frat parties or dive bars or sports bars. But many of them have been born and raised here, so they're incredibly in tune to the city. The club is a good comfort zone for them to go out with other Asian-Americans."

It may be familiar territory now, but the club scene is a far cry from the atmosphere in which many of these 20-something Asians were raised. They grew up accustomed to having their strict first-generation parents forbid them from engaging in the social activities of their teenage peers.