Denver Mayor Mike Johnston only had to travel 4 miles from his downtown office to attend the Saturday, Feb. 10, Lunar New Year celebration at the Far East Center.

The close-knit Luong family, which has run the food-and-retail complex at Federal Boulevard and Alameda Avenue since opening it in 1988, traveled many thousands more.

“Back in the (late 1970s) there were not a lot of resources for immigrants and refugees in Denver,” said Mimi Luong, whose family fled North Vietnam for a refugee camp in Guam, and eventually, Denver during the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“Three or four years later, my dad and his brothers were making weekly trips to California to buy Vietnamese staples. For the first time since we arrived, our family was able to find seasoning, rice, and all the dishes we missed so much. There was none we could find in Denver,” she added.

Those trips were unsustainable, prompting the family to dream about opening their own business that catered to immigrants on Federal Boulevard’s diverse corridor. That area in the late 20th century welcomed not only Vietnamese refugees but families arriving from Thailand, China, Japan, Korea and other, diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) countries.

With its Torii-style entry gate — inspired by traditional Japanese architecture — welcoming visitors to Denver’s own, highly compact version of Little Saigon, the Far East Center was this month added to the State Register of Historic Properties by History Colorado’s board of directors, making it the first-ever Asian building in the state to win such recognition.

It’s also only the third AAPI site in Colorado to make the state’s register, History Colorado said, after Bromley Farm/Koizuma Hishinuma Farm in Brighton, and the Amache National Historic Site in southeastern Colorado — also America’s newest national historic park, as of last week, and one of 10 incarceration sites used to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The Far East Center’s designation means the property is eligible for financial incentives to help maintain the historic character of the structure, History Colorado said, as well as protection from future demolition. The two-year drive to register it began when Luong and History Colorado joined to recount the site’s history as part of a storytelling series, followed by a lengthy grant-writing and nomination process, and board approval, she said.

The news coincided with Far East Center’s 33-year-old Lunar New Year celebration (on Feb. 10), as well as Colorado’s new designation as only the second state in the U.S. to recognize the Lunar New Year as a holiday, behind California.

“It’s huge for our community,” Luong, 43, said of Westwood neighborhood residents. “The moment I told my mom she was bawling. I said, ‘Why are you crying? This should be exciting!’ And she, ‘It’s because they finally see us for who we are. We lost everything when we came here. Our lives were turned completely inside out.’ ”

Luong’s grandfather owned a Saigon bank that catered to international clients, and her grandmother “never worked a day in her life,” owing to their well-off lifestyle. But after fleeing to Guam, where the meager possessions they brought (jewelry, photos and clothes) were stolen, they flew to Oklahoma and then traveled to Denver on a Greyhound because an aunt lived here.

In Denver, family members began working in hotels and at King Soopers to make ends meet. They had few other options since they didn’t speak the language, Luong said. At one point, her uncle was sheltering 19 refugees in his basement.

Their story is not uncommon. Colorado’s history is intertwined with Asian immigrants — particularly from China — as they helped construct the state’s gold mines and railroads in the 19th century. But not speaking the language or sharing the dominant culture for more than a century created major obstacles here and, at worst, fear, discrimination and violence that has cycled over the decades — including during the pandemic when anti-Asian sentiment hit a disturbingly high peak.