Inside the Tết festivals lighting up cities this spring

The drums start before the sun is fully up. By mid-morning, the parking lot of a converted furniture warehouse has become a Tết festival grounds: folding tables selling bánh chưng by the slice, a stage for lion dance troupes, kids in miniature áo dài chasing each other between vendor tents.

"We used to run this out of a church basement," said Trinh Ho, one of the volunteer organizers who has helped grow the event from a few dozen families to several thousand attendees over eight years. "Now we need permits for street closures. That's a good problem to have."

Much of that growth, organizers say, comes from younger Vietnamese Americans who grew up attending these festivals as kids and have come back as organizers, vendors, and performers — often bringing production values and social media savvy their parents' generation didn't have the bandwidth for. Lion dance troupes now post rehearsal clips that rack up hundreds of thousands of views; festival maps circulate on group chats weeks in advance.

What hasn't changed is the emotional center of it all: the lucky money, the incense at the ancestor altar set up near the entrance, the specific chaos of trying to keep track of four generations of one family across a crowded lot. "My grandmother comes every year in a wheelchair just to watch the lion dance," Ho said. "That's the whole point. Everything else is just logistics."