An Asian-owned owned KC coffee shop was vandalized after the election. Was it targeted?

Café Cà Phê owner Jackie Nguyen spent Election Day selling Vietnamese coffee to Kansas City voters outside the World War I Museum in her mobile cart.

The next morning, she sat on the back patio of her brick-and-mortar shop in Columbus Park, clutching her Chihuahua, Lixi, while collecting her thoughts about both the election and about her business that had been violated for a third time since it opened at its current location.

The Asian-owned Kansas City coffee shop, which sits at 916 East 5th Street, was vandalized early Wednesday, just hours before the presidential race was called, in an incident Nyugen believes was a targeted attack, not a burglary.

Video provided to The Star shows a masked person drove a Chevrolet SUV to Café Cà Phê at 1:50 a.m., threw a rock at the glass door and window three times, and drove off. The person never made an attempt to enter the shop.

Owner Jackie Nguyen started her business in late 2020 to give Asian people in Kansas City a safe space, she said. Nguyen is a first generation Vietnamese-American who employs Vietnamese-Americans and members of other marginalized communities, and who's become an activist in her community.

Nguyen said this is the third time her business has been vandalized, but said the first two times were break-ins where burglars took money from the cash register. Nguyen and her staff are reluctant to label the incident as a hate crime, but since the person didn't attempt to go inside, they feel they have nothing else to point to in order to explain the attack.

"There was no intent to steal, which actually feels more heartbreaking to me than anything," Nguyen said.

A Kansas City police report confirmed officers were dispatched to the shop at 7:42 a.m. Wednesday, and a report was taken for property damage.

Nguyen said she was already feeling unsettled from the election results when she checked in on her staff around 7 a.m. to ask how they were doing and if they should open. She didn't get an answer until 30 minutes later, when managers informed her of the vandalism, which left shards of glass all over the floor.

Nguyen and her staff started the day feeling dejected — both from their dashed election hopes and from Café Cà Phê's smashed windows. But the response from the community the shop aims to serve has poured back into them — encouraging them as they continue their work of serving both coffee and a sense of community to Kansas City's Asian population.

'This community is unstoppable'

Café Cà Phê's Columbus Park location opened in August 2022. Cà Phê means coffee in Vietnamese.

It was broken into the following May. The shop's mobile cart was also broken into at one point. Nguyen had sympathy for the suspects in those incidents, saying the alleged thieves were just people who were struggling.

"I didn't feel violated, because I saw the intention," she said. "They just saw a business that had money in it, not what we represented."

The shop's Instagram account has been vocal about supporting Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign, and reaches more than 28,000 followers.

According to previous Star reporting , Nguyen became known as an activist in 2021 when she organized local "Stop Asian Hate" rallies following the killing of Asian workers at Atlanta-area spas and a string of anti-Asian attacks across the country. She also received hate emails and voicemails when she displayed a sticker which read "I'" in her business when it was located in the West Bottoms.

Nguyen acknowledges the fact that Kansas City's widespread property crime spree that's affected dozens of local businesses this year could also have been a factor. But to her and her staff, this incident feels like an affront to their mission of serving marginalized communities

"This hurts our community too. And it's like, damn, Is this about to be a regular thing?," Nguyen asks herself about the incident.

Director of community outreach Bety Le Shackleford struggles to dismiss the idea that the presidential race could have played a factor in the incident.

"It's so hard to not correlate this with what happened," Shackleford said. "The sense of emboldened to act in violence towards something that you don't agree with or you don't like."

But after sharing the incident on social media, the community responded with donations and a steady line of patrons on Wednesday afternoon. Replacing the glass will cost almost $2,000, but Shackleford said that's already been covered because of the support they've received.

"This community is unstoppable, and I'm very, very, very grateful for the community," Nguyen said. "It's an exchange. Our community shows up just as much as we show up for them, and we know that, they know that."

'We're not going anywhere'

Nguyen plans to apply for the city's Back to Business Fund , where she can receive up to $3,000 for repairs and up to $5,000 for reimbursement on security measures.

A new security system is also in the works.

They say the support that Café Cà Phê received from others is what Shackleford and Nguyen hope to replicate with their nonprofit, Hella Good Deeds, which celebrates Asian culture in Kansas City.

"This is exactly what I want part of the programming to be: small businesses, and then to even go into small Asian owned businesses," Shackleford said about Hella Good Deeds. She is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit.

"Not everyone can literally post [an incident] on social media and get the support," she said.

Nguyen and her staff refuse to let this incident, or past incidents, deter them from their goal of community organization in the place Nguyen now calls home, she said.

Before moving to Kansas City, Nguyen lived in San Diego, Los Angeles and New York City; cities that all have designated neighborhoods for the Asian community. She moved to Kansas City during the pandemic in 2020, and said she's determined to develop spaces for the Asian community here, even while fighting through the challenges she's encountered along the way.

"If I can do a centimeter of that work getting us forward to more representation, I'm gonna stay," Nguyen said.

"But this incident, it breaks my spirit. But at the same time, it also lights a fire under my ass too, to be like, 'Well, we're not going anywhere. We're gonna keep the fight. Because clearly, we're doing something.' But it's still really difficult."