DATELINE: SAIGON — Little Saigon that is. In the largest
Vietnamese enclave outside of Vietnam they remember the Vietnam War
as the American War. Spanning the three Orange County, California
cities of Westminster, Garden Grove and Santa Ana, the residents of
this communist-free (by legislation) stronghold have little use for
War Hero candidate John Kerry. Chock full of beauty schools, cafes,
and ubiquitous Pho restaurants (the classic Vietnamese soup), the
pre-communist national flag proudly waves next to the Stars and
Stripes above the Veterans memorial at Westminster City Hall.
In “America’s Most Republican County” (350 elected officials;
registration 48.5% Rep./30.6% Dem.) Senator Kerry is considered a
traitor to the Vietnamese cause. His anti-war antics that helped
launch a thousand boats, coupled with his shelving of the 2001
Vietnam Human Rights Act (a litmus test for a majority of
Vietnamese no matter what party), gives President Bush a golden
opportunity to woo an often overlooked minority voting block.
“Kerry’s action burned bridges nationwide” within the Vietnamese
community, according to Garden Grove councilman and Republican
California State Assembly candidate Van Tran. Sponsored in the
House by Christopher Smith and co-sponsored by the unlikely
bipartisan duo of Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Loretta Sanchez
(D-CA, whose district crosses into Little Saigon), the human rights
act passed by a margin of 410-1. Kerry, then ranking member of the
Senate subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, did not
allow the legislation to come to the floor for a vote.
TRAN, A VIETNAMESE-AMERICAN, is readying for a cross-country trip
to New York City as a first time delegate to the Republican
National Convention. He told this writer that he had taken
advantage of this year’s option of registering as a GOP delegate
via the Internet. Elected to the Garden Grove City Council with
more votes than any other candidate in city history, Tran also
picked up the Republican nomination for State Assembly with a 2-1
edge (66% to 33%) over fellow Councilman Mark Leyes. He is also a
member of Rep. Ed Royce’s Asian Pacific Congressional Advisory
Board.
For those of us who have been content to let the bad dream of
the Vietnam War fade into national unconsciousness (until the Kerry
campaign), the strength of the battles still going on in our midst
may seem surprising. In early 1999, Truong Van Tran (no relation)
placed a picture of Ho Chi Minh and the communist Vietnamese flag
in the window of his video store in the Westminster portion of
Little Saigon. Seven weeks of subsequent protest garnered national
attention and culminated in Truong’s arrest for pirating Vietnamese
soap operas. This event was a turning point in the political
participation of the locals. After serving as a liaison between the
community and the Westminster police, Van Tran decided to make a
run for city council in his neighboring hometown of Garden
Grove.
“It is intriguing about this election that Vietnam is coming in
to play,” Tran muses. “Vietnamese-Americans haven’t forgotten John
Kerry’s anti-war stance. It would not be too much to say there is
some hatred for him in the community.” With a population of over a
million in the U.S., and almost half of that in California, this
sizable and vocal minority voting block may have some resonance
during this election cycle.
Lan Quoc Nguyen, the first Vietnamese-American to be elected to
a local school board in California (Garden Grove, nach), has a more
“nuanced” view of his struggles with Kerry. “Senator Kerry is a
deeply principled man that believes that the war was wrong,” he
says, “and he’s trying to undo the damage that the U.S. did to the
country.” That doesn’t mean that Nguyen believes that Kerry is
right, or that Kerry is listening to the Vietnamese community. “It
is difficult to approach him. Anyone who gets in his way is viewed
as a leftover from the Southern regime.”
Nguyen believes that the war was wrong in the way that it was
fought, not in its intent. He says that the war cause was just, and
that the actions of the North afterwards demonstrate that. “We
fought to prevent what actually happened. Senator Kerry has ignored
the aftermath of the war, the wholesale persecution in the south,
the tragedies and the torture.
“In the south, we accepted the fact that we lost. The communist
government did not forget that it won. It did not reconcile with
the south. It cracked down with a vengeance on all who were
involved, including the religious organizations. This never
registered in any part of Kerry’s policy.”
AS FOR KERRY’S HANDLING of the 2001 Vietnam Human Rights Act,
Nguyen says it further emboldened the communist government. “We
accept democratic debate. We won almost unanimously in the House.
When Kerry used his influence to squash the bill in the Senate, it
was like he was thumbing his nose at us and making a mockery of the
process.” He says that the communist government has used Senator
Kerry to make a point at home. “They make fun of America and its
‘process.’ They know that all they need to do is get one Senator to
get what they want.”
Nguyen says that the government has used the bill’s defeat to
enact a new crackdown on religious freedom in Vietnam. On the
street in Little Saigon, people take a blunter view, and refer to
Kerry as a communist sympathizer. To make it even more interesting,
the community doesn’t hold all its ire for Kerry. Although John
McCain wasn’t technically linked to Kerry or the legislation,
locals suspect that he had a role in its fate, and want him to fess
up.
Councilman Van Tran is grateful for the opportunity to represent
Little Saigon and the greater Vietnamese-American community at the
convention. He considers his life to be a classic American success
story. Emigrating with his parents at age 10 from Saigon, Tran went
on to get a B.A. in Political Science from the UC Irvine, and then
went on to earn both a Master’s in Public Administration and a
Juris Doctorate from Hamline University School of Law in Saint
Paul, Minnesota. He has served as a staff aide to Rep. Bob Dornan
and then-State Senator (now Congressman) Ed Royce, as well as other
political posts. “America offers to immigrants a life of hope and
opportunity, and nourishes our aspirations to be something
better.”
Tran, along with Nguyen, has worked intensely within the
Vietnamese community to encourage people to participate in the
electoral process. Earlier this year in anticipation of his
assembly race, Tran registered 4,000 new Republicans through his
Vietnamese-American Voters Coalition, including 1,000 existing
voters that switched parties to vote in the primary. With an
Eastern Seaboard group sponsoring a fundraiser this month in
Philadelphia for his California race, Tran is taking-in talk of his
being a future national figure. “There is talk about that
circulating, but one step at a time.”
THE LATEST NEWS OUT OF Little Saigon was the passing of two
ordinances in May of this year, one each in Westminster and Garden
Grove, which declared both cities “communist-free zones.” The
communist Vietnamese government had been planning a charm mission
to Little Saigon (as well as other expat communities), to promote
“Resolution 36,” which seeks to define the government’s
relationship with those communities. The resolution, passed in
March defines the Diaspora as inferior to the homeland, and
requires it to support the current regime for its ultimate success
(in other words, “send us your money”). The mission was
subsequently scrubbed, at least in Orange County. Since then a
number of other communities have enacted similar communist-free
zoning acts.
With John Kerry and the Swift-Vets moving Vietnam to the front
burner of public debate, discussion of the new version of the
Vietnam Human Rights Act could attract some unwanted attention; and
bring further trouble to Senator Kerry. Reintroduced in April of
2003 as H.R. 1587, the measure passed the house 323-45 on July 19
of this year, again co-sponsored by Rohrabacher and Sanchez. This
time Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Sam Brownback, who
is also chairman of the Sub-Committee on East Asian and Pacific
Affairs, is sponsoring the bill in the upper chamber. The bill is
more than likely to reach the Senate floor.
Lan Quoc Nguyen says that he is preparing for the worst. “We are
resigned to the fact that if Kerry is elected, our cause will be
set back 20 years. Our efforts will be doomed until he’s out of
office.”
According to Van Tran, the Vietnamese-American community is
“strong on national defense, strong on family values, and strongly
religious,” a natural Republican group. It opposes Kerry’s quest
for normalization of government relations with Vietnam until the
government provides answers about missing family members, prisoners
of war, and a commitment to basic human rights.
In Little Saigon they’ve been talking about the War for thirty
years. If John Kerry wants to talk about the war, they would like
to talk to him about it too. After all, they were there.
