Peace with Vietnam’s Past

Perhaps former South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky can again be a leader of sorts, paving the way for Vietnamese refugees to make peace with their past. By openly visiting his homeland, an act long considered treasonous by the people who fled South Vietnam almost 30 years ago, the former premier of a former nation sent an important message to his fellow expatriates: It is time to come to terms with the nation that exists now.

Bitterness as deep as the Vietnamese refugees’ cannot be expected to die quickly. They had spent much of their lives fighting the communist regime before it swept through South Vietnam, forcing them to flee. A subsequent wave of refugees felt the horrors of the communist reeducation camps before getting out.

Many expatriates cannot forget and understandably choose not to forgive.

But their pretense that South Vietnam will rise again and their refusal to accept the normalized relations between their native country and their adopted one are another matter.

Vitriolic rallies in 1999 forced a video store owner in Little Saigon to close shop after he displayed the Vietnamese flag. Just last year, the Westminster City Council bowed to community pressure to adopt the flag of the defunct Republic of South Vietnam as the official flag at city functions that involve the Vietnamese community.

Truth is, many Vietnamese Americans already travel to their homeland or buy Vietnamese products, but they do it quietly for fear of harassment from die-hard anticommunists. A shop owner covertly sells CDs of Vietnamese musicians in the back of her Little Saigon store. Open sales would threaten her business, even though, as she told a Times reporter, “It’s too late to fight. It’s the past. It’s over.” Many expatriates would never tell their friends that they send money to relatives in Vietnam. This simple act of humanity is denounced as supporting the communist regime.

As an icon of the anti-communist republic, Ky is in a position to dent that fear of open contact with Vietnam. As Ky noted, Vietnam is moving rapidly toward a free-market economy. His assertion that it also is beginning to embrace human rights is more naive. But young Vietnamese Americans are using modern political tactics to pressure the current regime, with recent rallies and lobbying efforts on behalf of 11 Buddhist leaders arrested in Vietnam.

“The road of old warriors has ended,” Ky said as he surveyed his hometown of Hanoi. The expatriate Vietnamese can better help their native country and countrymen by recognizing the truth in those words.