Little Saigon’s Own Edition of the Front Page : Viet Refugee Keeps Community Paper’s Presses Rolling

Thirty-three years ago in Saigon, a skinny Do Ngoc Yen scurried around his junior high school campus, distributing underground newsletters he and his friends wrote to oppose French attempts to control Vietnam.

Last week, no longer skinny, and with his name Anglicized to Yen Do, the same person stood in a cavernous, 5,000-square-foot converted vehicle-undercoating factory in Westminster. With a father’s pride he waved his right hand toward six cluttered desks jammed so close together a pencil wouldn’t slip between them. “This,” he said, “is the editorial department.”

Nearby stood the sloping layout boards of the advertising department. Beyond a partition lay a giant table for conferences, lunch and, on busy days, dinner too; across another partition sprawled the circulation area. In a nearby room, computer operators busily tapped stories into their machines.

A sense of urgency pervades the place, a tension that makes the room seem ready to spring to life.

This is the Nguoi Viet Daily News, one of this country’s largest and most successful Vietnamese newspapers.

Yen Do, now a U.S. citizen, is editor of Nguoi Viet. He has seen the paper through its difficult birth and tenuous infancy since Dec. 6, 1978, when the first edition’s banner headline screamed in Vietnamese “100,000 Boat People Will Be Airlifted to U.S.” Today Nguoi Viet is a healthy, bilingual publication with a circulation of about 9,000. The Vietnamese population of Orange County is about 90,000, Do said.

Do has traveled a tortuous path on his odyssey from publishing a political newsletter in Saigon at age 12 to publishing a newspaper in Orange County at age 45. He has made stops along the way as a prisoner, poet, dishwasher, war correspondent, teacher’s aide, political organizer, wallpaper hanger, refugee camp intern and in enough other positions to fill several resumes.

Nguoi Viet translates to mean Vietnamese people. As the name hints, Do’s paper is intended to do more than disseminate news. “We try to help our small society to get along with the mainstream,” Do said, watching intently from behind thick glasses to be sure the significance of his journalistic mission was understood. “We try to help Vietnamese to get along in society. If not, we have no future here. And we try to help our people get along with themselves.”

Mission in Life

Do has had a mission in life since his pre-teen leafleting days. The son of shopkeeper parents has always been fiercely nationalistic.

When the French left Vietnam in 1954, 14-year-old Do found his Saigon home crowded with relatives fleeing the communist-dominated North. Their stories of communist oppression fueled Do’s nationalistic zeal.

He helped publish “secret leaflets, just for high school boys to keep nationalist solidarity.” Then, in 1957 when he was 16, Do learned to his chagrin that he had been working for communists who he said infiltrated student organizations, even the Boy Scouts.

Do’s abrupt realization that he was working for communists resulted from a meeting of provincial high school student leaders, over which he had presided. After the meeting, secret police arrested many participants.

Do escaped arrest, but many of his friends were jailed. “I went to the police and accepted responsibility,” he said. “My friends were released, but I was put in jail.

“They were looking for political details,” Do said, explaining that questions asked and information given by the secret police tipped him off that he had been working for communist organizers in the student movement.

After two weeks of daily questioning, Do was released.

For the next year, Do said, his friends were afraid to be seen near him. A lonely Yen Do took refuge in reading and writing poetry and essays. His parents supported him, mainly from the proceeds of artificial flowers his mother made and sold in their shop.

Then, about a year after his release from jail, Do and about 10 other youths were called before a judge, who charged them with undermining the Vietnamese government.

Barred From School

Do was sentenced to two years in prison, but the judge immediately suspended the sentence “because it would have created an unnecessary political crisis,” Do said. Do left the courtroom and bicycled to school. Within the hour, two teachers escorted him off campus and told him never to come back.

They said he had written “politics between the lines” in a school publication he edited, and “school administrators didn’t want political activism at school, so they threw me out.”

For the next four years, Do wandered throughout South Vietnam, “spending most of my time in libraries reading, mostly politics and history.”

Do’s family continued to support him while he read, wrote occasional pieces for newspapers, reviewed books and translated French articles for Vietnamese publications.

Having passed a high school equivalency test, Do entered the University of Saigon in the fall of 1963. He quickly became a leader of the anti-communist Saigon Student Union.

A Classical Marriage

In January, 1964, while attending the university, Do married Loan La, a college student training to become a teacher. “It was a very classical marriage,” Do said, adding with a laugh: “My father and her father knew each other a long time. My family thought the best way was to give me a wife so I would be domesticated.”

Do spent only a year at the university before leaving to travel around South Vietnam, trying to organize a national youth movement.

For five years he tried to organize South Vietnamese youth. Mostly, he worked on his own, though for eight months he was a staff member and organizer for the government’s Ministry of Youth. Do’s organizational efforts were, for the most part, failures. “It was wartime, so all human resources were going to the military.”

In October, 1969, Do gave up on the youth movement and took his first paying journalism job, as war correspondent for a news and literature magazine in Saigon. He went on assignment to Cambodia, Laos and the demilitarized zone.

For three years, Do ducked in and out of combat zones. “Then my wife told me just one week before delivering my third child that she was so worried that the child might abort. So I took a position of assistant editor for the Saigon Daily News.”

Do kept that editorship until April 25, 1975, when he, his wife and their three children fled on a U.S. military plane five days before the South Vietnamese government fell to the communists.

Coming to the United States

After a three-day stop on Guam, the family landed at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside.

Moving to a new continent did nothing to dampen Do’s passion for organizing. His first act after establishing his family in a tent in the Camp Pendleton refugee complex was to set up a school to teach English to the Vietnamese.

“It’s my job to organize people,” Do said.

Each refugee needed a sponsor in order to leave the camp, and Do could not find one. After 45 days, he and his family were moved to Hope Village in Auburn, a settlement near Sacramento of 500 families sponsored by World Vision International, a Christian relief and development group.

Do quickly got back into the newspaper business at Hope Village. In the 18 days he spent there, he managed to publish two six-page mimeographed newspapers about the refugee camp.

On July 4, 1975, Dorothy Wilson, a retired schoolteacher from Santa Rosa who had met the Do family on an earlier visit to Hope Village, returned, piled the family in her station wagon and drove them to Santa Rosa. Finally, Do had a sponsor.

The best work Do could find in Santa Rosa was a part-time job washing dishes in a chain restaurant. It wasn’t much to his liking, and it paid only minimum wage. His wife was eight months’ pregnant with her fourth child.

With three-fourths of his first paycheck, Do bought a Greyhound ticket to Dallas, where his cousin worked repairing aircraft altimeters. The cousin found similar work for Do.

By early September, Do had brought his family to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He quit his job because he couldn’t afford hospital bills for the birth of his child, and Medicaid wouldn’t pay if he earned as much as he made fixing altimeters.

Do spent 2 1/2 years in Texas, some of it on welfare, but most of it in a series of diverse jobs.

Back Into Newspapers

As a social worker, “I learned that you can stay on welfare for 10 years, 15 years,” Do said, furrowing his brow in consternation. “I think that’s a very dangerous system. So I began to think about mass education again, about the newspaper business again.

“I thought, ‘If I can share my experience in this country, the newcomers can reduce their learning time.”’

Another driving force was pressing Do back toward the newspaper business: patriotism. “It is my duty to rescue the heritage (of the Vietnamese who fled their homeland) and, most important, to keep the values of the non-communists alive.”

Do had no savings and wasn’t able to accumulate any on a social worker’s pay. So he learned to hang wallpaper and quit his social worker’s job early in 1978 to paper walls. He saved $1,000 a month for four months and then quit to fly to San Diego to work for a friend who published a Vietnamese magazine.

“The first day I sat down and wrote, and I knew, never again would I quit the journalism business. I was so happy,” Do said.

In October he flew back to Texas, rented a U-Haul trailer, squeezed his wife and four children into their Chevrolet sedan and drove to San Diego.

Using the magazine’s equipment, Do put together the first issue of Nguoi Viet. He sold 200 copies for 75 cents each.

Since that inauspicious start in December, 1978, Yen Do has gathered a dedicated staff, built his paper to a six-day-a-week publication with a section in English on Sundays, dropped its price to 25 cents an issue, multiplied circulation by 45, and moved his family and his newspaper to Orange County.

It hasn’t been easy.

After publishing three issues in San Diego, Do said he “realized Orange County was the hub of Southern California.” He paused and smiled. “Besides, I had exhausted my money. I could not afford my (San Diego) apartment anymore.”

Do brought his family to Santa Ana and moved in with 12 young friends from Vietnam. The six Dos lived in one room of a two-bedroom apartment, and the 18- to 20-year-old men squeezed into the other.

“We needed them and they needed us,” Do said, adding that the men made money by selling his paper at churches and supermarkets. “One issue paid for the next.”

The paper came out once a week then, on Sundays.

After three years, Nguoi Viet hit the streets three times a week, circulation rose to 4,500 and Do had attracted a loyal staff, mostly friends he had known in the youth movement in Vietnam--teachers or university students, a banker and an engineer.

Do had moved from Santa Ana to a four-bedroom tract home on aGarden Grove cul-de-sac. His wife, who had been a teacher in Saigon, attended electronics school and found work repairing telephones. The children attend public schools: Anh, 19, is a USC sophomore; Mary, 16, is a high school junior; Tung (John), 14, an eighth-grader, and Lin, 10, a sixth-grader.

Do’s house is for his family, but the garage, which looks as though it barely survived a hurricane, is a hodgepodge of Do’s hundreds of books, plus food, shoes, a motorcycle and other belongings of Vietnamese refugees who have slept there while getting settled in Orange County.

At the newspaper, Do’s staff proved so loyal, the relationship among its members so close and its remuneration so slight that in 1983 he formed a corporation to run the paper, giving himself and eight others equal power and equal pay, about $1,000 a month.

Do is not getting rich from his newspaper, nor does he expect to do so. He dedicates himself to Nguoi Viet because “being in this country is a totally new experience for every one of us (refugees), and the only thing that links us together is newspapers. They allow us to maintain our own culture and to become Americans at the same time.”