Politicians Save Face, Gain Votes by Learning About County’s Asians

The Vietnamese have a saying: nhap gia tuy tuc. When entering the home, abide by its customs.

“That covers a lot of area,” said Tony Lam, a leader in Orange County’s Southeast Asian community and former president of the county’s Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. “Once you want to learn about us, then you have to learn about our customs and tradition. And be a friend with someone who knows something. And then you don’t make mistake.”

For politicians trying to attract the Asian support in Orange County, this is, as an American saying goes, easier said than done.

One thing an astute politician learns quickly is that there is no monolithic Asian community.

Own Customs

Each group has its own customs and its own political history, whether it be the Vietnamese community in Westminster or the Korean community in Garden Grove or the many other smaller enclaves of Japanese, Chinese, Laotian, Cambodian, Filipino and other Asians that have settled in Santa Ana and other cities in Orange County.

Even within each ethnic group, there are many factions, some of them decidedly hostile toward the others. Sometimes the hard feelings date back to the old country. Siding with one, even inadvertently, can alienate another.

“It’s very complicated,” said Garden Grove Mayor Jonathan H. Cannon, who has a reputation in his city’s Korean community for being particularly sensitive to these cultural differences.

Learning the Players

“You have to learn who all the players are and make a concerted effort to treat people equally. Otherwise . . . you become the darling of a single faction in the community. And then the other factions don’t trust you.”

Negotiating these unfamiliar waters has become a necessity for people like Cannon, U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), Westminster Mayor Elden F. Gillespie and others who represent areas that are becoming increasingly Asian.

“They’re a power to reckon with,” Gillespie said. Politicians have learned to cater to the Asian groups, he said, because “they work (for candidates), they donate money.”

According to county demographer Bill Gayk, as of 1985, about 7% of the county’s residents were of Asian or Pacific Island descent, and about 60,500 of those were Southeast Asians. In raw figures, Gayk estimated that the Asian-Pacific Islander population increased from about 87,000 to about 147,000 between 1980 and 1985.

“That’s the equivalent of saying we just added a mid-size city,” Gayk said.

The two dominant Asian groups in Orange County are the Vietnamese, many of whom have fled their homeland since the fall of Saigon in 1975, and the Koreans, who have immigrated more for economic than political reasons.

Growing Impact

It takes little more than a drive in “Little Saigon” on Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, or the Korean community on Garden Grove Boulevard, to see the growing impact of Asian migration. The reverberations are being felt not only in the business community but in the housing market and all aspects of government, from law enforcement to schools. That has brought into the picture politicians at every level of government, from city council members to congressmen.

Cannon is one of those who has stepped into the Asian community enough to have blundered a bit. For example, on a cable television show for Koreans, he was asked for his advice to new Asian immigrants who wanted to set up businesses. He rattled off a list of steps, including introducing themselves to public officials, getting the proper business licenses and joining the Korean Chamber of Commerce.

The last of those items was a mistake.

While the Korean Chamber “was ecstatic,” many other Korean groups in the community were upset at being left out, Cannon said. “I have a comfortable-enough working relationship with many Koreans that they feel they can tell me, ‘you shouldn’t do that, Mr. Mayor.’ ”

Asked who would have given him such frank advice, Cannon laughed: “If you’re going to mention names, you’ve got to mention them all.”

Supporters Joined In

Kathy Buchoz, who as a former mayor of Westminster was faced with similar situations, said a few years ago some of her Vietnamese supporters suggested having a fund-raiser to help retire the debt she accumulated in her unsuccessful bid for the state Senate. When the word got out, other Vietnamese supporters ask to join in.

“I was of the opinion that the more people we had working on this fund-raiser, the better,” Buchoz said. But the original group of supporters was so offended by the presence of the others that they left the fund-raiser early.

“A few days later, in contacting some of them, they said, ‘Well, Kathy, you had some groups there and we didn’t want to be in the same room with them.’ I knew then it was maybe a little deeper than I had known.”

Another example, this from Cannon:

Garden Grove put on an Asian cultural forum to educate business people about how to deal with Southeast Asian refugees.

“It was Americans telling Americans how to deal with Asians--a big, big mistake,” Cannon said in retrospect. “Big mistake.”

A few Vietnamese were invited to participate, but that brought a backlash from those who were not.

Valuable Information

“The Americans who attended that forum got a lot of valuable information. But in achieving that goal, we offended a lot of groups, and it took some time to go back and mend fences,” Cannon said.

Frank Jao, a Bolsa Avenue real estate agent and developer who was born in Vietnam, said ruefully that it “takes more time to plan a political event in the Asian community here than anywhere else in the world I know of.”

One of the things that politicians need to understand about Asians is why they get involved in politics, and why they don’t.

Recent immigrants initially are so involved in establishing themselves in their new home that they do not turn their attention to politics, those familiar with the various Asian communities say. Even when they do, it is sometimes with a fear of politics that they had in their own countries, which many of them fled for political reasons.

‘General Suspicion’

Former Assemblyman Richard Robinson (D-Garden Grove) said he noticed when walking precincts in his campaign to try to unseat Dornan last year that “there’s a general suspicion on the part of most of the immigrants, the first generation in any case, of government. Period.

“Whether it was bad experiences they had in Vietnam, for example, or the Filipinos with the Marcos government, they have a different view of government than the one we have in this country. Government represents a very repressive part of their lives. . . . It’s going to take them a little while to trust our form of government.”

Dennis Catron, first vice chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County and chairman of its ethnic outreach committee, said party officials have had to reassure new immigrants that they can talk to their representatives without going through the party.

“They thought they had to come through us,” Catron said.

When new immigrants do register to vote, they often make choices based on generalizations about the major political parties.

Register Republican

Vietnamese immigrants tend to register Republican because they identify President Reagan with strong anti-Communist views. Democratic Party officials concede that the GOP has done an excellent job of recruiting the Vietnamese on this basis.

“We disagree with him on a lot of domestic issues, but for political reasons we are still supporting him,” Nhi Ho, Dornan’s liaison to the Asian community, said of Vietnamese support for Reagan. Watching a group of a dozen or so of his countrymen cross the street near Dornan’s office in Garden Grove, Ho said: “Vietnamese people like these, if you have two candidates, will ask, ‘Is this guy anti-Communist or not?’ That’s it. Their English is very limited. So they don’t know very much about the American political system.”

So sensitive are the Vietnamese on this issue that even Dornan, the quintessential anti-Communist, got into trouble over news reports that quoted him in describing a 1986 visit to Hanoi to seek information about U.S. soldiers who were missing in action.

“For the first time, Hanoi was not the dark side of the moon, an enemy country where my friends were held in captivity,” Dornan was quoted as saying. “Now, it’s on the beaten path for me. The old cliche that time heals old wounds really is true. I’m ready to stop calling them the enemy country.”

The headline on the story, which ran in The Times, was “Dornan Leaves Hanoi With New Respect for Old Enemy.”

Tempest in a Teapot

Dornan did not deny he said that, although he objected to the headline. But what ensued was what he described recently as a “tempest in a teapot.” The newspapers in the Vietnamese community--there are 20 of them, ranging in circulation from 2,000 to 12,000--picked up his comments and vilified him.

“I had to go around to several groups and make it very clear that my lifelong stand on Vietnam had not been changed by a couple of days in Hanoi,” Dornan said. Eventually, he added, he was able to reassure them that his loyalties had not changed and that he had meant only that he would talk to Hanoi in order to get American and Vietnamese prisoners out of Vietnam.

Dornan said he learned something about Asian politics from the incident. “It told me about language barriers and that they only notice headlines or quick reports in the press. And if you want to reach them, you have to go to their press.”

Speaking of the Korean community, Maria Cho, who is an alternate to her husband, Ben, on the county Republican Central Committee, said she was puzzled by some of her friends who agreed with her on political matters but who were registered as Democrats, as are many Koreans.

“They reply, ‘Somehow, I don’t know why, I like the Democrat. The democratic system,’ ” she said. “They said they love the democratic system, without knowing the democratic system and Democratic Party are two different things.”

The Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian communities seem to share one thing: many of them are entrepreneurs. Thus, they need a special kind of help from the political system.

Promoting Interests

Ho Chung, 54, of Buena Park, a Korean-American who is former president of the Asian Pacific Democratic Caucus, said the strongly business-oriented Korean community tends to get involved in politics as a practical way to promote its interests, especially business interests.

“Koreans are very aggressive,” Chung explained. “They like to stay as first-class people. So they buy houses in good areas. They like to send their children to top-class schools. Like to buy good quality cars. So . . . they work hard, overtime.” What they need from politicians, he said, is help in business development in their communities.

Koreans also are learning to pick their shots, according to Chung. For example, in 1982, they contributed money to former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., a Democrat, in his race for the U.S. Senate. But because Brown lost, Chung said, “we didn’t get any return, so we had a great lesson through that campaign. So now most Koreans are more careful in fund-raising involvement. We are learning more the principle of give-and-take.”