Vietnamese Celebration Conjures Up the Past : Tet Holiday Lives On in a New World

To Americans, the name may conjure up savage images of war.

Twenty years ago, the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive marked the beginning of the end for U.S. forces in Vietnam.

But Tet, or the Vietnamese lunar New Year, is that southeast Asian nation’s most important holiday, a blend of firecracker revelry and religious reverence that can last for weeks.

And as was obvious Saturday at the Tet Festival in Santa Ana’s Centennial Regional Park, it is a holiday that lives in the soul of the Vietnamese.

Thousands in Attendance

Thousands of Vietnamese, dressed in everything from business suits to frilly dresses to traditional silk robes, began welcoming in the Year of the Dragon by eating New Year’s foods, burning incense and laying a wreath in memory of those killed in the war that changed the course of their lives.

Organizers of the festival, the sixth such annual event for Southern California’s Vietnamese community, said they expected as many as 50,000 people would visit before the close Sunday night. This year Tet falls on Feb. 17, but the holiday is traditionally celebrated days in advance.

“Tet is an occasion for everyone to have fun, even for those who can hardly afford to,” said the festival program prepared by the Union of the Vietnamese Student Assns. of Southern California. “On the New Year, one has to be most courteous, most forgiving, most generous, in short most gentlemanly or ladylike, though one may not intend to be so in the course of the year.”

And so it went Saturday. Everyone was on their best behavior.

Mothers watched as their children, dolled up in their holiday finest, managed to eat even the gooiest goodies without any major accidents.

The elderly, many holding umbrellas to block the sun, watched in silence as the ancestral Tet ritual ceremony was performed on stage. And the festival began with a procession toward “Freedom Fighter’s Square,” a monument erected by organizers to honor Vietnamese and American war dead. That was followed by the playing of the Star Spangled Banner and South Vietnam’s national anthem, a eulogy in Vietnamese and English and a moment of silence.

But that is not to say that there wasn’t a lot of just plain fun going on. In the best tradition of traveling carnivals, there were rides for the kiddies--at 25 cents a pop--and games where one could win everything from stuffed animals to a pack of cigarettes to the assurance of good luck in the coming year.

Hoang Dao, 23, of Santa Ana, was eagerly taking the money of those playing Bau Cua , a game of chance in which participants could wager from 25 cents up to $3.

To play the game, a Tet tradition, a player lays down his money on a picture of, say, a crab. Then three dice, bearing pictures instead of dots, are cast. If the crab, or whatever other picture the player has bet on, comes up on one of the dice, the player wins good luck, but no money.

On the other hand, Dao explained, losing could mean bad luck.

But Son Tran, 18, of Garden Grove, who just lost $2 on an unfortunate roll, said he wasn’t worried.

Just for the Fun of It

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s just to throw money away for fun.”

Others at the festival, however, were less cavalier.

Tung Le, festival coordinator, explained that the Vietnamese are very careful about who is invited into their home to celebrate Tet.

“The first person in your house can either bring you good luck or bad luck,” he said. “So you have to research that person very carefully. He has to be very lucky.”

Among other Tet musts, according to the festival guide: don’t break dishes, don’t display grief, don’t argue and don’t refuse to eat what your host offers.

A Tet greeting for a married woman, the guide suggested, could be, “I hope that next year you will have a (another) boy.”

Hang Tran, 17, of Orange, said that she wasn’t exactly sure how much stock to put in those Tet guidelines, but she did not want to risk breaking them. She had come to the festival with her parents in an attempt to relive the Tet holidays they spent in their home of Bien-Hoa, not far from what is now Ho Chi Minh City.

“It was somewhat like this in Vietnam,” said Tran, who came to the United States when she was 8 years old. “There were open markets, lots of food and we would visit all our relatives.”

Tran, wearing the traditional Vietnamese ao dai , a long silk tunic over pants, said that her parents would like to return to Vietnam, “but I’m much more Americanized.”

“We want to go back to Vietnam if we can gain our freedom again,” Tran translated her mother, Ba Tran, as saying in Vietnamese.

One non-Asian visitor, Doug Gambriel of Fountain Valley, said he showed up on the suggestion of Vietnamese friends who work with him at SR Engineering in Garden Grove.

“It’s quite interesting,” he said, “but it needs more English translation.”