The Americanization of Tet : Vietnamese Celebrate Their Key Holiday Season--but Remember How It Was

Years ago and an ocean away, it was a time of both exploding fireworks and holidays that appeared to stretch on forever, a calming hiatus marked by days of carefully observed rituals. Foods seen just once a year appeared on the table. Relatives gathered. The war that seemingly never ended at least gave the illusion of being suspended for a time.

In the weeks before the celebration of the festival called Tet, “you could feel it, you could feel it in the air, you knew something happy was coming,” remembered Tram Do, 24.

That was then, in Vietnam. And now, in America? “We don’t have all the feelings for it,” he said. “It just comes.”

It came last weekend, in Centennial Regional Park in Santa Ana, and it will come again this weekend, in the Little Saigon section of Westminster and Garden Grove. Orange County is now home to 100,000 Vietnamese, the largest number in any area outside Vietnam, and the two festivals are the most important holidays of the year for the community.

But they aren’t what they used to be.

Peter Pham sells real estate for Century 21 on Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana now. The Tet holidays he remembered with the most pleasure were the ones of his youth in North Vietnam, before the country was partitioned in 1954, when Pham was 10 and his family fled south. In 1975 he escaped the Communists again, leaving for the United States.

“To me, the most important tradition in the Tet celebration is the homecoming,” he said. “It’s time for family members to renew their relationships and to celebrate the start of the year and to look to the future.” And for children, it’s a time for gifts.

In Vietnam, Tet as often as not meant a month’s vacation, allowing plenty of time to travel to birthplaces and celebrate. Here, Vietnamese are spread out, and the holiday lasts 3 days at most, Pham said, even when the families are together. His parents are still in Vietnam. He hasn’t seen them since 1975.

As a result, Tet is not as big a holiday for him as it once was, he said, “because without my parents and grandparents the meaning is not the same.”

Dr. Co Pham agrees. Tet is “more . . . Americanized already,” the obstetrician/gynecologist said.

He worries too that his children “are too Americanized. They know nothing about their background.”

Yet he will bring them to the Tet celebration in Little Saigon, “so we can have the feeling that we’re back home.”

Tet is the lunar new year, determined each year by the movement of the moon and starting at the first new moon after the sun enters Aquarius, which means it falls between Jan. 21 and Feb. 19. This year the date is Feb. 6, the start of the Year of the Snake, succeeding the Year of the Dragon and preceding the Year of the Horse.

It is a major holilday in China and on Taiwan, and for communities of overseas Chinese, but goes largely unnoticed by virtually all other countries aside from Vietnam.

The lunar calendar is broken down into 12-year cycles, each with its own animal. No matter which of the 12 animals marks the year, the end of the year is characterized by a settling of accounts and a paying of debts.

Some Little Saigon merchants continue the practice of pre-Communist Vietnam and of Taiwan and Hong Kong of holding end-of-year sales as an ostensible way of raising money to pay off loans, said Chuoc Vo-Ta, executive director of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce.

Another key element of Tet is prayers to and for parents and relatives now dead. Buddhists use household shrines; Catholics attend church for special Masses.

One custom that has survived the pilgrimage from Asia to North America is the thorough cleaning of the house in the waning days of the old year, said Tram Do, a teachers’ aide at Morningside Elementary School in Garden Grove. When the new year begins, dust remains undisturbed for the first day or three, lest good luck be swept out with the dirt.

Another custom followed fairly closely--even by people who laugh nervously as they dismiss it as “superstition”--involves the first person to enter the house in a new year. Tradition has it that the initial visitor will determine the luck of the house and its occupants for the rest of the year.

A lot of thought is given to deciding who will be invited to be the first to enter. Vietnamese say their parents often send the youngest person in the house outside just before midnight, with instructions to re-enter as soon after midnight as possible. Several Vietnamese said they know of people who have declined to be the first to enter a house, because if the family runs into bad luck during the year, that first person is often blamed.

A major element of Tet, especially for children, is li xi , or the giving of money in a traditional red envelope. As children get older, the amount of money they receive usually dwindles, so most Vietnamese speak of the Tet festivals of their childhoods as their happiest.

“(Older) children have the freedom to do the things that normally they are not allowed to do--like drinking and smoking--and not be called down for it,” Peter Pham, the real estate agent, said with a laugh.

Tony Lam, a Westminster restaurateur who is organizing this weekend’s Tet Festival for the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, said the new year’s celebrations of his teen-age years were the best because “the country was at peace.”

For 26-year-old The Tuy Nguyen, however, there are no memories of peace in her native land. Her parents left North Vietnam when the Communists took power in 1954. She was born in South Vietnam in 1962, when fighting was going on and U.S. advisers were becoming more prominent.

“I remember a lot of fireworks, family gatherings, getting li xi money from my grandparents,” she recalled. “It’s a time of new dresses, new clothes, everything new. It’s a time of reunion. It’s a time of hoping for a good new year’s and hoping for an end to the war.”

Nguyen, who fled Vietnam in 1975, is now president of the Union of Vietnamese Student Assns. of Southern California, sponsor of last weekend’s festival at Centennial Park.

She said Tet in the United States “naturally . . . can’t be the same.” Still, “We do the best we can. I came here so young that I don’t know all about the culture, so that’s why we do it, to learn more about the culture.”

The Vietnamese and U.S. cultures blended last weekend, as they will this weekend. In Centennial Park, in a tent featuring photographs of “boat people” who fled Vietnam in craft of all sizes and varying degrees of seaworthiness, there was also a display of a “Lo-Pro Pedestal Washbasin” for the most modern bathroom. Above the display was a yellow balloon with the slogan Pacific Bell Yellow Pages, and a red one with a happy face and the words Jesus Loves You.

A stand selling cassette tapes blared the song “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” first in English, then in Vietnamese--recalling the dual-language songs that screamed from jukeboxes in hundreds of bars and cafes across South Vietnam in the years that U.S. troops fought there.

The cross-cultural mix was also obvious at Morningside school, where Tram Do and other teachers’ aides for weeks have been teaching youngsters the traditional dances of Vietnam so they can perform them at today’s school Tet festival.

A bulletin board listing “famous folk of January” (including Robert E. Lee, Benedict Arnold and Louis Braille) contained student Huong Le’s tribute to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “He was the movement for black equality.”

One student carried a stick with five spinning pinwheels but accidentally got a pinwheel stuck in the mouth of the dragon, which in the traditional dragon dance is teased by men in masks. On this day, those with the masks wore Reeboks on their feet.

Behind a curtain, six young girls were being instructed in the art of a traditional Vietnamese dance, featuring the graceful use of fans.

Anh Vu, 26--a teachers’ aide, college student and reporter for a Vietnamese-language newspaper in Orange County--said that even in Vietnam the Tet celebration isn’t what it used to be. After the Communist conquest in 1975, her family and neighbors “tried to keep up the tradition, but the Vietnamese (government) didn’t really let us. It was not as beautiful as in the old days.”

She left Vietnam with her family in 1983. She said that at Morningside, where more than half the students are Vietnamese or the children of Vietnamese parents, “every year the principal lets us celebrate our Tet, and we appreciate it very much.

“This is the only way to keep up our tradition.”

TET EVENTS

All events in Little Saigon, Westminster Friday, Feb. 3 2 to 5 p.m.--Nhat Tung Band & Quoc Thai Band, Catholic Dance Group 5 to 5:15 p.m.--Firecrackers 5:15 to 6:15 p.m.--Variety Show by Nang Moi 7 to 9 p.m.--Variety Show by Hoang Thi Tho 9:30 to 10:30 p.m.--Korean Show. Saturday, Feb. 4 10 a.m.--Opening Ceremony, Parade, Firecrackers, Traditional Ceremony Service, Dragon Dance noon to 1:30 p.m.--Moon Flower Band 1:45 to 2:30 p.m.--Binh Traditional Martial Arts 2:30 to 3 p.m.--Traditional String Band of Minh Duc Hoai Trinh 3 p.m. to 3:45 p.m.--Martial Arts by Ha-Quoc-Huy 3:45 to 4 p.m.--Kampuchia Dance 4 to 4:15 p.m.--Buddhist Folk Dance 4:15 to 5 p.m.--Korean Dance & Firecrackers 5 to 7:45 p.m.--Fashion Show by Trang Tailor 7:15 to 9:15 p.m.--Variety Show by Hoang Thi Tho 9:45 to 11 p.m.--Nhat Tung Band. Sunday, Feb. 5 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.--Nhat Tung Band 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.--Variety Show by Nang Moi 12:45 to 1 p.m.--Martial Arts by Dang Huy Duc 1 to 5 p.m.--Catholic Dance Group & Firecrackers, Kampuchia Dance, Dragon Dance, Martial Arts by Le Thanh Tung, Korean Don Kim Show 5:45 to 6:45 p.m.--Selected Music 7 to 9 p.m.--Comic Show by La Thoai Tan.