Viet Writer Once Friendly to Reds Is Shot in Fresno

An internationally known Vietnamese writer who sympathized with the Communists before the fall of South Vietnam but later was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese was shot and seriously injured here Saturday while walking along a residential street near his home, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman said.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Oliver Moon said witnesses reported that Doan Van Toai was wounded from shots fired at 9 a.m. by two Asian men in a “dirty” brown Pontiac station wagon. Toai was hit three times and underwent surgery at an undisclosed hospital, said Moon. He was listed in serious condition and by late Saturday still had not been able to talk to investigators.

No Known Motive

Moon said there was no known motive for the attack. Until detectives are able to question Toai they will not know if the shooting has any connection to other assaults in recent months aimed at prominent Vietnamese who advocated closer ties with Vietnam, such as travel and establishment of diplomatic relations. Several such incidents have occurred in Orange and Los Angeles counties, home to large Vietnamese immigrant communities.

Phuong Tran, president of the Vietnamese Committee for Human Rights in Washington, who said she has known Toai for more than 15 years told the Associated Press, “A lot of Vietnamese accuse him of being a communist agent.

“I think of him as a Vietnamese who tried to do something good for the people of Vietnam and for the good of the country itself,” she said. “That doesn’t mean he agreed with the present political situation in Vietnam.”

Toai, 42, came to the United States in 1978 after being released from a Vietnamese “re-education camp.”

He co-authored two books “The Vietnamese Gulag” and “Portrait of the Enemy” with writer David Chanoff. “The Vietnamese Gulag,” published in 1979, was a best-seller in France and in 1986 was published in the United States, making Toai one of the few Vietnamese authors able to attract a non-specialist audience.

Backed Ho’s Cause

Born in the Mekong Delta in 1945, the same year Ho Chi Minh began his campaign to free Vietnam from French colonialism, Toai grew up following the politics of his family, including his village school teacher-father, in backing Ho’s cause. He said he wanted an independent Vietnam, but like many southerners, was wary of Northern Vietnamese, fearing that given the chance, they would take all power to themselves and dominate the nation.

Toai said he strongly supported the Hanoi-backed National Liberation Front but never actually joined the organization. Instead, he became branch manager of a bank in the central coastal city of Qui Nhon and carried out secret financial transactions for the NLF.

A few days after South Vietnam fell to the north in April, 1975, Toai returned to Saigon seeking, but failing to find, a way to leave the country. Instead he became a member of the finance committee of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, which held power before the unification of the country under the government in Hanoi.

After a dispute over Hanoi’s increasing refusal to give power to southerners, Toai was imprisoned for 2 1/2 years.

View of Communism

As he later said: “Communism does well in repelling foreign invasion, but does not bring the good society.”

Since arriving in the United States, Toai supported his family through his writings, as a visiting research associate for the UC Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies .