What Are Friends For? : Billboard’s Blunt Message Gets the Word Out to Vietnamese Community

At first glance, the billboard in San Francisco’s downtown featuring a young, denim-clad Vietnamese man with a cigarette dangling from his mouth may look like just another smoking ad aiming to entice.

But a double take at the brand name of the cigarette pack the model holds shows the universal symbol of death: a skull and crossbones.

And in Vietnamese, the billboard reads: “You wouldn’t want your friend to get cancer--so why offer him a cigarette?”

Sponsored by a Bay Area health group, it is the first Vietnamese-language anti-smoking billboard to appear in the United States. The sign also is a harbinger of messages to come throughout the rest of California as the state readies a $28.6-million anti-tobacco campaign. The primary targets: pregnant women, young people and minorities.

“The campaign will definitely have a minority focus since minorities are at high risk for lung cancer and heart diseases as a result of (high rates of) smoking,” said Dearell Niemeyer, chief of local programs for the Tobacco Control Section of the state Department of Health Services in Sacramento.

Niemeyer added that although the Vietnamese-language billboard is not officially part of the state campaign, it “is a foreshadowing of what’s to come.”

Niemeyer said that getting the anti-smoking message across to the state’s Asian population will be particularly challenging.

“The multiethnic Asian population will require special attention,” Niemeyer said. “Unlike the black and Latino populations which have a common language, this group will be a real tough media target because of the language differences and geographic concentration of the various communities.”

The Vietnamese-language billboard in San Francisco is the brainchild of the Vietnamese Community Health Promotion Project, a state-funded research group based at UC’s San Francisco Medical Center. The sign was unveiled in January.

“We came up with the idea after we conducted a study of Vietnamese male smokers,” said Chris Jenkins, project director. “They told us that carrying a pack of cigarettes and offering their friends cigarettes is very important to them. We’re trying to get the message across that what they’re really offering them is cancer.”

A 1988 project survey of 215 randomly selected Vietnamese men and women in the San Francisco-Oakland area found that 56% of the males were smokers. In contrast, a recent study by the Altanta-based Centers for Disease Control found that among all California men, 26% are smokers.

The project’s findings sparked a “real fear” among the group’s officials that an epidemic of cancer and heart disease could break out among Vietnamese men within the next two decades, Jenkins said.

The project’s 1988 survey found that only 9% of Vietnamese women were smokers. In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control study found that among all California women, 25% are smokers.

“We think men are actually starting to quit, as more and more acculturate to American society and find (smoking) less acceptable,” Jenkins said. “But as Vietnamese women acculturate, their numbers might increase as they become more like their California counterparts.”