5,000 Turn Out at Tet Festival to Greet the New Year : Celebration: Golden West College event showcases Vietnamese culture. Festivities continue today.

To the staccato of fireworks, five fierce-looking dragons danced onto the central lawn at Golden West College, ushering in the celebration of the Vietnamese New Year.

As about 5,000 people watched, the dragons--actually pairs of red-sashed dancers, one to hold a dragon’s large head, another to move its bright cloth tail--dipped and swayed menacingly, working to chase away bad spirits and ensure prosperity in this, the Year of the Monkey.

After 15 minutes of wild dancing, throngs of children gathered around the dragons to thrust money at the beasts.

Though the dragons looked scary, 5-year-old Michael Nguyen was not frightened, said his father, Lewis Nguyen, an electrician from Costa Mesa who held the boy on his shoulders so he could feed one of the dragons a $20 bill.

“We like to give lucky money of the New Year,” Nguyen said of the tradition to offer gifts to the dragons. “Every year with the festival, we try to get my boy back to the tradition” so Michael will learn something of the land his father fled in 1975, when Vietnam fell to Communist rule.

This was the 10th annual Tet or New Year’s festival sponsored by the Union of Vietnamese Students of Southern California, a Westminster-based organization representing Vietnamese-American students from San Luis Obispo to San Diego.

It was also the third year that Golden West College, about five miles west of Orange County’s Little Saigon, hosted this family-oriented affair that was expected to attract up to 50,000 people by its 8 p.m. closing time today.

Tet is the biggest Vietnamese celebration of the year, said Hung Ha, a 28-year-old engineer from Westminster who assisted at this year’s festival. Another Tet festival is planned by Vietnamese-American merchants and community leaders next weekend in Westminster.

“Tet is like New Year’s, Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one,” Ha said. “It comes from a word that means ultimately New Year . . . but it is not religious. You have Catholics celebrating it (as well as) Buddhists.”

As the students and college officials had planned, the festival was fun--with Ping-Pong games and chess competitions, miniature sidewalk cafes, plus booths where one could snack on dried persimmons, buy a small, blossoming peach tree or drink a sugar cane refreshment for $2 a cup.

Along with the emphasis on Vietnamese culture, the festival included some American carnival traditions as well. There was a Ferris wheel as well as a tent for face-painting. One small girl, clad in an ao dai , a traditional elegant long dress, was observed enjoying a hunk of cotton candy.

But along with the entertainment, the festival has a serious purpose, Ha and other festival leaders said. “We like to introduce the culture to the younger (Vietnamese) kids born here or the children born in refugee camps.” he said.

The festival is also intended to introduce Americans to Vietnamese culture and raise money, which will go to help Vietnamese still in refugee camps and fund Vietnamese language classes for children here, officials said.