Vietnamese Mark New Lives in U.S. in Late Tet Festival : New year: More than 4,000, many former political prisoners, gather in Buena Park to celebrate their immigration.

More than 4,000 people, many of them former Vietnamese political prisoners, gathered Sunday to celebrate their successful immigration to the United States, hope for a better life, and belatedly mark the Vietnamese new year.

The overflowing throng enjoying the festivities in a cavernous union hall was brought together by the Westminster-based Vietnam Political Detainees Mutual Assn., which has sponsored hundreds of immigrants in recent years.

Among those celebrating the luncheon, music and speeches was Huu Hanh Vo, 61, a former Army colonel for the Republic of South Vietnam who arrived in the United States in January.

As a former military leader and author of a book praising “the heroic fight for Democracy,” he had been imprisoned in Vietnam for 13 years in a “re-education” camp after the government of the south was overthrown in 1975.

Even after his release from prison in 1988, the Communist Vietnamese government “didn’t give me a chance to work” and confiscated his property, Vo said through an interpreter Sunday.

But under a 1989 agreement between Hanoi and Washington, Vo and as many as 130,000 other former political detainees and their families have immigrated to the United States and a new life, according to the event’s organizers. Vo, who lives in Westminster, arrived here with his wife and four children.

More than 9,000 of the former political prisoners and their families have settled in Orange County, government officials estimate.

As Sunday’s celebration got underway in the union hall of Buena Park’s United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324, a beaming Vo said he would like to send a New Year’s greeting to Vietnam-era U.S. veterans with whom he worked closely during the war.

This marked the fourth consecutive year that the Vietnam Political Detainees Mutual Assn. has held Tet--the Vietnamese new year--festivities for immigrants, known as H.O. people, an acronym for the Humanitarian Operation, the program that brought them to the United States. Sunday’s gathering, a belated observance of the Vietnamese lunar new year, was the largest yet.

The organization, which is run by volunteers and operates on donated funds, helps file documents, picks up newcomers from airports, arranges housing and medical assistance and assists with a variety of other tasks for the largely non-English speaking immigrants.

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Event organizer Nguyen Hau estimated that so far only about half the eligible political detainees from Vietnam have come to this country. Many, however, have left their homeland and live in interim refugee camps elsewhere in Southeast Asia, he said.

Immigrants arriving under the Humanitarian Operation agree to reimburse the U.S. government for the transportation costs, said Phuong Nguyen Le, who arrived here under the program three years ago.

Le, who works as a bilingual coordinator for the Garden Grove Unified School District, said he has repaid his debt. Le arrived in the United States with his parents and two sisters. A third sister attempted to leave Vietnam for America before the Humanitarian Operation was implemented.

“She tried to escape from the country by herself,” Le recalled.

But his sister was lost when the boat she shared with 150 other refugees disappeared in the Gulf of Thailand, he said.

Among the speakers at Sunday’s luncheon was Assemblyman Rusty Areias (D-San Jose), a candidate for state controller.

Areias, whose parents were Portuguese, said he had come to speak about “my own family’s immigration” to the United States at the turn of the century.

As a product of a home in which many family members did not speak English, Areias said he felt a common bond with the H.O. people who had filled the hall.