Good Morning, Vietnamese Americans! : Communications: After nine months on the air, O.C.’s Little Saigon Radio has become <i> the </i> source of news for community.

Trang Nguyen, president of Little Saigon Radio Broadcasting, barely had time to sit down at her desk Tuesday morning before her phone started ringing. It would not stop for hours.

Early reports about the Vietnamese American who had gone on a shooting rampage at a Santa Fe Springs electronic plant had just hit the newspapers.

Nguyen’s Vietnamese-speaking listeners wanted to know if the station could tell them more about Tuan Nguyen, the Orange County man who had killed three people and then himself. Reporters for mainstream media also were on the line, asking if Little Saigon Radio could provide additional information for their own coverage. Even tearful relatives and friends of the victims called in, seeking advice.

Though it has been on the air for a mere nine months, Little Saigon Radio has become an influential voice in Vietnamese-American affairs throughout Southern California at a time when debate over U.S.-Hanoi relations has intensified here. The station provides news, a platform for debates on issues and community service information.

Its emerging, multifaceted role was not planned by station founders--not to mention completely unanticipated by skeptics--when the idea of the first extensive Vietnamese-language daily broadcast in Southern California was bandied about this time last year.

“It was quite a bold move to start a daylong radio program, especially since other, shorter Asian-language programs on the radio at the time were not very successful,” said Nghia Tran, executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a nonprofit social service organization. Tran, like many others in the expatriate community, had politely dismissed the program’s chances of success when Trang Nguyen initially asked his opinion.

“Somehow, against all odds,” he now marvels, “it has become an institution, a medium which Vietnamese--those who are not acculturated as well as those who are fluent in English--can turn to for help and information.”

Stroll through almost any store in Little Saigon during business hours any day of the week, and chances are that if the radio is on, it is tuned to KWIZ-FM (96.7), Little Saigon Radio. Broadcast entirely in Vietnamese, the program features music; local, state, national and international news; commentaries and talk shows.

More important, the station supplies news that Vietnamese Americans from Orange County to parts of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley normally can’t find or understand in the English-language media.

“There’s a sense of need for information in the Vietnamese community, and people trust us,” Nguyen said. “We’re journalists. We’re professionals. But our listeners also know that we want to extend our hands instead of just doing a job. It’s not a cliche: We are a community service.”

Some critics, however, charge that the program at times shows an anti-Communist bias in its coverage of Vietnam and the local community.

Dr. Co Pham, the president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce who has received death threats for openly supporting the normalization of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam, cited as an example the September demonstration in front of his office--the first major story broadcast by the station since it began airing on July 1.

The protest began with one man staging a hunger strike in the parking lot of Pham’s Westminster practice and grew into a crowd over two days that totaled thousands.

Pham alleges, and some others in the community privately concur, that by allowing demonstrators to get on the airwaves to ask for participants, Little Saigon Radio unduly helped fan the protest.

“There were only a few hundred anti-Communist protesters at my office several months ago but they said on the air there were several thousand,” Co recalled. “Then their announcer urged listeners to go join the protest. So several hours later there were several thousand people. That’s irresponsible.”

Little Saigon Radio said it was merely doing its job by reporting the demonstration.

Viet Dzung, the morning disc jockey who broadcast the event live, denied he encouraged listeners to protest. But “even if I did,” Dzung said, “if Dr. Co is in the right, if what he does is for the good of the community and not his own, then I could have screamed my lungs out for people to show up and protest and no one would have come.”

His boss, Nguyen, is just as unabashed. She and other board members of the private corporation were disappointed, she admitted, when President Clinton ended the economic sanctions against Vietnam last month which allows the two former enemies to conduct commercial business.

And in the critical months to come while the U.S. government mulls over whether to renew diplomatic ties with Vietnam, Nguyen said, the station’s broadcasters will continue to advocate that normalization should only occur when human rights and democracy for the Vietnamese are restored.

But they also will invite those who support normalized relations with Vietnam onto the program to present the other side, she said.

Nguyen pointed out that in the interests of balance, the station has been willing to risk losing advertisers who oppose the ending of economic sanctions. For example, the program last year interviewed Nghia Nguyen, an economist who works for the World Bank and who favors the lifting of the embargo. Following that interview, employees of the station fielded calls and letters from angry anti-Communist callers, some threatening to bomb the station, Trang Nguyen said.

“We may not have supported (the economist’s) viewpoint,” she said, “but we were not going to suppress it either.”

The station “can’t tell the listeners what to think about anything,” Nguyen said. “They will make their own decisions.”

Other criticism of Little Saigon Radio has less to do with station’s politics and more with the broadcasters’ ethnocentric approach.

A few Vietnamese American followers of the station claim that broadcasters seem to promote ethnic elitism during the morning and afternoon drive-time talk shows.

One recent example, some said, were the closing comments earlier this week by Viet Dzung after an on-the-air interview with a witness to the Santa Fe Springs shootings. During his address to the listeners, asking Vietnamese to unite in the aftermath of the tragedy, the disc jockey labeled mainstream media coverage of the shooting as “distant, cold.”

“I’m sure they (the media) don’t intend to do so, but it seems that because they’re looking at this tragedy through the eyes of someone not a part of this community, they’re searching for some reason to blame the tragic shootings on something relating to the Vietnamese community as a whole,” Viet Dzung said on the air Tuesday, a day after the shooting.

He continued: “We all know it’s not so. . . . The community should show its unity by comforting relatives of the victims. . . . We need to show those who are not a part of the community that we care for each other.”

Because of the broadcasters’ practice of “complimenting” the potential audience and many of the guest speakers, said Yen Do, editor of the Westminster-based Nguoi Viet Daily newspaper, “the listeners get this image that our community is all good and we’re the victims of the outside world.”

For every critic, Little Saigon Radio owners said, there are thousands of listeners who value their program and the community voice it has indisputably become.

When the station first went on the air, the corporation formed by Nguyen and three partners had attracted only only five advertising accounts after weeks of soliciting. Three weeks into the program, the station had filled all its advertising air time. It now has about 200 advertisers with new accounts lining up every day, Nguyen said.

It cost the partners, including Nguyen’s husband, $150,000 to launch the station. They had hoped to be in the black within six months; they reached that goal within three. Nguyen declined to discuss the station’s profitability because of future potential competitors.

The program began with nine hours of daily air time, Monday through Friday. Today, it broadcasts from weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays. The station, now with 60,000 to 70,000 listeners, is in the process of negotiating for Saturday air time.

For all their reservations about the program, even the critics agree that Little Saigon Radio offers many Vietnamese Americans some degree of belonging, something mainstream media probably could never match.

“It lessens the stress of homesickness in our community,” Dr. Co Pham said. “The station gives Vietnamese people a sense of pride in our heritage.” Do, the editor, added: “It’s really given our community a sense of focus. Now, any time people have questions or comments, they call up the station.”

Such was the occasion for Chi Pham of Garden Grove, whose fiance, Chin Nguyen, was one of the three people shot to death last week at Extron Electronics in Santa Fe Springs. (None of the Phams or Nguyens in this story are related.)

The day after the shooting, when official information was still scant, Chi Pham frantically called Little Saigon Radio for help.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she tearfully told Trang Nguyen in Vietnamese. “I don’t know who to turn to for information on what happened to my fiance. I don’t speak English very well. Please help me.”

Nguyen told Pham what the station knew, what Pham couldn’t understand in the English-language media, and helped calm her.

“I didn’t know who else I could trust to give me some information,” Pham said later in an interview. “The radio was my only link.”

Little Saigon Radio started out as a business venture and as an attempt at become a voice where one has not existed before for the Vietnamese community in the Southland, Nguyen said.

“We now realize that whether we want to or not, we have become something a little bit more--something like some sort of a leader, I guess” she said. “I don’t think we could ever live up to that expectation because we are journalists, after all. All I can say is I hope we can do our part in strengthen the sense of the Vietnamese community.”