Little Saigon Gets a Big Voice : Radio: Nine months ago, plans for full-time Vietnamese broadcasting sounded like a long shot. Today, despite some critics, KWIZ-FM is an institution.

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 had just hit the news about the Vietnamese American man who had gone on a shooting rampage at a Santa Fe Springs electronic plant the day before.

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 from 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 controversial issues and community service information.

Its emerging, multifaceted role was not planned by station founders when the idea of the first extensive Vietnamese-language daily broadcast in Southern California was bandied about a year ago.

“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 about the venture.

“Somehow, against all odds, 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,” he said.

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). Broadcast entirely in Vietnamese, the program features music, commentaries, talk shows and news--local, state, national and international.

More important, the station supplies news that Vietnamese Americans in Orange and Los Angeles counties usually cannot 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 charge that the programming at times displays an anti-Communist bias in its coverage of Vietnam and the local community.

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

The protest began with one man staging a hunger strike in the parking lot of Pham’s Westminster practice. Over two days, it grew into a crowd of thousands.

Pham alleges, and some 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 said, when President Clinton ended economic sanctions against Vietnam last month, allowing the two former enemies to conduct business.

And in the 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 say normalization should occur only when human rights and democracy for the Vietnamese are restored.

But the broadcasters also will invite those who support normalized relations 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. The program last year interviewed Nghia Nguyen, an economist who works for the World Bank and who favors the lifting of the embargo. After that interview, station employees 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 criticisms of Little Saigon Radio have less to do with station’s politics than with the broadcasters’ ethnocentric approach.

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

Critics cited the closing comments last 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.”

Because of the broadcasters’ practice of complimenting the 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.”

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

When the station began airing, the corporation formed by Nguyen and three partners had attracted only five advertising accounts after weeks of soliciting. Three weeks into the program, the station filled all its advertising air time. It now has about 200 advertisers, and new accounts are 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 in three months. 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 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday.

“It lessens the stress of homesickness in our community,” Co Pham said. Do, the editor, said: “Now, any time people have questions or comments, they call up the station.”

That was the case 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.

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

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she tearfully told Trang Nguyen in Vietnamese. “Please help me.”

Nguyen told Pham what the station knew and helped calm her.

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