Countywide : HUNTINGTON BEACH : Vietnamese to Mark Milestone of Arrival

Dubbing it a “season of affirmation,” a group of Orange County Vietnamese Americans on Tuesday announced plans for Project 20 (1975-1995), an ambitious commemoration of next spring’s 20th anniversary of Vietnam War refugees’ arrival in the United States.

Project 20 organizers said at a news conference here that through musical performances, art exhibitions and literary symposiums planned throughout 1995 locally and in other cities around the country, they hope to celebrate Vietnamese Americans’ identity, give thanks to their adopted homeland and reinforce their cultural heritage with younger Vietnamese Americans.

“We want everybody to know that we do exist here, to share that we come here for freedom, to show our gratitude and that we are looking to the future, which is our children,” said Tien Q. Nguyen, a Garden Grove dermatologist and member of the project’s 17-person volunteer organizing committee.

At the war’s end, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975, unleashing an exodus that made refugees of roughly 1.5 million people. Orange County is home to roughly 100,000 Vietnamese, the nation’s largest enclave.

The artists, musicians, writers and professionals on the project’s organizing committee all belong to the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Assn., a nonprofit group founded in 1991 by Dieu D. Le, editor of Little Saigon’s Nguoi Viet Daily, the country’s oldest and largest Vietnamese daily newspaper.

“So far, we have contacted other cultural groups in Houston, San Jose and Washington, D.C.,” Le said at the Huntington Beach Public Library. In addition to these locales, he said, “we are going to work for more.”

Project 20 will cost roughly $100,000, said organizers, who will raise much of the money through VAALA from private individuals and corporations, both Vietnamese and American.

A major component of the event, subtitled “Vietnamese Americans Twenty Years After,” will be performances of “1-9-7-5,” a symphony written by Le Van Khoa of Orange. Inquiries have been made for a presentation at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Khoa said his composition pays homage to those who died in their efforts to escape Vietnam by boat, but “the message is that in their death springs up the hope for a better future for all of us, for the human race.”

“We are very grateful that the United States extended her arms to receive us,” Khoa said. Project 20 will also feature the Ngan Khoi Choir, a chorale group founded in Westminster’s Little Saigon, which performed its 1990 debut concert to a sellout crowd at Fullerton’s Plummer Auditorium, organizers said.

The Vietnamese American literary community, which produces roughly 40 newspapers in Southern California alone, will be involved in book-signings and a range of symposiums, including those on mass media, Le said. Exhibitions of art, an area in which many Vietnamese Americans have gained recognition on the mainstream American cultural scene, will include artists from around the world.

Plans also call for concerts, educational workshops and other activities geared toward and organized by youths and college students.

The Santa Ana-based Pacific Symphony Orchestra, represented on the organizing committee by its executive director Louis G. Spisto, will in April present the premiere of a large-scale symphonic-choral work by New York composer Elliott Goldenthal commemorating the Vietnam War.

No cultural community has shown “a greater appetite, a greater interest in music” than the county’s Vietnamese community, Spisto said Tuesday.

“I think the rest of the country could learn a lesson from what you are doing here--celebrating with the arts,” he said. “We are absolutely the beneficiaries of your being here. You are going to make the arts healthier and better.”