Passions of Exile Politics Wane Among Vietnamese : Culture: Sway of hard-line anti-communism ebbs in refugee community. Focus is shifting to domestic issues.

Along the sunbaked macadam parking strips of Little Saigon, a candidate is stalking handshakes.

Chung Nguyen’s hands are poised and his suit is pressed to the crisp corners of political correctness. His campaign manner is the proper blend of sincerity and enthusiasm, an attitude that endures even when a few Vietnamese American voters warily regard his extended hand like some limp fish at the market.

“They don’t know what to do at first, because Asian leaders don’t usually campaign that way,” explained Nguyen, a 37-year-old computer programmer and a resident of Orange. “They seem really surprised that I’m running for Congress.”

Even more stunning, perhaps, is that moderate politicians like Nguyen are speaking up and moving openly to take over the street corners of political ambition in Southern California’s sizable Vietnamese community.

They sense that with them is a long-silent majority, which is acquiring citizenship, learning to vote and shifting attitudes. The passions of exile politics are cooling, as is the Vietnamese immigrant community’s divisive, occasionally violent debate about dealings with the homeland.

For almost two decades, political power in Southern California’s Vietnamese community has been largely in the hands of ardent anti-Communists who claimed to speak for the refugees who settled here in waves after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

In the past, it was heresy to express support for ties with Hanoi and--in some cases--suicidal to express public views remotely sympathetic to the Communist regime. Few people openly shared moderate opinions, which could be misinterpreted.

And yet a new Times poll found that more than half the Vietnamese living in Southern California hold those very heretical views. Fifty-four percent favor full diplomatic relations with Vietnam as well as the recent lifting of trade sanctions, while only 20% voiced opposition to those moves. The survey of 861 Vietnamese residents--conducted between March 28 and April 19--has a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Many of those contacted for follow-up interviews conceded that they had been afraid to speak freely for fear of hurting war veterans or reopening old wounds.

“I know one thing for sure,” said Thuy-Vy Luyen, 33, of Anaheim. “That is a very controversial issue. A lot of people think that if we do business with the Communists, that means we’re helping them. Right now, I believe that lifting the trade embargo is the right way to go. I believe in opening our minds and thinking in a broader way.”

In another era--when politics in the immigrant community was played with a sharper edge--such opinions failed the litmus test of anti-Communism.

Little Saigon reached a “level of threats and political pressure that was higher than other places. Very noisy. Very dangerous and very complicated,” recalled Yen Do, editor of the Nguoi Viet Daily newspaper.

Dating back to 1984, Vietnamese exile groups were raising alarms about a calculated campaign to terrorize anyone who questioned activities of anti-Communists working to overthrow the Hanoi regime. The list of victims included not only liberal Vietnamese, but conservatives who tried to expose extortion schemes camouflaged as anti-Communist activities. People who expressed public support for normal relations with Vietnam were targeted.

Pragmatists maintained silence as they followed Vietnamese language newspapers’ sober tales of shooting attacks, firebombings and obituaries of men such as Tap Van Pham.

Pham, the editor of a Vietnamese entertainment weekly, died in a 1987 firebombing attack on his Garden Grove office after he published advertisements for companies that some anti-Communists considered fronts for the Hanoi government.

As recently as last autumn, the president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce in Westminster was sweating in a bulletproof vest, dodging rocks and walking in the company of a full-time bodyguard. For the heresy of supporting an end to the economic embargo, Co Pham was reviled as a “traitor” and a Communist sympathizer.

But by April, the voices of protest were silent on the very day that President Clinton lifted the trade embargo. And the sinister rumors about a violent reaction didn’t amount to a sputtering firecracker. The passive response seemed to mark a new stage in the political maturation of the Vietnamese community.

“You got to keep in mind that here in a democracy using violence is counterproductive,” said Diem Do, a staunch opponent of trade normalization who is a regular at Little Saigon demonstrations. “People become mature. If you want to win this game, using your voice is the best approach. Being violent in this society just doesn’t work.”

Diem Do said he had noticed at one of the demonstrations outside chamber President Pham’s medical offices that violence was losing popularity as a political tool. When a demonstrator threw a rock, Do said, other protesters quickly circled him and chastised him.

The apparent decline in violence is part of a natural progression, according to Brian Jenkins, a researcher who has tracked domestic political violence for the RAND Corp. and Kroll Associates in Los Angeles.

“As the Vietnamese move away from exile politics, and become more a part of the new community, it’s inevitable that violence declines,” he said. “It’s just the passage of time. It was the same thing in the Cuban community in Miami. It took 15 to 20 years.”

Pushing these changes is the younger generation, the sons and daughters of Vietnamese immigrants who consider Vietnam a place to vacation instead of to settle.

When Vietnamese American university students gathered for their annual conference this spring at UC Irvine, they made it clear that they were ready to move on to political issues on the home front. The theme of their conference reflected their views: “The Crossroads.”

“Most students agree that we have to do something to change our tactics to deal with the Communists,” said Ly Phan, 24, a UC Irvine biology major and president of the Vietnamese Student Assn. “Perhaps, after the fighting of all these years, people are beginning to see that the old way of fighting is not working anymore, and the majority of people are starting to think of other solutions.”

His own family is split on the issue. His father, a former prisoner, opposed trade normalization. Yet Phan said he notices a weariness among the former political prisoners who have been settling here in the last five years. They are looking, he said, for another way.

“If you compare the mood now and the situation six or seven years ago, the mood is more realistic,” said Nguyen, one of six Orange County Democrats who vied for the right to challenge Republican Rep. Robert K. Dornan for the 46th Congressional District seat. “People realize one thing now. We cannot overthrow the regime by using guns. It is healthy, this realism. I don’t talk to anyone who raises the issue of military (force).”

Nguyen was also utterly realistic about the aims of his own quixotic write-in campaign. From the outset, he did not expect victory. And he did not achieve it.

“Most of the candidates always say they will win, but I don’t,” said Nguyen. “I set my goals very modestly, because all I wanted to do is stir up the community. If people come out in big numbers and become more familiar with the political process, then I consider that a win. . . . I want to tell people that this is our home. If you want to go out and influence the course of Vietnam, then the best way to do it is our political base.”

He and a circle of younger friends pooled $10,000 to spend on mailed flyers and a telephone bank to cajole Vietnamese American voters to register, seek absentee ballots, and even switch their loyalties to the Democrats.

His advertisements urging participation in the voting process were running weekly in the Vietnamese language Con Co--The Stork. And he didn’t stint on the scut work of local politics, distributing flyers along the sidewalks of Little Saigon or at the Strawberry Festival in Garden Grove.

Frequently, he found himself playing the role of teacher instead of politician, instructing Vietnamese American voters that it’s permissible to shift allegiances from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Many of these voters may be so busy surviving that they are oblivious to the Vietnamese American politicians trying to establish themselves as leaders. Indeed, 88% of those surveyed could not name a leader in their community. Only 5% of the Vietnamese in Southern California could name Tony Lam, the Westminster city councilman thought to be the only Vietnamese American elected official nationwide.

“It’s a large community,” said Lam, “so there’s bound to be many people claiming to represent it. If you asked who is the first Vietnamese to be elected to office in the U.S., your answer would be considerably more than 5%.”

Typically, Vietnamese American voters have leaned toward the Republican Party, many believing it takes a harsher view of Communism.

And the survey detects that party line; more than 62% of Vietnamese American voters in Southern California are registered Republicans, contrasted with 24% who consider themselves Democrats.

In conservative Orange County, which has the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam, the Republican figure rises to 68%.

Ky Ngo, chairman of the Vietnamese-American Political Action Committee and a member of the state central committee for Republicans, said the party has been an easy sell because of its foreign policy. But in many ways he is delivering the same moderate message as Democrat Nguyen to potential Vietnamese American voters.

“We tell them that if we don’t vote, we have no voice,” said Ngo. “It’s the only way we can help from Vietnam. It’s different than 10 years ago. We’re not going to send the military at this time. Now we should use politics and the economy to do the fighting. We recognize that in 1975 we lost our country--not because we didn’t know how to fight--but because we lost the political power in Washington, D.C.”

According to the poll, almost half of Vietnamese residents in Southern California are citizens, with 59% saying they are registered to vote. And those who are not citizens hunger to start the process; more than 80% say they expect to become citizens within a few years.

Some Vietnamese activists say this desire for citizenship is rooted in practical concerns.

Recently, the Vietnamese community of Southern California started raising alarms on Little Saigon radio about congressional welfare reform bills that seek to deny Supplemental Security Income benefits to elderly immigrants until they become citizens.

More than 9,000 people streamed through the shopping strip offices of the group to sign petitions denouncing the proposal, and the talk shows are still crackling with complaints about it. Soon after, many Vietnamese immigrants started signing up for citizenship preparation classes.

This break with the past is all the more dramatic given the reverence for homeland in their culture, a view summed up by the Vietnamese expression: Your country is where your umbilical cord is buried.

Hoang Van Duc, a medical professor at USC, has tried to offer advice to two generations--his children and grandchildren--about how to choose their homeland.

“It is a Vietnamese cultural (tradition) that you belong where you are born,” said Duc, who is in his 70s. “For our young ones who were born here or raised here, the U.S. is their first country. Second is the country of Vietnam. So now, they have to go out and vote. As Americans they still have a fatherland, and if they want to improve the fatherland then they’ve got to work right here.”

Times staff writers Thuan Le and Lily Dizon contributed to this story.

How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Poll interviewed 861 adult Vietnamese residents of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties by telephone from March 28 through April 19, 1994. The questions were developed in consultation with Duong Pham, a visiting lecturer at UC Irvine and UCLA, and Khao Luu, president of the Assn. of Former Vietnamese Educators Overseas. The interviewing was conducted in Vietnamese and English by Vietnamese American interviewers at Interviewing Services of America Inc. of Van Nuys. A list of Vietnamese surnames was used to draw the samples from phone directories in the six counties. Results were adjusted slightly so that the sample conforms with census information about sex, age and education. Vietnamese residents of Orange County were oversampled and a total of 502 interviews were conducted there; 359 were conducted in the other five counties.

Where Southern California results are cited, the Orange County sample is weighted to its proper proportion in the sample. The margin of sampling error for the entire sample is plus or minus 4 percentage points. For the Orange County sample, the error is plus or minus 5 percentage points, for the rest of the region it is plus or minus 7 points. The sampling error for other subgroups may vary. In addition to sampling error, poll results can be affected by other factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented. Additionally, surname samples of this type do not allow for the sampling of people with unlisted telephone numbers and Vietnamese residents who do not have Vietnamese surnames.

Los Angeles Times Poll: Citizenship and Political Process

Nearly half of the Vietnamese immigrant community in Southern California has taken advantage of the opportunity to become U.S. citizens, and four out of five non-citizens expect to do so soon. By a large margin, they also think it is important to take part in the American political process.

Are you a citizen of the United States? Non-citizens were asked: Do you expect to become a citizen of the United States in the next few years, or not?

Expect to be citizen Yes, Don’t citizen Yes No know Total 49% 81% 5% 14% Male 56% 78% 8% 14% Female 41% 83% 2% 15% Less than 30 38% 88% 3% 9% 30-49 years 58% 75% 8% 17% 50 and older 45% 77% 3% 20% Parents* 54% 77% 5% 18% Non-parents 44% 84% 5% 11%

* With children 17 and younger

+

How important is it for Vietnamese people living in the United States to participate in American politics?

Orange Rest of Total County So. Calif. Very important 68% 77% 61% Somewhat important 11% 11% 11% Not too important 8% 3% 11% Not important at all 2% * 3% Don’t know 11% 9% 14%

* Less than 1%

+

Asked of citizens: Do you know for sure if your name is recorded in the voter registration book of the election district where you now live?

Orange Rest of Total County So. Calif. Total Registered 29% 32% 26% Republican 18% 22% 14% Democrat 7% 6% 8% No party 4% 4% 4% Not registered 14% 13% 15% Not sure 6% 4% 8% Non-citizen 51% 51% 51%

+

If you had to name the most important leader of the Vietnamese people in Southern California, who would that be?

Orange Rest of Total County So. Calif. Tony Lam 5% 9% 3% Binh Bui 4% 7% 2% Co Pham 1% 1% * Other 2% 3% 1% No one 35% 30% 39% Don’t know 53% 50% 55%

* Less than 0.5%

Source: Los Angeles Times Poll