Vietnamese Views in Poll Misinterpreted

* While I commend the Los Angeles Times for its effort to conduct a survey on critical issues concerning the Vietnamese community, I think that these articles (“Southland Vietnamese Support Renewed Ties,” June 12 and “Vietnamese Political Passions Have Cooled,” June 13) poorly serve readers because they misinterpret the poll results.

The people who supported the method of applying pressures on the Vietnam government to obtain democracy are those who preferred a diplomatic approach to the problem; however, they are not supporters of the current government. The bottom line is that 68% of (those in) the survey preferred a change in the Vietnam political system. This result is consistent with the 59% unfavorable rating on the Communist government of Vietnam.

Vietnamese are practical people. They accepted the past, for they realized that history cannot be altered. However, they did not forget the terrible wrongs that the Communist Party did to our country. The majority of the Vietnamese community in Southern California did not make peace with the past nor with the Communist government of Vietnam.

Your article claimed that “the voices of the protest were silent on the very day that President Clinton lifted the embargo.” This statement is a disregard of the truth. Your newspaper reported in the Feb. 6, 1994, edition that 600 people attended a rally held in Little Saigon the previous day to protest the lifting of the embargo against Vietnam.

The claim that “the passionate rhetoric of Little Saigon protesters and demonstrators is clearly at odds with the moderate views of the majority of Vietnamese immigrants” showed The Times Poll staff’s lack of understanding about the depth and the psychology of the Vietnamese community. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the last 12 months, the political rallies and demonstrations in Little Saigon broke many previous attendance records.

It is absolutely essential to point out that the poll was conducted two months after the lifting of the embargo. The time element is critical in every survey. Unfortunately, there was no question that addressed the change in attitude before and after the lifting of the embargo. As mentioned above, 68% of (those in) the survey called for a political change in Vietnam to improve the human rights condition and to restore democracy there. However, it is unsettling to see that the poll also showed 54% support the lifting of the embargo. Furthermore, 79% believed that their participation in American politics was important to them.

One possible interpretation of the above statistics is that: faced with a fait accompli , the attitude of the Vietnamese community shifted to “resignation” as opposed to “silence,” as asserted in the article, then the Vietnamese Americans resorted to diplomatic leverage as an alternative approach to accomplish what could not be done through the embargo.

If the poll had been conducted before the embargo was lifted, the results might have shown that the majority of Vietnamese wanted to maintain the embargo. At best, the article conclusion is a stretching of the facts; at worse, it is a distortion of the Vietnamese community view.

DUNG T. TRAN

President

Southern California chapter

Vietnamese Professionals Society

Irvine