WESTMINSTER : O.C. Trade Mission to Vietnam Protested

This became Andrea Nguyen’s summer of discontent.

For the past three weeks, Nguyen, often in T-shirt and a baseball cap, has joined protests against the impending visit to Vietnam by a group of Orange County business people.

The 50-year-old electronics technician has picketed the Bolsa Avenue office of Co Pham, president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. He is heading a 25-member delegation which will meet this month with high-ranking Vietnamese government officials to explore business opportunities. “We’re against anyone who will cooperate with the communists,” said Nguyen, a Garden Grove resident.

The pickets at Pham’s office began Aug. 22, days after news leaked out that the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and the Asian Business League of California are sponsoring a trade mission to Vietnam.

The trip has rekindled debate within the Vietnamese American community about how to deal with the Vietnamese government in the face of what appears to be warming relations between Hanoi and Washington.

Pham said he was not surprised by the reaction to the planned visit.

“It’s an emotional issue, and I don’t blame them,” Pham said. “Many of them were victims. But it’s important to forget the past and look to the future and rebuild Vietnam.”

Hien Phan, executive director of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, said the delegation will include bankers, developers, academics, immigration lawyers and representatives of U.S. companies eager to open trade with Vietnam.

The trip is intended to promote “economic exchanges and business activity between Vietnam and the United States, particularly Little Saigon,” he said. “We hope Little Saigon will be the gateway between the U.S. and Vietnam. The increased trade will bring jobs to Vietnamese Americans in Orange County.”

The Little Saigon business district on Bolsa Avenue, between Ward and Magnolia streets, is the cultural hub of the county’s estimated 150,000 Vietnamese American community. There are more than 2,000 shops, restaurants, cafes, offices, and other business in the area.

But Nguyen said trade ties with the communists will bolster the Hanoi government, which she said continues to oppress the people.

Her husband, a former captain in the South Vietnamese army, was imprisoned for three years after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The couple came to the United States in 1978 with their sons, now ages 25 and 22.

Chau Tue Phung, 52, who left Vietnam in 1989, also has joined the pickets at Pham’s office to remind people that “there’s still a dictatorship in Vietnam,” she said.

“It’s the aspiration of every Vietnamese that democracy returns in our country.”