For Vietnamese Activists in O.C., Battle Goes On

Chau Tue Carey looks around anxiously at the relatively empty courtyard behind the Civic Center. It is time for her hastily arranged demonstration against President Clinton’s decision to normalize relations with Vietnam.

Only one man is present.

It’s still early, Carey is saying brightly. People don’t know how to get there. They have to work.

She runs out of excuses and sighs.

Thursday’s protest--which ultimately drew about 25 people two days after Clinton’s announcement last week--was not the first time organizers failed to produce a large showing for a demonstration, Carey conceded. But she swore it wouldn’t be her last effort.

“No. Never. We now have new battles,” said the diminutive Garden Grove resident, who for six years has been a presence at nearly every political demonstration in Little Saigon. “We are about to gear up again. Don’t count us out.”

Such public outcry may seem after the fact, but activists in the largest Vietnamese expatriate community in the United States who have devoted their lives to dissuading the United States from establishing ties with the Communist regime say they will press on.

They see normalization of relations not so much as a defeat but the passing of the inevitable--and they credit themselves for helping to delay it for 20 years.

Now, the die-hards say, their long-distance war against Vietnam goes on, even if the battle has shifted.

“There are still trade negotiations to protest against; there are still human rights discussions between the two countries,” said Ban Bui, the 55-year-old president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, a group that claims to represent the 300,000 Vietnamese Americans in the Southland and whose primary mission is “fight communism and anything that has to do with communism.”

“Until we get rid of the government in Vietnam, we still have a lot to do,” he said.

But in the middle of his impassioned speech in an interview in his Westminster headquarters, Bui paused to concede that the fight, so far, is akin to “butting my head against a hard wall.”

It is the closest Bui would come to admitting that the political battle waged on American soil by South Vietnamese nationals has been practically fruitless.

In the 20 years since the fall of Saigon, dissidents who settled in Orange County have orchestrated dozens of protests, including a demonstration two years ago in which thousands of people rallied in front of the office of a Vietnamese American doctor who advocated normalized relations with Vietnam. They have formed a panoply of political organizations--large and small--to overthrow the Vietnam government. They have written reams of editorials in all of the anti-Communist Vietnamese-language newspapers and have touted their fight on Little Saigon Radio and Television.

Some Vietnamese Americans in Orange County privately said the effectiveness and community support for the ardent anti-Communist protesters will gradually erode now that the United States and its former enemy have established full diplomatic relations.

“The community is changing and growing,” said a Vietnamese journalist in Santa Ana, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions from the community he covers. “A new generation is growing up and many of them think differently from their parents.”

The journalist and others in the Little Saigon area also criticize the inability of the activists to unite the 70,000- to 100,000-expatriate community.

The dissidents, however, vehemently disagreed.

“We may have different groups and different approaches but our common goal--to help the 70 million suppressed and impoverished Vietnamese in our country--is the same,” said Carey, 53, who founded the Vietnamese Women Community of Southern California. “Perhaps we do have different policies but we fight one common enemy.”

They couldn’t stop the inevitable normalization of relations, the activists said. But what they did do, they claim, was impede it while getting the attention and sympathy of the American public.

“It is very important to point out that we appeal to the collective conscience of Americans that what the U.S. government is doing is wrong,” said Tuan Anh Ho, a 55-year-old Stanton sign maker who is credited with organizing many of the larger demonstrations.

Ho, Bui, Carey and others said that instead of being discouraged by the latest setbacks, they are spoiling for new fights.

They look forward to the day when a Vietnamese consulate is established in Southern California, a move that could come as early as September, according to the Vietnam Mission to the United Nations in New York. “We’ll be there in the thousands every day when it opens,” Carey said.

They have already planned demonstrations to oppose any future discussions on whether the United States should grant Vietnam favorable trading status.

They vow to boycott any grocery store or supermarket that carries Vietnamese-made products.

“There’s no doubt that there will be many more demonstrations in the future,” said Chuyen Nguyen, who for years has been a fixture at protests, with his bullhorn and a borrowed flatbed truck bedecked with South Vietnamese flags.

Nguyen, a 46-year-old former South Vietnamese Air Force pilot, has figured in past controversies.

In 1989, when he and a group of Vietnamese military veterans sought from the city of Westminster a permit to hold a parade to commemorate their war heroes, they were told by a councilman, “If you want to be South Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam.”

The councilman later made a public apology after much criticism.

In December, 1993, Nguyen galvanized a demonstration against LeLy Hayslip, the author of “When Heaven and Earth Change Places,” which chronicles her childhood work with Communist guerrillas. The outcry reached such a peak that Hayslip had to leave Little Saigon before completing a round of scheduled interviews with local media.

“Sometimes protests work, other times they don’t,” Nguyen said this week from his office in Westminster, where he writes for an anti-Communist newspaper, Lap Truong , or Viewpoint. “But they still have to go on because that’s how we broadcast our feelings and our concerns.”

Nguyen and other activists also said normalization signals a need for the community, long fractured with its many different organizations, to finally unite and work together.

One way is to rally Vietnamese Americans to register to vote, said Ban Bui, whose group holds registration drives frequently. “What the announcement of normalization does is show that we are on our own with this fight, which will not be easy because the U.S. government is not behind us,” he said. “But if we establish a voting power, we will eventually win.”

Bui said his organization will also back young Vietnamese Americans who seek public office and actively oppose the Vietnam government, although most in this generation tend to favor normalized relations.

‘We need to make inroads into mainstream politics and the best people who can do that are those in our younger generation, those who have mastered the English language and are educated here,” he said.

Other political activists are open to the idea of new strategies in their battle to topple the Vietnam government, but also warned that the community should not stray too far from the previous course.

Those in this camp are the younger dissidents who came of age in the well-publicized years of the “boat people,” who poured into the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s with personal stories of horror and sufferings inflicted by the Communist regime.

“We must still adhere to the basic strategy of the last 10, 15 years, which includes publicizing the current situation and human rights violations in Vietnam and galvanizing support for our cause within the overseas Vietnamese communities,” said Diem Do, a 33-year-old Cypress resident who is the regional director of the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, an international group seeking to overthrow the Vietnamese government.

Do’s group is recognized by Vietnamese Americans as the core of the resistance movement and most of the members of current political associations at one time or another have been members of “The Front.”

Dung Trung Tran was one such member. Like Do, the 35-year-old consultant who works for an Irvine software company could often be seen leading protests whose participants were mostly young Vietnamese American professionals.

“We really don’t have to do anything new in our efforts to continue what we’ve done for two decades now,” Tran said. “We just have to continue to exert the pressure.”