Vietnamese Activists Vow to Press Fight : Protest: Clinton’s decision to normalize relations with Vietnam angers refugees. But some observers say new policy may erode their support.

Chau Tue Carey looks around apprehensively at the nearly empty courtyard behind the Orange County 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 garner 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 to “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 during an interview in his Westminster headquarters, Bui paused and conceded 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.”

Activists say 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.

And 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.

“Sometimes protests work, other times they don’t,” Nguyen said last 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 such 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.