Westminster to Co-Sponsor Tet Festivities

For the first time since the Tet Festival was launched 15 years ago, the city government will co-sponsor the celebration, a long-sought indication, many Vietnamese Americans say, that officials are finally recognizing the social and economic contributions of the expatriate community.

“The city truly believes in what Vietnamese Americans have to offer to their adoptive country,” said an exuberant Councilman Tony Lam, who pushed for the city’s sponsorship. “Nothing could say more than this, an official seal of approval.”

Maybe so, but rifts in the community threaten to overshadow the city-sponsored celebration, which commemorates the Vietnamese New Year and runs Feb. 23-25.

There is a second Tet celebration planned the same weekend by another prominent community organization, the first time there will be two major festivals. Some take the fact that there are competing festivals as another sign of the acknowledged fracture within the community, a fracture that prevents it from being a political force.

Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, in accordance with the lunar calendar, falls on Feb. 19 and will usher in the Year of the Mouse. The religious and cultural holiday, the most important in Vietnam, honors the dead and celebrates the future.

Although the city is co-sponsoring the festival with Vietnamese American business people, taxpayers will not be footing the $200,000 tab, which will be financed by major corporations and Vietnamese-owned businesses in the county. Proceeds will go to the city’s treasury and be used to help build the long-planned Vietnamese American Heritage Center and a tourist bureau, and pay for other civic activities.

A 30-member committee made up of municipal and civic leaders has been mobilized to oversee fund raising, marketing and advertising. Mayor Charles V. Smith and Lam will serve as co-chairmen of the festival. Organizers have promised that entertainment, cultural exhibits and more than 200 food booths and carnival activities will outshine all past efforts.

Unlike recent Tet celebrations, the festival will take the form of a street fair. It will be on a section of Bolsa Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare that runs through Little Saigon, the business and cultural heart of the Vietnamese community in Orange County and home to an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people.

As an added attraction that previous Tet celebrations did not have, this festival features two cyclos, or pedicabs, brought in from Vietnam. They are ubiquitous in Vietnam and for decades have been the main transportation for the common and genteel alike.

“Our aim is to bring as much cultural images, lessons and traditions to this year’s festivities--more than ever before,” said Quy Van Ngo , the festival’s executive director. “That mainstream businesses, Vietnamese American merchants and the city of Westminster are working jointly to make this possible just shows how far our community has come, how we’ve gained credibility, how we’re willing to work together.”

Others in the Little Saigon area, however, aren’t as sanguine about the festival, whose theme is “Harmony and Prosperity in the Year of the Mouse.”

On the same weekend that Westminster is hosting its Tet festival, the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, a nonprofit agency that claims to represent 300,000 emigres living in the Southland, is having its own celebration in Garden Grove Park.

Hue Nguyen, who is coordinating the Garden Grove festivities, said his group planned its festival months before Westminster announced its intention. Neither side, however, discussed combining their celebrations.

Nguyen said the Westminster Tet celebration shows that, “once again, there is no unity within our community.”

Since 1980, when the first Tet celebration was launched, there has always been one anchoring festival in the Little Saigon area with a few smaller ones being held by other organizations. The Vietnamese Community of Southern California hosted the major one last year.

One Vietnamese American, who helped organize several Tet festivals in the 1980s, is frustrated, she said, with what she sees as “subtle political battles among people in the community and those battles have now even extended to our revered Tet.”

“It’s sad that there are two rivaling festivals in one weekend,” said the community leader who requested anonymity. “If they think about what’s best for Little Saigon, they should work together.”

Smith and Lam counter that Little Saigon’s interest is exactly what they have at heart.

“Our main purpose is to make Little Saigon a cultural center and tourist hub to attract visitors from all over the country,” said Smith. “It’s good for business, it’s good for the city, it’s good for the Vietnamese business community because we will use the profits to build a cultural center and a tourist bureau and pay for other activities in the city.”

Furthermore, Smith said, the other festival is held in Garden Grove, adjacent to Westminster. “This one,” the mayor added, “is right in the heart of Little Saigon.”

Lam said he doesn’t see the two Tet celebrations as rivaling each other. “They just show the Vietnamese Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit,” the councilman said. “As long as its done in the spirit of the culture, of the traditions, then it can’t hurt.”

Lam’s optimism is also tempered with wariness. As one who pushed the city to sponsor the festival, he has political stakes riding on the success or failure of the event given that many past celebrations lost money.

The 1990 Tet Festival committee, of which Lam was a member, is still paying off a $52,900 debt to the city incurred for the use of public facilities and services.

“I know I’m taking some risk,” said Lam, the first Vietnamese American elected to public office. “But if the festival is a success--and we expect that it will be--then, the city and the community will benefit so much from it.”

Besides, Lam said, cultural belief would have it that luck is on his side. He was born in a Year of the Mouse.