In Dispute Over Rival Festivals, It’s Tet for Tat

This year’s local festivities to usher in Tet, the lunar new year and the most important holiday in Vietnam, promise more fireworks than ever before. In more ways than the obvious.

First, there are two major festivals in and near Little Saigon scheduled for the same weekend, Feb 23-25. Organizers have accused one another of trying to undermine their events, which together are expected to draw about 250,000 people.

Then, there’s the matter of a lawsuit filed by a group of merchants in Little Saigon to block Westminster’s celebration on Bolsa Avenue, the tourist district’s major thoroughfare.

Adding to the tumult, someone tried to torch Westminster Councilman Tony Lam’s restaurant last week, prompting him to suggest the culprit did it to protest Lam’s involvement in the city-backed festivities.

Welcome to the soap opera that Tet has become.

In the 15 years Tet has been celebrated in Orange County, home to the largest Vietnamese population outside of Southeast Asia, it has been observed as it is in Vietnam--a joyous time to dwell on peace and harmony.

Now, “Rumors are flying all over the place about who’s doing what to try to ruin the Tet’s atmosphere,” said Nhuan Do, a local businessman. “Why can’t we all celebrate in peace?”

A custom derived from the Chinese, Tet, which begins Monday, is the most important religious and cultural holiday for those of Vietnamese descent. It honors ancestors and is the traditional observance of the new harvest season. In Vietnam, business owners and farmers alike observe the holiday by not working for at least a week to celebrate.

This year’s two biggest festivals are sponsored by the city of Westminster and the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, a political and social service agency that says it represents the interests of the 300,000 emigres from San Diego to Ventura County, half of whom reside in Orange County. The rival events will be a mile apart.

Both festivals will include food booths, cultural art exhibitions, singing and dance performances, beauty contests and parades. The Westminster event--the first one sponsored by the city government--will be a street fair on a cordoned-off section of Bolsa Avenue. It aims to promote Little Saigon as a tourist mecca, and proceeds will finance a Little Saigon Heritage Center and Tourist Bureau and other municipal activities.

The celebration sponsored by the Vietnamese Community of Southern California will be at Garden Grove Park. Profits will pay for community events and the expenses of the agency.

But with days before the start of the celebrations, people seem more concerned with what the competing festivals and rancor will mean to the community.

The last thing the emigres need, many said, is another fissure in an already fractious community that carries little political weight because many community organizations and their leaders don’t want to have anything to do with each other.

“If these groups would work together,” said Nghia Tran, who runs a social services group in Santa Ana, “the whole community would benefit.”

The fracas has reached a point where everyone involved has accused the other of “dirty politics”--an increasingly common refrain as the debate goes on.

Merchants who have packed Westminster City Hall the last two weeks to air their anger with officials said the closure of parts of Bolsa to accommodate the festivities in Little Saigon would hurt their businesses. City officials last week nevertheless formally approved holding the festival on the street.

“The city doesn’t care,” said Thanh Tong, who owns a beauty supply shop on Bolsa. “It’s just dirty politics.”

Organizers of the celebration in Garden Grove accuse Westminster of trying to dampen their festival by having its street fair on the same weekend. “Lots of dirty politics going around,” said Hue Nguyen, coordinator of the Garden Grove festivities.

Westminster officials countered that the other side is trying to sabotage the city’s carnival by encouraging business owners in Little Saigon to sue for an injunction to keep the event from taking place. (A judge refused to grant the injunction two weeks ago but has given the merchants another chance to make their case Wednesday.)

To back their accusation, Westminster officials point to the two attorneys representing the merchants suing the city. One, Lan Quoc Nguyen, is a legal advisor for the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, and the other, Van Thai Tran, represented the agency last November in securing permits for the Garden Grove festival.

Nguyen said his representing the merchants has nothing to do with his work for the agency. Tran said his involvement with the Vietnamese Community of Southern California ended in November. Hue Nguyen said there’s no connection between the agency’s Tet festival and the merchants’ lawsuit, despite the fact that Tran hosted their festival’s opening ceremony last year.

“It’s dirty politics, these charges,” said Tran, who added that his involvement with the Garden Grove festival last year was just an exercise in community spirit.

The two lawyers contend the city was arrogant and condescending to the Vietnamese American community by not consulting with the business people before deciding to sponsor the festival.

Not true, said Westminster Mayor Charles V. Smith. The city sent out fliers to business people in the area months ago, he said.

The accusations are “a very blatant attempt by the other group to try to help their own Tet festival and damage the Bolsa Tet festival,” Smith said, concluding: “It’s dirty politics.”

The mayor of Garden Grove also has weighed in.

Mayor Bruce A. Broadwater wrote an open letter to the Vietnamese community criticizing his neighbor city for hosting its festival on Bolsa Avenue and inconveniencing the merchants and their potential customers.

Come to the celebration in Garden Grove instead, Broadwater invited in the missive that has been translated into Vietnamese and displayed in stores around the Little Saigon area.

In response, Smith wrote an open letter of his own “to clear up any possible misunderstandings caused by false information currently being circulated.” Go to Westminster’s festival, Smith urged, since it “promises to be the biggest and best one yet.”

Both mayors deemed the other’s letter “inappropriate.”

As far as the merchants in the lawsuit and organizers for both festivals are concerned, unless someone gives in this three-way tug of war--and no one seems ready just yet--there would be, as Van Tran put it, “only an uneasy peace” as people prepare to greet the Year of the Mouse.

“We just want to put on a beautiful Tet festival with joy and meaning,” Hue Nguyen said. “Want to or not, there are two events, so whoever goes where, that’s his business.”

“We just want to have the best festival we can,” said Sondra Evans, coordinator of the Westminster celebration. “The winner in all this is the Vietnamese people because they get two Tet festivals.”

And who knows, said Nguyen, maybe organizers could learn something from all this and work together next year. But not this year, he said. “It’s too late.”