On Neutral Ground : With Nguoi Viet Daily, based in Westminster, Yen Do is taking the unorthodox approach of using Western-style objectivity.

It is late evening, and everyone at Nguoi Viet Daily has gone home. Yen Do, a small-built man who wears bottle-thick eyeglasses, relaxes the only way he knows how: by talking about the hum of Vietnamese news and the important role his newspaper plays in reporting it.

Do, 56, is polite and patient, but his eyes stray to the many plastic bags several feet away--bags bulging with hundreds of newspapers from Vietnam brought back by friends. He’ll stay up tonight to read them.

But that is later. Right now, he wants to talk about his “experiment” in having started the first Vietnamese-language, hard-news daily newspaper in the United States, one with an unorthodox approach of using the rules of Western-style objective reporting.

The result is a publication that does not take sides in the emotional debates that still roil the emigre community almost 22 years after the fall of South Vietnam to the Communist North, an editorial position that has made Do an enigma to many and anathema to the nationalists who question his loyalties.

“To write news, to chronicle events, is to have power, and with power comes responsibility,” says Do, president and publisher of Westminster-based Nguoi Viet.

“Many people are not pleased with the editorial decision of the paper to stay neutral in debates and to just step back and report news. I am sad at this. But as a journalist, I have a responsibility to not get carried away. I have a responsibility to just report news in a fair way.”

While Do is insistent that Nguoi Viet adhere to Western-journalism objectivity, he is just as insistent that the paper not break a news story that would hurt anyone’s reputation or business in the community.

Which is why he won’t publish information on the recent arrest of a well-known local artist, the power play and ultimate fallout among the handful of Vietnamese advocates nationwide who proclaimed themselves leaders of their communities or the scoop on the Vietnamese American pol who wants Assemblyman Curt Pringle’s seat if, as rumored, Pringle seeks state or national office.

“People are always coming to us to give us news, background, whether it’s about what’s going on in Vietnam or here,” Do says. “The reason Nguoi Viet is dependable to our readers is because the people in the community don’t see it as something dangerous to anyone.

“Some may criticize it as being too bland. But they trust us not to harm anyone.”

Most of the newspaper’s readers--newsstand buyers and 15,000 subscribers--are in Orange and Los Angeles counties. But Nguoi Viet, which means “Vietnamese people,” also has subscribers in Vietnamese enclaves elsewhere in the U.S. and in France and Australia.

And while the paper is not officially circulated in Vietnam, many copies find their way there via Vietnamese American tourists.

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The offices of Nguoi Viet are in the heart of Little Saigon--the cultural and business capital for Vietnamese emigres in the U.S. The mile-square district centered in Westminster is home to many of the 72,000 Vietnamese who have settled in Orange County.

Do’s ascent from political exile to newspaper journeyman to publisher reflects and parallels the evolution of the Vietnamese community in the county: From planeloads of bereft and jobless refugees it has grown into the country’s largest and most vibrant Vietnamese population.

Do’s newspaper career dates to his childhood in Vietnam, where, at age 12, he apprenticed for an underground high school student newspaper. In his teens, he led student protests, petitioning the government to give students more scholarships and to provide improvements to antiquated classrooms. Because the government outlawed mass demonstrations, Do was arrested and, after his release, suspended from school.

He was drafted, but the military rejected him because of his severe nearsightedness. To earn a living, Do became a reporter and editor for a couple of Saigon’s many newspapers. Later, he moonlighted as an interpreter for American and French journalists.

Like most of the Vietnamese refugees who fled to the West in 1975, Do landed in Camp Pendleton with virtually nothing but his wits and ambitions. The first few months, he washed dishes at a local fast food restaurant before moving to Texas to find other work.

In 1978, Do read about the impending arrival in the U.S. of about 100,000 “boat people,” the second wave of Vietnamese refugees fleeing persecution. Most would come to Orange County, where many of their compatriots had settled.

Southern California was about to witness the birth of an exiled community, Do remembers thinking. “The boat people are starting over with nothing. This was an opportunity to chronicle history,” he says. “I decided to get back into journalism. I left Texas with the intention of starting a newspaper.”

Do and his family moved to San Diego, where he rewrote stories from mainstream newspapers about the soon-to-arrive immigrants.

He wrote the stories on a typewriter borrowed from the owner of a Vietnamese monthly magazine. Using his family’s savings of $4,000, he printed 2,000 copies of the first edition of Nguoi Viet.

On Dec. 6, 1978, the first issue debuted with a banner headline--”BOC 100,000 TI NAN O DNA”--announcing 100,000 boat people to be airlifted from Southeast Asia.

Every copy sold, with readers, hungry for hard news about what was going on in Vietnam, demanding more.

After two months in San Diego, Do, his wife and four children moved to Santa Ana, where they rented one bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment they shared with about 10 others, all friends and former newspaper people from Vietnam. From these living quarters, Do and his associates continued to publish Nguoi Viet.

Once written and distributed by a ragtag team of unemployed refugees who worked for free and in the spirit of camaraderie, Nguoi Viet is now a corporation with about $1 million in assets and stock in a broadcasting company, Vietnam California Radio.

Its full-time employees and reporters receive medical benefits and options for retirement investments, making them the envy of other writers for other Vietnamese publications, who are mostly unpaid freelancers.

Do and his family now live in a modest four-bedroom house in Garden Grove. His wife works at Nguoi Viet in distribution and circulation. Three of his four grown children live at home; the eldest, Anh Do, lives in Mexico City, where she teaches grade school and writes freelance articles for U.S. newspapers.

One of his proudest moments, Do says, was when Anh graduated from USC with a degree in journalism.

His daughter, 30, says she is equally proud of her dad.

“He was definitely the catalyst” in her decision to become a journalist, she says. She cut her teeth in the business when as a teenager she went to Nguoi Viet’s office on Friday afternoons to help label and bundle papers for delivery.

“He has that rare ability to see both sides in any situation that you present to him,” she says. “He has set examples for me to follow.”

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Loc Ba Nguyen, like many Vietnamese journalists who launched publications in the U.S., has reprinted in his paper stories from Nguoi Viet Daily.

“Yen Do has set the sort of standards that many Vietnamese newspaper people have tried to follow,” says Nguyen, editor in chief of Nguoi Viet Dallas, which is not affiliated with Do’s paper.

But even as he lauds Do’s trailblazing efforts, Nguyen criticizes--as have a number of others--Do’s decision to remain editorially neutral when it comes to issues dealing with relations between Washington and Hanoi.

Unlike vocal Vietnamese editors and publishers who denounce Vietnam’s Communist government at every chance, Do, citing journalism objectivity, has refrained from stating his opinion.

His deafening silence, coupled with Nguoi Viet’s publication of news of investments and social and political changes in Vietnam, has led nationalists to accuse him of promoting and sympathizing with the cause of the regime that toppled South Vietnam.

“Even if he is objective, he still has to stand on the side of the people of the community, and that side is to write everything to attack the Communist regime,” says Duy Sinh, president of Vietnamese Newspapers and Broadcasting Assn. in America. “Yen Do, now that he is publisher and no longer runs the daily activities of Nguoi Viet, is still the spirit of the paper. He has a large responsibility, and by keeping his silence, he is abdicating that responsibility.”

It is such pronouncements that cause Do, who has not been to Vietnam since coming to the U.S., to be even more adamant that Nguoi Viet continue its neutral course.

“I have tried many times to explain that, as a newspaper, we have to be responsible with what we write, but the more I say, the more suspicious and skeptical some get,” he says. “Now I cannot spend my time worrying about that. All I can say is we are here to report news and to chronicle the history of the community as its grows, and how Vietnam changes and does business will affect the community here.”

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To talk to Do--even casually or after-hours--is to talk about the news or about his paper: He eats, breathes and sleeps only those topics, his family and friends say, and not in jest.

He rarely takes vacations. And when he is not at the office or sleeping, he can be found reading newspapers or books brought from Vietnam or going over new documents or research material in the Southeast Asian Archive at UC Irvine.

“Sometimes he would disappear for days, but we would always know that if he’s not home, he could be found at the library,” says Dieu Dinh Le, executive director of Vietnam California Radio, who used to work at Nguoi Viet.

Le has known Do since both led student protests in Vietnam.

Do may be criticized for his journalistic neutrality, Le says, but no one can deny that he has “given much--everything--to the community by investing his time, his energy, himself, in Nguoi Viet and making it a newspaper Vietnamese will reach for [for] news relating to their lives.”

Such testimony, Do says, flatters him. But he doesn’t think of the newspaper he has built--”with the help of many others,” he is always careful to add--as an investment. It is, he says, a symbol of his being a part of the ever-changing community.

“That is all that counts at the end of the day,” Do says, before turning out the office lights. It is late. Time to go home and read other newspapers.

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Yen Do

Background: Born 56 years ago in Vietnam. Immigrated with wife and three young children to the U.S. in 1975, landing at Camp Pendleton before settling in Texas, where his fourth child was born. In 1979, moved to San Diego and then Orange County two months later to launch Nguoi Viet Daily, now in Westminster. After serving as the publication’s editor-in-chief for 14 years, Do became its publisher in 1994. He and his family live in Garden Grove. He says he can’t imagine retiring.

Passions: Nguoi Viet Daily. Reading. When he’s not at work, he’s usually at the library. His home is more archive than house. “He has every kind of book,” says his 30-year-old daughter, Anh Do. “He’s never without a book.”

On the value of a newspaper: “This is knowledge. This is a reflection of life. This is people, community, responsibility to those around you.”

On overseeing the finances of Nguoi Viet: “I’m not good at bookkeeping, so from the beginning, others took care of it. Once, one of the partners liked a woman and brought her into the paper to work for us. She came in, saw money lying all over the place and she ran off with it.”

On not wanting to leave Vietnam: “I didn’t want to go to the U.S. I wanted to witness the changes brought about by the war. I didn’t think we’d lose.”