Protests in Little Saigon: Fresh Start or Last Gasp?

It was an electric moment Monday night: a roar rumbled through the crowds surging into an anti-communist rally in Little Saigon as political rivals Thang Ngoc Tran and Duc Trong Do clasped hands.

“Fighting communism is the No. 1 goal,” Tran would later say. “I shook Duc’s hand at that time because we need to unite, put aside our disagreements, and fight communism together.”

As anachronistic as the movement may seem to mainstream America, the protest rallies over recent days have made history, drawing unprecedented numbers and healing--at least temporarily--bitter rifts in the notoriously fragmented Vietnamese American enclave in Orange County.

Though sparked by something as simple as a shopkeeper’s decision to hang the Communist flag and a portrait of the late Ho Chi Minh, the event has become a watershed, observers inside and outside the community agree. They call it a turning point for a people who fought side by side with Americans in their homeland and then scattered around the world in their flight from tyranny.

Where community leaders, Vietnamese Americans elsewhere and historians disagree is over the future: Is this a renaissance for the former nation of South Vietnam or a rite of passage for refugees on the verge of assimilation?

Protest organizers see a bright future of political action built on their newly ignited anti-communist unity.

“With this crisis, we’re turning a new page in advocating for human rights and democracy in Vietnam,” said activist and attorney Van Thai Tran. “There’s tremendous momentum coming out of this.”

But others point to quieter signs that suggest the protest movement is one last stand before the painful memories of war fade and the maturing Vietnamese community--like other immigrant groups before them--slowly discard the vestiges of homeland politics.

“This has been the history of the Chinese Americans, Korean Americans and Filipino Americans,” said historian L. Ling-Chi Wang of UC Berkeley, referring to how each group faced pressure to extend its political allegiances and prejudices into the second generation. “I think it is a rite of passage,” he said.

Most scholars agreed that the Little Saigon protests mark a significant moment for many of the million-plus Vietnamese Americans in the United States. But they expressed doubts about whether the latest events would further shackle and fragment the nation’s largest Vietnamese community or lead to broader political participation.

“People now understand more about the law and policy in this country,” said Minh-Hoa Ta, associate director of the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University and herself a refugee.

A decade ago, she and others said, the video store owner who prompted the protests might well have been killed, as were several advocates of normalization in the 1970s and 1980s.

Trang Nguyen, former anchor of Little Saigon TV, recalled the death threats she got several years ago after airing a BBC interview with senior Vietnamese government officials.

“They know better now than to firebomb the place,” said Nguyen, who recently left for a television job in New Jersey. “The fact that they’re going out there and demonstrating peacefully, it shows the community has matured.”

Korean Experience in U.S. Recalled

But others were not so sure. Instead, they saw in the protests parallels to other refugee groups in the United States, from Asia and Cuba, that put relentless pressure on compatriots to be loyal to their homeland political causes.

“In the ‘70s, the Korean community in Los Angeles was very similar,” said Edward Chang, professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside, although noting that the context was different, because South and Communist North Korea then and today exist side by side, whereas there is no South Vietnam state.

Chang recalled how the regime in South Korea came down hard on Koreans in Los Angeles, trying to influence and often suppress their voices. “With [certain] recent immigrants and refugees, the anti-communist ideology supersedes everything else. But as a generation changes, they will not share that collective memory.”

Some years ago, Chang said, a bookstore opened in Koreatown selling North Korean books and items. “Initially there was some protest, but it’s no longer an issue,” he said.

Little Saigon, of course, is different in that it is a community of immigrants who are also mostly refugees, who have adopted the 2-square-mile area in Westminster as their last outpost of South Vietnam.

Unlike other Vietnamese concentrations in Houston and San Jose, Little Saigon is not only larger--about 200,000 Vietnamese live in Orange County--but it is also home to many former officers of the South Vietnam military and more recent political detainees. Memories of wartime atrocities are fresh.

That area is a “hotbed of conservatism,” said Chung Chuong, who directs the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University. Chuong said he believes the anti-communist protests reflect a reaction by conservative elements in Little Saigon who were caught off guard by the swift pace of the restoration of U.S.-Vietnam ties.

To Chuong, it’s not clear that the protests reflect unity. “It may be a sign of continuous divisiveness and lingering legacy of the war,” he said. “It may be a key turning point. But we have to see whether the lessons of democracy will be learned.”

The protests have already helped unify various factions in the local Vietnamese community--most dramatically illustrated with the handshake between Tran and Do. Both men are strongly anti-communist and share similar ideas but have recently battled each other to lead an influential community group.

Now, both men said they’ve put their rivalry aside to unify Little Saigon in the anti-communist protests.

‘Maybe This Will Be the Last Stand’

There is little disagreement that no matter how hard anti-communist forces protest, more and more Vietnamese in the United States will return home to visit loved ones. Cultural and trade exchanges with Vietnam have accelerated since U.S. sanctions were lifted in 1994.

Even as thousands were marching in Little Saigon this month, many more Vietnamese-Americans were celebrating Tet--the lunar New Year--in Vietnam. And in markets on Bolsa Avenue, it is not hard to find food and other products imported from the communist land. Dr. Co Pham, president of the Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce, remembers how he was protested when he led a trade delegation to Vietnam a few years ago.

“I wish that people may forgive,” he said. “Maybe this will be the last stand.”

Organizers and other supporters of the protests, however, say the recent events had little to do with travel and trade with Vietnam, or the coming of age of the Americanized second generation. Instead, they describe the rallies as an organized yet powerfully spontaneous reaction from extremists and moderates alike.

“I’ve never gone to a protest before,” said Lan Khai, 51. “But this time I felt it was something I had to do. It’s been more than 20 years. We’ve tried so hard to forget and move on with our lives, but he’s [the shopkeeper] made all the memories come back.”

“The big majority has kept silent and waited for some turning point,” said Yen Do, publisher of Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese daily in the country, which was strongly in favor of the protests. “Then this happened and it came so fast.”

Do said he too believes and hopes that the experience of these protests will translate into unified action that furthers the community.

“It’s time,” said Suong Ngoc Truong, 43, of Mission Viejo, who brought her family to Monday night’s protest and witnessed the shaking of hands between the two longtime political rivals in Little Saigon. “We need to come together,” she said. “I hope we can start down a new path.”