A Vietnamese Doctor's Crusade for Trade: Healing vs. Wounds

By MARC BALLON

Feb. 27, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

For nearly a decade, Dr. Co Pham has advocated reconciliation and free trade between the United States and Vietnam, engendering such fierce protests in Orange County’s Little Saigon community that he hired armed guards to protect his medical clinic.

Now, as the two nations edge closer to a sweeping trade accord nearly 25 years after the Vietnam War’s end, the native of Hanoi has stepped up his controversial campaign.

Pham, a physician who started out in America cleaning toilets, returned to Vietnam last summer to visit relatives, then spent the rest of his 10-day trip urging top-level government officials to sign the trade agreement. Back in California, he brought his gentle voice to National Public Radio, arguing for the pact alongside U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stanley Karnow. Then last November, he hosted a group of Vietnamese government and business leaders at an Orange County restaurant. It was the 15th such delegation from Vietnam he’s hosted in seven years.

“Trade will lead to democratization and improve conditions in Vietnam,” said Pham, a sinewy man with jet-black hair, impeccably coiffured.

Le Van Bang, Vietnam’s ambassador to the U.S., has come to know Pham over the years, twice staying at Pham’s spacious home in Huntington Beach.

“For U.S.-Vietnamese relations now and in the future, he’s playing an important role,” Bang said in a recent telephone interview. “He’s delivered on his promises. . . . He’s brought American businessmen to Vietnam and has introduced Vietnamese businessmen to American businessmen in California.”

But Pham’s undertakings have earned him scores of enemies. The mere mention of his name can evoke sneers and derision in some quarters of Little Saigon. The community is the heart of the nation’s biggest Vietnamese population and home to roughly 200,000 Vietnamese Americans, many of them former political detainees and ex-officers of the South Vietnamese Army.

“Co Pham is a traitor,” said Ky Ngo, 47, a leading anti-Communist activist. “We’re against him. We oppose him. We want to isolate him in the community.”

Said Diem Do, 36, another community leader who appeared on the radio broadcast in August with Pham: “I would have thought that after all these years he would see that what he’s advocated hasn’t worked at all. The Vietnamese government is as hard-line as ever.”

Pact’s Prospect Brings Jitters

In 1994 the United States lifted its long trade embargo against Vietnam and a year later normalized relations. Since then, travel between the two countries has soared. But trade hasn’t, partly because of high tariffs and other barriers.

Two-way trade totaled just $800 million in 1998, less than one-half of 1% of the total U.S. volume, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. That is expected to jump dramatically with the passage of the agreement, says the World Bank. Vietnam has a population of 78 million, although its per capita income was estimated in 1996 to be less than $300.

Last July, U.S. and Vietnamese officials reached a tentative trade agreement, but Vietnam has held off giving final approval. The delay is blamed on government hard-liners who fear a loss of control over the economy and the effects of fully opening to the West. Moreover, the collapse of market economies during the Asian financial crisis, analysts say, may have had a chilling effect on senior Vietnamese officials.

There is some resistance, as well, among U.S. politicians, who complain about human rights abuses in Vietnam. Yet many see the agreement eventually being ratified.

That includes the current U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Douglas “Pete” Peterson. Peterson says he doesn’t know Pham. But others do and view him as quite influential.

Henry Vo, president of International Trading Co. in Ontario, credits Pham with helping him make important “connections” with business leaders. Through Pham, Vo says he met a Hanoi-based importer who is now interested in buying water pumps from him.

“Pham is a matchmaker,” said Vo, whose company exports Teflon and pool and spa equipment to Vietnam. His 1999 sales were $250,000.

“Pham was among the earliest to come forward supporting normalized political and economic relations and has been quite outspoken, which isn’t an easy position to take,” said Virginia Foote, president of the U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council, a trade association with offices in Washington and Hanoi.

Still, there is considerable disagreement about the benefits of a trade accord to the United States.

Joseph Damond, deputy assistant U.S. trade representative, said, “Vietnam has a lot of potential to become a good market for U.S. exports and American investment.” But some U.S. and other foreign companies in Vietnam are pulling back, complaining about the hardships of doing business there.

“There’s this great illusion that Vietnam is some kind of El Dorado and that everybody will make a lot of money there,” said Karnow, author of the best-selling book “Vietnam: A History.” “The economy is terrible,” he said in an interview. “Corruption is terrible. The bureaucracy is terrible.”

Biggest Medical Practice of Its Kind

Inside the Bolsa Medical Center, a salmon-colored building decorated with pagodas, Pham faces little of the antagonism he encounters in the streets. Wearing a white lab coat and glasses, he mixes easily with colleagues and patients, some of whom have come from as far as San Jose to see Pham, a gynecologist, and some 20 other mostly Vietnamese physicians.

Every day an estimated 400 patients visit Bolsa Medical--the largest Vietnamese medical operation under one roof in America, says Quan Dong Nguyen, vice president of the Vietnamese Medical Assn. of the USA. Pham refused to divulge information about the financial health of the clinic, but knowledgeable sources said the medical center’s annual revenue approaches $9 million.

Pham worked hard to get this far professionally, and some say he is risking it all by engaging in politics in a community still embittered and scarred by the war.

Reputed Communist sympathizers have found themselves and their businesses attacked. Last winter crowds of up to 15,000 marched for weeks to protest a video store owner’s display of a Communist Vietnamese flag and a picture of the late Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. A few months later, Westminster City Councilman Tony Lam’s restaurant was the scene of demonstrations because Lam didn’t attend those rallies. Lam said protesters screamed profanities at customers and urinated on the side of his business.

“In Orange County, there’s a climate of fear and intimidation that if you express a view that’s unpopular with some members of the Vietnamese community, they will picket your business and even make threats against your life,” said Jeff Brody, an assistant professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton and former journalist who has written extensively on Vietnamese American affairs.

Like thousands of his compatriots, Pham remains haunted by the legacy of the Vietnam War. Rarely does a day go by, he says, when he doesn’t think about why South Vietnam lost, what went wrong, how it could have turned out differently.

The war shattered Pham’s comfortable life, borne of his aristocratic roots. He says his family, with close ties to the French colonial government, had lived on a 1,000-acre estate in Hanoi and made money by farming rice and other foods. But after the country was divided along the 17th parallel into Communist-controlled North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam, in 1954, the Phams fled.

In Saigon, Pham studied medicine and earned his medical degree in 1970. He then served in the South Vietnamese Army as a surgeon in Da Nang. When Communist forces closed in, Pham and his wife, Thuy Bui, and their 10-month-old son, Cung, boarded a U.S. Navy ship. That was April 30, 1975--the day South Vietnam fell.

The Phams arrived at Camp Pendleton, then moved to Seattle, where Pham and his wife, also a physician, worked as hospital orderlies. In 1976, he returned to medical school for certification, first at Northwestern University and later did his residency at Loma Linda University School of Medicine.

In Orange County, he joined Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, eventually becoming a member of the board of directors. By the end of the 1980s, he was elected president of the Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce.

“I would walk into restaurants in Little Saigon, and people would come up to me to talk,” he recalled wistfully. “I was a rising star.”

A Guilt Born of Having Plenty

Pham says he, too, hated Communist Vietnam for a long time. He blamed the Communists for upending his life and forcing him into exile. And like many others in Little Saigon, he supported anti-Communist groups and conservative U.S. politicians. A portrait of President George Bush shaking his hand hangs on the walls of Pham’s office.

But sometime in the early ‘90s, Pham underwent a change of heart. He says he began feeling guilty. He realized that as he was getting rich in America--he tooled around in a new Mercedes--millions of his former countrymen in Vietnam struggled to get by. He concluded that the hard-line approach toward Vietnam wasn’t working and began advocating the lifting of the U.S. embargo against the country.

On a hot August day in 1993, Pham met publicly with Ambassador Bang, then Vietnam’s ambassador to the United Nations. And his life changed forever.

Picketers showed up at Pham’s office. Friends shunned him. The Vietnamese Physicians Assn. of Southern California stripped him of the organization’s presidency.

It only got worse when he led a delegation of two dozen Vietnamese American businesspeople to Hanoi in 1994. Hundreds of demonstrators marched at his medical clinic for days, and he was met with death threats. At one point, he wore a bulletproof vest and paid bodyguards to shadow him. Fearing for his safety, he took his political activities underground.

He resurfaced publicly last summer, more determined than ever to broker the trade accord.

His ambitions, though, seem to go beyond the passage of the pact. Early in his marriage, Pham confessed to his wife that he hoped to one day become president of South Vietnam. Asked whether he still harbors political aspirations in Vietnam, he paused, then smiled and said, “No comment.”

But moments later, he said: “I think Vietnam in the future will want somebody mainstream who they can trust, a strong, educated leader who can speak to the East and the West.

“I love America,” he continued. “It’s been very, very good to me. But I’m 100% Vietnamese, and I love my country.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Dr. Co Pham

Birth: Hanoi, Sept. 21, 1943.

Family: wife of 29 years, Thuy Bui; four children, ages 8 to 25.

Professional title: President of Bolsa Medical Group

Education: University of Saigon Medical School, M.D., 1970

Favorite Author: Robert McNamara, former U.S. Defense Secretary

Hobbies: jogging and reading

Childhood idol: Ngo Dinh Diem, former South Vietnamese premier

Proudest accomplishment: having four children

Biggest failure: inability to convince Vietnam to sign pending trade pact.