Local Institute Launched for Vietnamese Studies

Educators and leaders of Orange County’s Vietnamese community on Saturday inaugurated an institute for teaching Vietnamese music, art, literature, language and history.

More than 150 educators and business leaders attended the launch of the Viet Vien-Hoc Institute of Vietnamese Studies in Garden Grove. The educators included several prominent academics from Vietnam, most of whom taught at the University of Saigon and the University of Hue. They will act as advisors to the center, and some will teach classes.

Dinh-Hoa Nguyen, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Southern Illinois University and a Mountain View resident, will be the center’s director. Nguyen told the crowd Saturday that he hopes the institute will spread knowledge about Vietnamese culture and prepare Vietnamese Americans to teach humanities and social science in refugee communities across the globe.

“We’re going to teach about all aspects of Vietnamese civilization,” Nguyen, a Hanoi native, said later in an interview. “We’re very happy, and we’re very proud.”

The “ultimate dream,” he said, is to use the institute as a seed to build a university for the Vietnamese community in the United States.

The institute expects about 30 students to take classes at first. Sessions will get underway immediately; the first lecture will be today 1 to 4 p.m. Sy-Te Nguyen, an author and chairman of the institute’s literature department, will talk about the impact of literature on education.

The institute is at 10872 Westminster Ave., Suite 202. Information: Minh-Lan Nguyen at (714) 636-6967, (714) 456-4114 or info@viethoc.org.