Reunited, Reignited

About 1,000 people jammed a Buena Park auditorium Sunday to commemorate 53 days of protest rallies against the government of Vietnam, which were sparked one year ago by a Westminster video store owner’s display of the Communist country’s flag.

The people had come from throughout California and the United States to the union hall to celebrate the anniversary of the largest Vietnamese demonstrations anywhere since the fall of Saigon in April 1975, and to honor protesters, some of whom were arrested or beaten in the confrontations outside the Hi Tek video store in Westminster’s Little Saigon.

“I was there to voice my feelings against the flag,” said Sinh Tran, a 62-year-old Westminster grandmother who was among 40 protesters arrested last Jan. 17, on the first day of the demonstrations. Event organizers gave Tran a bouquet of red roses.

Tran, who escaped by boat from Vietnam with her six children in 1989, said she was following her heart when she turned out for the rallies last year. “I wasn’t afraid because I didn’t do anything bad. In Vietnam, we can never voice our opinion.”

She was among the 15,000 mostly anti-Communist demonstrators who spoke against Truong Van Tran after he displayed the Communist flag of Vietnam and a poster of Communist leader Ho Chi Minh on a wall inside his store.

Many who attended Sunday’s event still see Tran as a pawn of the Hanoi government, a man whose actions were aimed at testing the unity of Vietnamese people living outside their homeland.

“But the Communists failed,” said Tuan Anh Ho, chairman of the Committee for Just Cause of Free Vietnam, which sponsored the event.

“We must not ask when we can return to our country,” Ho said. “How soon or how much later depends on our attitude, our responsibility and our involvement in our fight to free Vietnam.”

In his passionately anti-Communist speech, which was interrupted with applause, Ho also urged the community to boycott goods from Vietnam, and to draw media attention to their cause so they might instill hope to those left behind in Vietnam.

San Jose radio station owner Doan Trang hoped to help in that cause, telling the crowd her station would be broadcasting Sunday’s speeches and subsequent commentary to the Southeast Asian country.

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Trang, who received an enthusiastic reception from the crowd, told them that her radio program gives the people in Vietnam a sense of connection to Vietnamese people elsewhere in the world.

“We give them the spirit to stand up against the Communists,” she said.

Some, like Cuc Ngoc Pham, 59, who came from Orlando, Fla., said he followed last year’s 53-day vigil through Vietnamese-language radio and newspapers. Pham said he was impressed by the show of unity in the Vietnamese community.

Calling Little Saigon “the City of Hope,” Pham told the chanting crowd that Orange County’s Vietnamese community gives inspiration to all those opposed to the Hanoi government around the world.