Viet Tide Paper Making Waves

Abortion, drugs, homosexuality, interracial dating. These are not issues even discussed in most Vietnamese American families, but a new bilingual weekly newspaper in Orange County hopes to change that.

“After 25 years in this country, our community has a lot more variety of interests than just communism and anti-communism,” said Hieu Tran Phan, editor of the English-language section of Viet Tide, a Westminster-based weekly tabloid that debuted in July.

In its first weeks, the section already has explored subjects shunned by traditional Vietnamese publications: A young man caught between cultures finds comfort in the rave party scene and the drug Ecstasy; a 23-year-old gay man from Santa Ana ponders how to come out of the closet; and a 21-year-old Anaheim Hills woman wants advice on how to break the news to her parents that she is in love with a Mexican man.

The section is a medley of opinion columns, news briefs, poetry and an open forum called “Heart to Heart.” It is inserted inside the new but more traditional Vietnamese-language newspaper. Topics in the English-language pages are decidedly different from those in the Vietnamese section, which features news stories on politics, and national and international events.

The subjects may not seem groundbreaking by mainstream media standards, said Phan, 27, who left a daily newspaper reporting job to take the helm of Viet Tide’s English-language section.

“But for us, this is truly revolutionary,” he said. “These things happen in [the Vietnamese American community], but they are rarely discussed in the open.”

Viet Tide is published by the company that owns Little Saigon Radio, a longtime fixture in Orange County’s Vietnamese American community and named for the Westminster area that serves as a commercial and cultural hub.

California, with its large and diverse immigrant population, has one of the most vibrant ethnic media scenes in the country. New California Media, a network of ethnic publishers and broadcasters, counts more than 200 publications among its members, although Viet Tide is not one of them.

The challenge for many of these newspapers and magazines, observers say, is how to remain relevant as their readers age and their children become more assimilated into the larger culture.

The answer for many has been to include English-language pages. Large ethnic dailies such as Korea Times, Nguoi Viet Daily News and the Chinese L.A. Daily News publish sections in English periodically. But, for the most part, they contain articles from mainstream media and translated versions of their own paper’s native-language articles.

Such publications have their compasses turned toward Asia and seldom deal with issues that first-generation immigrants consider taboo, such as sexuality or drug use. But Viet Tide is one of a handful of ethnic publications beginning to offer original content that puts more emphasis on local issues and trends.

KoreAm Journal, an 11-year-old, Gardena-based English-language magazine for Koreans, has been tackling social issues often off-limits in the Korean-language media.

“For anyone who is born here, we feel the need to put things from that perspective,” said Dina Gan, editor in chief of A. Magazine, a New York-based publication distributed nationwide. “Our focus is basically on a Pan-Asian awareness, chronicling that identity as it develops in the U.S.”

Viet Tide and similar publications may mark the beginning of the end of Asian ethnic media, said Jeffrey Brody, an associate professor of communication at Cal State Fullerton.

“The bilingual version can be viewed as kind of a transition period signaling the death of the Korean version or Vietnamese version” of a paper, said USC sociology professor Sandra Ball-Rokeach, who studies the role of community media in ethnic neighborhoods. “But I’m not so sure. It is much more of a global setting now, and the capacity to negotiate linguistically and culturally among different countries may be an advantage.”

Phan agrees. He sees Viet Tide’s English-language section as a way for young Vietnamese Americans to explore issues they cannot in more traditional publications. But it also can serve to strengthen Vietnamese roots.

“The luxury of living in Little Saigon is also the curse of living in Little Saigon,” Phan said of the insular nature of the Vietnamese American community. “We’re trying to cover all the experiences living in the borderland.”

Phan said 15,000 to 20,000 copies of the tabloid are distributed free at businesses that advertise in it. It is sold for 50 cents a copy at newsstands around Southern California.

The early reaction has been mixed, said Phan, who fields dozens of calls from readers every week, some supportive and some critical. Some critics think the publication goes too far, he said.

“You don’t air out your dirty laundry in public,” Phan said he has been told by some callers. “But that’s what’s exciting. It means we can be a catalyst for debate.”