A Courageous ‘Little Tiger’ Leaves Office Without Regrets

Tony Lam is sitting in his office above a nephew’s tofu store in Little Saigon, pondering a question about the worst moment in his 10-year political career as a Westminster city councilman. It was a “moment” that stretched out over several months in early 1999 and came to define Lam as a man of personal and political courage.

Not that much good came of it. What he mostly got, he says, was a ton of legal bills and quadruple-bypass surgery.

This year, at 65, the man once dubbed the “Little Tiger” by a U.S. Embassy official in Saigon is retiring.

The question put to him in his office, then, seems relevant: Would he do it the same way again?

Lam has spent lots of time since 1999 thinking about that. The incident flared overnight: A video store owner in Little Saigon displayed a poster of Ho Chi Minh and the flag of communist Vietnam.

To Westminster’s anti-communist Vietnamese community, the display was treasonous. Thousands of protesters hit the streets to say so. They wanted Lam, the first Vietnamese American elected to office in America, to join them. He refused, saying the city attorney had advised against him taking a stand, because the beleaguered store owner might someday sue the city for failing to protect him and his store.

It would have been a snap for Lam to discount the advice. After all, he sympathized with the anti-communist protesters. From childhood to manhood, he had suffered the same upheavals and tragedies that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese did as they watched the French, the communists and the Americans turn their country upside down and rend it in half.

He first became a refugee at 10 during the French bombardment of Vietnam in 1946 and later when the communists took over. The communists took his family’s property, Lam says, and he helped run a U.S.-backed refugee camp on Guam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“I left behind the bones of my ancestors,” he says of Vietnam. “I left behind my good living standards, all my assets, came here empty- handed and rebuilt my life.”

So, yes, Lam could easily have spoken out. But he didn’t, saying then and now he had to put the city’s interests above those of the Vietnamese community. By keeping his distance, he withheld what could have been seen as an official stamp of approval for the crowd’s effort to suppress an unpopular viewpoint. He refused to join what became, at times, an angry mob.

He paid a price in vituperative remarks against him and a protracted boycott of his restaurant.

Would he do it again?

In a word, yes. But that doesn’t mean all is forgiven or forgotten with him.

“It still is a sore point in my life,” he says. “Whenever you talk about that time, it is still haunting me and my family. But when I take a stand, I can’t do anything halfway. If tonight you want me to go to Big Bear and chop down the highest branch of a pine tree, if I considered it a challenge, I would take the challenge.”

The magnitude of Lam’s courage went largely unnoticed in the press. It wasn’t as though he became a media darling to help salve the personal trauma. Whatever encouragement he got was fleeting; whatever denunciation he got was lasting.

It’s not that Lam is leaving office a bitter man. While chatting this week in his office, he seems upbeat.

We talk about political courage, and I suggest it fit Anaheim mayoral candidate Curt Pringle’s recent public support of a Mexican-based supermarket in Anaheim. The store’s presence angered many potential Pringle voters, and I can’t imagine that Pringle, once persona non grata in Orange County’s Latino community, really thinks his stance will result in Latino voters stampeding to his candidacy.

For my money, it was a principled stand on Pringle’s part, even if some political calculation figured in.

“Yes, let’s talk about Curt Pringle,” Lam jokes.

Not today.

Today, we’re talking about the Little Tiger at the end of his political trail.

And if history is fair, it’ll record his most trying moment in public life as his most shining.