Ho Chi Minh Protests: 5 Years Later, the Man Who Enraged Little Saigon

News Feature

Elena Shore, Pacific News Service

Five years after a Vietnamese American shopkeeper enraged his community by hanging a poster of communist leader Ho Chi Minh in his store, Little Saigon is more vibrant and organized than ever. PNS' Elena Shore finds the man who, perhaps inadvertently, started it all.

WESTMINSTER, Calif. - May 11, 2004 - "I'm reminded about the past," says Truong Van Tran, "and I don't feel good. It's a bad memory." Tran sits in his living room below the gaze of Ho Chi Minh, whose framed picture hangs on the wall above the television set, recalling the events that led Tran to lose his business, go bankrupt and end up in jail.

In early 1999, this Vietnamese community, called Little Saigon, exploded in fury when Tran displayed a communist flag and a picture of the late communist leader in his video store. Fifty-three days of protests garnered international media attention. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese marched and picketed in what may have been the largest Asian American protests in U.S. history.

The community compared Tran's act to displaying a picture of Fidel Castro in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami, or putting up a swastika in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood. The fact that Tran was a refugee himself made the act all the more astonishing to the Vietnamese community. Many Vietnamese Americans endured horrors in re-education camps in Vietnam, or, as boat people, watched as relatives drowned or were raped or murdered by Thai pirates.

Tran, who denies he's a communist, says he displayed the communist symbols to help bring more freedom to Vietnam by showing them the freedom of expression that exists in the United States. "If we don't do freedom here, we cannot ask them to do freedom there."

When a local Vietnamese radio station encouraged shoppers to boycott his store, Tran, who refused to take down the offending symbols, faxed letters to local media and community leaders, encouraging them to talk with him instead of resorting to "dirty politics."

Protest ended only after police confiscated pirated videos of Asian soap operas and copying equipment from Tran's store. Tran lost his business, was convicted of video piracy and sentenced to 90 days in jail.

Three years later, in 2002, Tran returned to Vietnam. He traveled throughout the country for two months, meeting with government officials and posing as a Vietnamese peasant. He says he wanted to discover the truth about how the government treated its people. While in Vietnam he wrote two articles for the official government newspaper Cong An -- "Use Your Pen To Serve Your Country" and "No One Loves Vietnamese More Than Vietnamese Themselves" -- which only rekindled the fire back home.

"Over here they say I am Communist. When I go there, they say I am CIA. I am not Communist and I'm not CIA. I am a Vietnamese and American citizen. I love my country and I love the American country also. I want the two countries to have a good relationship," Tran says.

Currently unemployed, Tran gives weekly talks about freedom, history and Ho Chi Minh on Saturday mornings on the video-conferencing Web site PalTalk. He sees himself as fighting for the freedom of Vietnam just as Ho Chi Minh once did.

Ho Chi Minh, Tran says, had no choice but to ally himself with Soviets after the United States and England refused to give him weapons to fight against the French colonial power in Vietnam.

Tran himself was driven into the arms of the communists when he was rejected by the anti-communist community of Little Saigon, argues Le Khac Ly, a former South Vietnamese colonel in the Vietnam War. But what Tran did also had an unintended consequence, Le says: it provided an opportunity for Vietnamese Americans to unite against the common enemy of communism.

Artist Vi Ly, featured in the documentary "Saigon, U.S.A.," which airs this month on PBS, says that, amid the chaos and protests, Little Saigon solidified its identity as a community. "It raised our dialogue to a different level," she says. "Up until then, the conversation had always been about our history of coming from Vietnam to here, our adjustment into American life. It has not been about how we dealt with leftover issues. Something happened to us between 1975 and the early 1980s and people don't know about it. Something happened during that time for people to be so angry."

Journalist Vu Nguyen says the incident sparked a dialogue that helped bridge the cultural divide between the younger generation and their parents, who experienced the traumas of the war. "Seeing my father reacting angrily for the first time changed my outlook," he says. "I started asking questions for the first time about my heritage."

Young people like the Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California (UVSA) are taking the lead in organizing community events, says psychotherapist Xuyen Dong-Matsuda, who helped organize a peaceful candlelight vigil in 1999. "Now the community knows that they have that power when they come together."

The community of Little Saigon has stood together behind several Vietnamese candidates in recent elections, and Vietnamese communities in more than 20 U.S. cities have voted to be represented by the South Vietnamese flag.

"Being an artist," says Vi Ly, "part of me understands why Truong Van Tran did what he did. If people like him didn't exist, our community would be less visible, less aware of itself. He showed people they have the right to protest -- they could not have done that in Vietnam. He opened a door accidentally."

PNS contributor Elena Shore (eshore@pacificnews.org) works for NCM, an association of over 600 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations founded in 1996 by PNS and members of ethnic media. This story was provided with the cooperation of NAATA (National Asian American Telecommunications Association), whose documentary "Saigon, U.S.A." airs this month on PBS stations.