It's not unusual to hear Vietnamese-Americans in Southern California express strong feelings against communism. After all, many came to the U.S. as refugees and veterans of the war against North Vietnam.
Earlier this month, there was a dramatic demonstration of this sentiment. California State Senator Janet Nguyen of Garden Grove was removed from chambers during a ceremony for the late Senator Tom Hayden. The uproar began when Nguyen spoke against Hayden's opposition to the Vietnam War. She alleged that Hayden had ties to the Communist regime, which caused the deaths of countless people.
That incident reignited a debate in SoCal's Vietnamese community that pits strongly held political beliefs against the concept of free speech.
Reporter Christine Mai-Duc has been writing about this for the LA Times. She joined Take Two's A Martinez.
How did the local Vietnamese community react to Senator Nguyen's remarks and subsequent removal from chambers?
I think there was a lot of outrage in the community. I think no matter what your views, Janet Nguyen is one of the most prominent elected officials in the Vietnamese-American community. She's widely respected.
And she was removed when she was trying to voice an opinion that many of them feel. Many of them share her views of anti-communism, of the experience that she had a refugee coming to this country, having to start over. And her family members were killed in the Vietnam War.
And so, the idea that she would be silenced for voicing a widely held belief in the Vietnamese American community and a perspective that is dear to many people in the community was really met with some disdain.
Has having ties or sympathies with the Communist Party been a longstanding topic of controversy within the Vietnamese-American community?
Just the fact that many of the Vietnamese-Americans who are in this country, who started lives and family here, came here because they were refugees of the Vietnam War. That really demonstrates how important his issue has been to the community in the past.
It's come up and bubbled up over time. I think the most visible example was in the late 90s, when a video store owner posted a Communist Vietnamese flag in his store window, and there were protests for weeks and weeks.
Some people who are of the older generation who came here as refugees — my parents came here as refugees as well — they're trying to explain that this is a very personal issue to them. It's very emotional. The number of family members that were lost, their lives that had to be uprooted, it's very important to them. I think that on the other side, there are those, especially perhaps in the younger community, who have become more Americanized, that have grown up in the country, starting to say that there are other issues that we should be looking at as well.
How historically important has it been to keep anti-Communist sentiment alive within the community?
I think it depends on who you talk to. I think that the hardliners, the older folks who lived through this — there are many Vietnamese-American civic society associations who really concentrate on anti-Communist views, or just fighting for liberty in current Vietnam and liberating their fellow countrymen — and I think that's a very important topic for them. Making sure that their voice is heard and making sure that there's expanded freedoms for people that are still in Vietnam. For younger generations who have built their lives here, I think that it's something that they understand is very important to the older generation, but they're starting to look elsewhere as well.
You cited a study from the late 1990s that said 58 percent polled within Orange County's Vietnamese community agreed that Communists should be denied freedom of speech. How has this view changed over the years?
That was definitely a long time ago. It was a snapshot at the time. That probably has started to shift among younger generations. What you really have to think about is, in any community, when you talk about free speech, there's going to be the extremes on either side.
When you're talking about the First Amendment in the United States, some people don't believe you have the right to burn the flag and that's an ongoing debate. That's one extreme. For example, Janet Nguyen said to me in an interview, if you want to wrap yourself in the Communist flag, you can't expect to be welcome in my home. And so that's how a lot of people really feel. This is their home. This is their community. Little Saigon is their community. I think that sometimes there are overtones of what is appropriate and what's respectful in terms of dishonoring the trauma that many in the community have gone through.