~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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Politics haunt Tet festival

Headlining this weekend's Sacramento Tet Festival is a young Vietnamese American pop balladeer with a familiar name, Don Ho. Another singer, Hanoi transplant Bang Kieu, had been the scheduled attraction. Instead, he'll be defending himself in San Jose against allegations that he's too close to a communist regime many California Vietnamese fled in the 1970s. The switch goes to the heart of a community being forced to re-examine its identity as a new generation of American-born Vietnamese comes of age.

While an older generation defines itself by its anti-communism, the younger generation, bridging two worlds, sees modern Vietnam as a source of fresh pop culture, part of the mix that defines these Vietnamese Americans. For these younger people, respect for elders often clashes with the frustration of being expected to share their enmity.

"I have anger when my parents talk about the past," Kay Nguyen said. "If you need to think about it, you need to think about the future and not think about the history because it's hard to get ahead." Reluctant to speak for fear of offending her parents, she nonetheless said the older generation has time to think about the glory days in Vietnam -- time that younger Vietnamese Americans don't have. To the 30-year-old Elk Grove insurance agent, the issue of who should sing at the festival is a matter of entertainment, not politics. Opponents of Bang Kieu, whose two-name sobriquet is used like the single-name monikers of entertainers like Sting or Madonna, have focused on an interview he gave to a Vietnam newspaper in November, while he was there with his wife visiting his mother.

According to the article, the 30-year-old singer said his fans should get used to him flying back and forth between the United States and Vietnam. It quoted Bang Kieu as claiming he's made an effort to rid Vietnam of music created by Vietnamese abroad and has attracted an overseas audience for music created in Vietnam. The statements made émigré Vietnamese communities suspicious of Bang Kieu's political ties, said Nhuong Nguyen, president of Sacramento's Association of Former Vietnamese Political Prisoners. Nguyen, imprisoned from 1975 to 1982, said he and others in the community are not against Bang Kieu personally, but fear Vietnam's communist government is trying to send spies to gain the trust of people in the United States.

Bang Kieu declined to be interviewed for this article, but in an interview that appeared earlier this month in Viet Bao, a San Jose-based newspaper, he denied making the statements attributed to him in the newspaper in Vietnam and said allegations that he backs Vietnam's government aren't true. Bang Kieu spent most of his life in Hanoi and recently married singer Trizzie Phuong Trinh, 35, who has lived in the United States since 1979. The couple and their son live in the Southern California community of Fountain Valley. She said the family is exhausted from trying to clarify the situation. Trinh said she was present during the interview and that the paper twisted Bang Kieu's quotes, then made up more. Not included in the interview were Bang Kieu's compliments of U.S. artists.

"I know the pain and suffering of the people losing their country," Trinh said. "I hope that they will look back and see the sincerity of Bang Kieu, who wants to help the boat people and ... how much he wants to be part of the community..." If that's true, the controversy is unfortunate, Nguyen said. "We protest, not because we're evil or we're seeking revenge, but we are against the communist regime in Vietnam," he said.

Ly Pham, entertainment coordinator for the Sacramento Tet Festival, had something else in mind when he suggested Bang Kieu for the annual Lunar New Year celebration. Pham said he thought Bang Kieu had been accepted by the Vietnamese American community, given his sponsorship by a California music label, contribution to refugees and his publicly proclaimed loyalty to Vietnamese émigré communities. Bang Kieu, Trinh and Don Ho each have followings among the roughly 500,000 Vietnamese Americans in California, more than 20,000 of whom live in the Sacramento area. Pham's plans fell apart last month when prominent Vietnamese groups demanded the committee drop Bang Kieu from the festival. Pham said the strong sentiments reflected the older generation's fear that the younger generations will become complacent and that the line they draw between communist Vietnam and the overseas communities will blur and diminish. Allen Hoang, chairman of the Sacramento Tet Festival Committee, said the decision to drop Bang Kieu from the program was not necessarily because of pressure, but because it was in the best interest of the community.

"The Tet Festival is to unite the community, and it's an event that all of us can enjoy," Hoang said. If the lineup for the festival is settled, the controversy isn't. Bang Kieu is scheduled to appear Saturday in San Jose to answer accusations that he is a communist sympathizer at a debate hosted by the Vietnamese Community of Northern California. San Jose lawyer Tam Nguyen said he'll be on hand to offer his views on Bang Kieu's political loyalty. "They will allow him to express his point of view, and I will also present my side of the story," said Nguyen, who also publishes the semiweekly publication SaigonUSA, which has led the attack on Bang Kieu.

"The community will decide. On one hand, I would like to welcome people from Vietnam to join us for freedom, but because my wounds from the war still bleed, and I see the pain of the people caused by the communists, therefore I must take what Mr. Bang Kieu says with a grain of salt." Nguyen said most young singers coming from Vietnam project in their music an image of a prosperous country, but that there are people in Vietnam who are Bang Kieu's age -- doctors, lawyers and journalists -- who have been put in jail for expressing themselves. If the country is prospering, it may be in no small part because of growing trade and tourism links with the United States, a relationship formally recognized last month when the U.S. government granted Vietnam normal trade status.

Vietnam's imports to this country hit $4.25 billion during the first 11 months of 2003, up from $2.4 billion in 2002, much of it clothing and shoes, according to census data, and U.S. exports to Vietnam doubled to $1.27 billion for the same period. This week, signaling a thaw even among the old guard, former exiled South Vietnamese premier Nguyen Cao Ky traveled to Ho Chi Minh City, known as Saigon when he left it in 1975. "A lot of people said 'Don't go, don't go,' but I said, "This is my home, my country,' " Ky, who lives in Hacienda Heights, near Los Angeles, told the Associated Press. "We Asians, we believe in destiny, so it's the right time, the right moment to come." With some in the Sacramento Vietnamese community urging caution before pointing fingers, one of Bang Kieu's loudest opponents in Sacramento now wishes he could take his words back.

Nga Tran, president of the Vietnamese American Senior Citizens Association in Sacramento and publisher of the Sacramento publication Tieng Vang, said that after reading Bang Kieu's response in the Viet Bao article, he empathized with him. If it's really true that the information was planted, Tran said, then Bang Kieu is just another victim of the Vietnamese government and should be supported by the Vietnamese community here. A former government prisoner, Tran said he knows what the Vietnamese regime is capable of. He's one who worries that Vietnamese in America are letting down their guard, becoming vulnerable to propaganda sent in the form of imported entertainers or religious figures. "The young always talk about change, but we will be against the communists until we lose our breath and die," Tran said.

By Thuy Doan Le - Sacramento Bee - January 16, 2004.