NCVA eREPORTER - April 26, 2005

In this NCVA eReporter:

EVENTS

• Hearing on Inter-group Conflicts & Hate Crimes in California Schools – April 28, 2005
• Vietnamese Silicon Valley Network Meeting – May 19, 2005
• San Francisco’s Largest Asian Street Festival to Take Place During Asian Pacific American Heritage Month – May 22, 2005

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

• Community Foundation Silicon Valley Invites Applications for Advancing the Arts Initiative
• NFL Youth Football Fund Grassroots Program Offers Funds to Improve Local Football Fields
• Anti-Terrorism Program for America's Poor Communities Announces Grant Availability
• NetAid Global Action Awards to Honor U.S. High School Students Fighting Global Poverty
• CDC Foundation Accepting Applications for Funding Program to Prevent Smoking Among Urban Youth
• Drug Policy Alliance to Administer Advocacy Grants Program
• Community Food and Nutrition
• Community Economic Development Operational Projects
• MetLife Foundation Announces 2005 Museum Connections Program
• Earth Island Institute Invites Applications for Brower Youth Awards Program
• Funding Available for National Service Training and Technical Assistance Programs
• Cisco Offers Community Support Through San Jose Impact Grants Program
• Office of Disability Employment Policy Invites Nominations for New Freedom Initiative Award
• Funding for Women and Children’s Needs
• Local Community Programs Funded
• Grants Focus on Renewed Citizenship
• Support for Youth Baseball Programs
• Focus on Community-Based Programs

JOBS/INTERNSHIPS

• NEA Senior Minority Community Outreach (MCO) Liaison

TIPS/RESOURCES

• Human Resources - The investigated have rights, too
• Management - Tips for an orderly transition
• Fundraising - Launching a comprehensive campaign
• Helping Board Members Ask for The Gift

NEWS

• Assembly of Veterans – April 30, 2005 (Press Release)
• Operation Memoir (Orange County Register)
• Vietnamese youths in U.S. largely taller (Orange County Register)
• WETA Relegates Documentary on Vietnam to Early Morning Time Slot (Press Release)
• 30 Years Later, Immigrants Shed Vietnam War's Burdens (Washington Post)
• Vietnamese in U.S. Take Stock of Community (Associated Press)
• On being Viet kieu (Vietnamese-American) (Orange County Register)
• Journey from the Fall Commemorates 30 Years the Fall of Saigon (Press Release)
• Asian-Americans step up to ballot box (Boston Globe)

Assembly of Veterans
Of the former Republic of Vietnam
P.O. Box 5055
Springfield, VA 22150-5055
www.chiensivietnamconghoa.org

April 11, 2005

PRESS RELEASE

April 30^th, 2005 will mark the 30^th anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam to the hands of the Vietnamese communists and the darkest day in the history of Vietnam.  The days following the North communists’ aggression were and continue to be a period of retribution and persecution.  Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese servicemen were sent to prison camps, millions of South Vietnamese were sent to the jungle to die, hundreds thousands more lost their lives at sea in trying to flee for freedom.

The Vietnam War was one of longest and costliest in terms of human casualties.  Fifty-eight thousands US servicemen and women and more than three hundred thousands from the South Vietnamese Armed Forces paid the ultimate price to defend Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam.  We owe them a great debt of gratitude.

A ceremony to honor and pay tribute to the sacrifices of the service men and women of both the United States and the South Vietnam will be held in Washington, DC on April 30^th, 2005 at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, between 9:00AM-11:30AM.  The memorial and wreath laying ceremony hosted by the Assembly of Veterans of the former Republic of Vietnam will be attended by the US Vietnam veterans, officials of the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Members of Congress, Members of Virginia’s General Assembly, members of the Rolling Thunder and other dignitaries.

The Assembly of Veterans of the former Republic of Vietnam, founded in 2003, is a network of veterans from all branches of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).  It is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to protect and preserve the ARVN history and tradition, to provide support, and to continue its non-violent advocacy and promotion for Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam.

For additional information, please contact:
ubphhd@ureach.com

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April 13, 2005

OPERATION MEMOIR
A former Vietnamese refugee and Marine veteran confronts the ghosts of his life.

By Valerie Takahama
The Orange County Register

As an editor at a major publishing house, Ron Doering sees many book proposals every week. But last spring, he got a pitch from a former Vietnamese refugee and first-time author, and within three pages, he knew it was something special.

The proposal outlined the facts of Quang X. Pham's life: The son of a South Vietnamese fighter pilot, he fled the country with his mother and sisters during the fall of Saigon. He grew up in Southern California, graduated from UCLA, joined the Marines and fought in the first gulf war and Somalia, while struggling with emotions about his father, lingering questions about the Vietnam War and racism.

"There are stories within stories of perseverance," said Doering, a senior editor at Presidio/Ballantine Books, imprints of Random House. "I hadn't seen anything like it. I handed it out to colleagues and everyone confirmed it."

Now, "A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey," the book outlined in the proposal, is out. And Pham, a 40-year-old entrepreneur from Mission Viejo, is set to embark on a whirlwind book tour with stops in Dallas, New York, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Salt Lake City, Little Rock, Ark., and elsewhere.

It kicks off with two public events today - at 3 p.m. at Cal State Fullerton and 7 p.m. at Nguoi Viet Daily News in Westminster- and it's already attracting attention.

"A Sense of Duty," of course, is the story of Pham's life. But the story behind the book speaks volumes about him, as well.

He wrote it on an abbreviated timetable that would have intimidated many veteran authors, and he made a commitment to find the facts of his father's life and tell the truth, no matter how painful.

"I try to tell people my age, people who are in the second generation, once you get through those uncomfortable feelings, the truth really helps," he says.

"You know what your parents went through. You acknowledge what they did, achievement or failure. That's what the human experience is about."

While Pham had toyed with the idea of writing a memoir for a decade, it was last year that he got serious about it. The founder and former CEO of Lathian Systems, a Newport Beach-based medical-software company, and an executive with QTC Medical Services, he quit working in business full time in April to concentrate on writing.

Meanwhile, his literary agent, Flip Brophy, began shopping around a proposal. It attracted publishers' attention, but not all of the offers were the sort he welcomed.

"One publisher said, 'Great story. Great proposal. It has the potential to be a great book. How does he feel about a ghostwriter?'" Pham recalls.

"I not only said, 'No.' I said, 'Hell, no.' "

All along, he says, his intention was to write it himself, in part as a tribute to his mother, Nguyen Thi Niem.

"My mother was a schoolteacher in Vietnam," he says. "She sat with me and helped me write my first words in English. It was a matter of pride."

The offer from Doering came through in mid-June. Pham, an avid golfer, was on a golf course in San Clemente playing a round on a Friday afternoon when he took the call from his agent: " 'Random House wants to buy your book; what do you want to do?' 'Sell it!' " After he ended the call, he parred the hole, not realizing it was the last golf he would play for months.

At first, the plan was to get "A Sense of Duty" into bookstores in time for Father's Day in June, which would have entailed an accelerated writing and editing schedule. But when the author and editor decided that a more appropriate launch date was the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, April 30, the clock began ticking.

Pham had four months or so to write a story that spanned two generations, two countries, two wars. He had to convey the complex emotions he felt as a boy whose mother bought groceries with food stamps, and as a U.S. Marine officer subjected to racist hazing by fellow officers.

He says the discipline he learned in the Marine Corps helped him keep to a schedule. He woke up at 4 a.m. and wrote until 4 or 5 in the afternoon, taking breaks only for meals and "P.T.," physical training. He says he worked seven days a week.

"It just poured out," he says. "It was an interior journey. It was lonely. I didn't share a lot of the stuff with my wife."

The most emotionally difficult portions to write dealt with the years that his father spent in Vietnamese re-education camps after the war.

"I know I wouldn't have made it through the first month, and I went through survival training in the Marines," he says. "The pure starvation would have gotten to me. I have a lot of respect for those men."

He met both deadlines: Labor Day for the first half of the 260-page book; Oct. 1 for the second half.

Doering, too, credits Pham's Marine Corps discipline for his ability to meet deadlines: "When they say they're going to get something, they get it, and it will be perfect.

"When I've worked with Marines, sometimes I stop and think, thank God these guys are on our side."

The book's official publication was April 12, so it's too soon for Pham to gauge its reception. But friends who have read it are surprised by his candor, hesays.

"A couple of people who read the book have said they had no idea. 'I've worked with you.' Or, 'I was in the service with you.' How do you tell people about this when you don't have hours or days? You don't want to drop this kind of stuff on people who are not ready. The beautiful thing about writing is that it's preserved. They can read it when they're ready," he says.

"I have heard stories about people who write memoirs having big blowups. But you have to be true to yourself. You can't write a memoir without peeling back the onionskin a bit. That's what memoirs are about. You can't hide."

CONTACT US: (714) 796-6087 or vtakahama@ocregister.com

(http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/04/13/sections/life/life/article_478230.php)

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April 22, 2005

VIETNAMESE YOUTHS IN U.S. LARGELY TALLER

By Anh Do
ASIAN AFFAIRS, Register columnist
anhdo_2000@yahoo.com

The more I hear people talk about the next generation, the more I think about it as the tall generation.

That's because for the Vietnamese, things are looking up, literally.

In family after family, our boys and girls are shooting beyond the 6-foot mark, wearing size 10-12 shoes, stocking extra-extra-large clothes.

Take Mike Dao. And his sister, Huong. I find them and their schoolmates at a mall, slurping sodas, munching on fish tacos, trying out sun shades. I stand just 5-foot-1. And I don't like heels. He towers a foot above me. She's 3 inches shorter than him. They both wear flats.

I peer at them, putting my observations from a decade of covering my fellow immigrants to the test. Have you noticed that the kids are soaring, I ask, citing the 30-year turning point when the first refugees came to America at the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975.

"For sure," he says in a firm voice. "Totally," backed up his sibling from the University of California, Los Angeles.

"It kind of feels weird when I have to talk down to everyone when we get together for the holidays," her brother adds. "They're shrimps."

In our homeland, women and men grow to an average of 4 feet 10 and 5 feet 3, respectively, according to Web sites charting Asians.

But immersion in a Western environment apparently changes things.

Experts will tell you that diet, exercise and nutrition lead to growth. In the United States, youngsters like the Daos eat well – they also eat often. Their parents, by contrast, were raised in the central region of Vietnam on rice and vegetables. They rarely consumed meat, the main source of protein, said Tuan Dao of Anaheim, who's 5 feet 5 inches. "My son can eat steak any time," he says. "And he can have vitamins. I never had that."

Indeed, children given strict vegetarian meals are "at risk for poor growth," according to Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which published findings involving 400 youths in rural Tennessee who were fed meals similar to those the elder Dao experienced.

Mineral supplements were included in the subjects' soymilk, yet even that didn't boost their height or weight measurements, which ranked as low as the 25th percentile.

Other medical research shows that Japanese children born in America are 2 inches taller than Japanese children born in Japan. "So you can see that the main factors are lifestyle and environment," says Dr. Quynh Kieu, a leading pediatrician in the Vietnamese community in Orange County.

The United States is cleaner and more sanitary than Vietnam, where youngsters are easily exposed to bacterial infections and where immunizations are difficult to afford, Kieu says. Moreover, adolescents here are encouraged to join in sports, activities that can stimulate growth hormones, she adds.

Neonatal care may also contrbute to height. After all, this is a county where expectant mothers can sign up for Lamaze and expectant fathers take courses on counseling and child wellness.

"In a Third World country, in my day and age, this was not possible," Tuan Dao said. In the land of plenty, he sees his – and other offspring – reaching new heights.

Some of those at such heights are creative when it comes toattributing reasons for their elevation.

Consider Bao Nguyen, a UCI political science graduate from Garden Grove who measures 6 feet and says, "I'm not done growing." All seven children in his family are taller than their parents. He credits chili peppers.

"I eat them practically every day," he says, laughing. "At Williams-Sonoma, they were selling ice cream with chilies in it," he remembered. "I think spices certainly have an effect. It's invigorating, and when you put things in your body that make it excited, it helps."

Nguyen adds, "I was raised on good old-fashioned home cooking, and I think the reason is chili peppers and love - the love my mom put into all that cooking."

Mike Dao, has a down-to- earth answer: "We're taller," he says, "because we play sports, we run every day and we're in a world that's constantly searching to stay fit. I think young Vietnamese know this; they reach for this. What else do you think could cause this?"

Who knows? The phenomenon is definitely worth studying.

CONTACT US: This column on Asian communities and cultures appears every other Friday in Local. Please contact Do at: anhdo_2000@yahoo.com.

(http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/04/22/sections/local/local_columns/article_491628.php)

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National Congress of Vietnamese Americans

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 24, 2005

CONTACT:
Hung Nguyen (877) 592-4140

WETA RELEGATES DOCUMENTARY ON VIETNAM TO EARLY MORNING TIME SLOT

Washington, D.C. – The National Congress of Vietnamese Americans (NCVA) denounces the time slot for a documentary on Vietnam during Asian Pacific American Heritage month.  NCVA is disturbed with the decision of WETA, a PBS station, to air the documentary Vietnam: The Next Generation on Friday, May 20 at 1 AM.

May is designated as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month by Public Law 102-450 on October 23, 1992.  The purpose of the law is to honor the achievements of Asian/Pacific Americans and to recognize their contributions to the United States.

According to the 2000 Census, there are 1.2 million Vietnamese Americans living in the United States.  There are over 43,709 Vietnamese Americans in the WETA viewing area.  NCVA applauds WETA for airing programs on the lives and perspectives of Asian Pacific Americans.  However, the scheduling of Vietnam: The Next Generation is not in-line with the scheduling of programs on other Asian Pacific American communities being aired throughout the month of May.

Complete schedule of programs on WETA during Asian Pacific American Heritage month is found at:

(http://www.weta.org/asianpacific2005.php)

Hung Nguyen, NCVA President, states, “We hope that WETA will reconsider its decision and air this documentary in a time slot that will attract a greater viewing audience.”

The WETA viewing area is the fifth largest Vietnamese American population center in the United States.  NCVA believes that Sandy Northrop's documentary Vietnam: The Next Generation should be aired at a reasonable time to enable viewers an opportunity to watch and comment on the contents of the program.

“2005 marks the 30th Anniversary of the Vietnamese Diaspora.  This is a time of reflection on the past and the present.  Without an audience for Vietnam: The Next Generation, there cannot be qualitative feedback on WETA's selection of programs,” says Hung Nguyen.

NCVA encourages the public to contact WETA to reschedule Vietnam: The Next Generation to a more appropriate time by contacting (703) 998-2724 or visiting http://www.weta.org/contact.php and submitting their concerns.

(http://www.ncvaonline.org/archive/pr_042405_VNNextGeneration.shtml)

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April 24, 2005

30 YEARS LATER, IMMIGRANTS SHED VIETNAM WAR’S BURDENS

By Phuong Ly
Washington Post Staff Writer, Page A01

On humid Washington days, after thunderstorms churn up the smell of fresh earth, Sandy Hoa Dang remembers the war. When the bombs fell on Hanoi, she was a little girl, cowering with her family in a hole in the ground.

Hundreds of miles away, as victorious North Vietnamese soldiers stormed a beach town near Saigon, 5-year-old Phuong Nguyen's mother stashed her in a concrete cistern. Her fair, freckled face and uplifted nose were evidence: Her father was an American.

Kara Mai Delahunt, an infant then, was buckled into a seat of a 747 on one of the rushed flights that brought more than 2,000 orphans to the United States. Her new parents discovered that their child reacted strangely in their arms. She stiffened. She was not used to being held.

Thirty years have passed since Saigon fell April 30, 1975, time enough for these three women and a generation of Vietnamese Americans to come of age. Thirty is now the median age of the 1.2 million people of Vietnamese heritage living in the United States. Thirty is young enough to be haunted by Vietnam, old enough to have created new lives.

The war brought the three women to the United States under starkly different circumstances: one as a baby adopted into a Massachusetts home; another as a teenager escaping with her family on a fishing boat; the third as a mother granted a chance to immigrate because of her American blood.

They are connected by the past they left and the lives they lead here: Dang is the founder of a social services organization in Washington for immigrant families, Nguyen is a client there and Delahunt is a volunteer mentor for Nguyen's teenage son.

Yet in their own way, they are defying the war's hold on their identity.

A Sought-Out Heritage

"Lovely with rosy and chubby cheeks," was how the adoption papers described Nguyen Mai Tai Trang, abandoned by her mother two days after her birth in a Saigon hospital.

She is now Kara Mai Delahunt, and the description is still apt. Even after a long day of work at a downtown Washington public relations company, she is poised and polished--hair in a neat bun, makeup fresh and clothes professional. She has recently returned from a seven-month business trip to Madrid. Tucked in her black purse is a travel book on Peru, her next destination.

She sometimes wonders, though, what price was paid for this life.

"My mom would always say, 'Say a prayer for your birth mother,' " said Delahunt, 30. "I was always told that she loved me so much and cared for me so much that she was willing to give me up."

Delahunt arrived as part of Operation Babylift, conducted in the frantic weeks before North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. The U.S. government commissioned jetliners to ferry hundreds of orphans to new homes here. Some Vietnamese parents, learning of the flights, left children at hospitals and orphanages. Advocates called it a humanitarian effort, and critics decried it as ripping children from their homeland.

Delahunt was adopted by Kati and William D. Delahunt, now a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. The couple tried to make their new daughter comfortable with her heritage, taking her to Lunar New Year events, buying her Asian dolls, introducing to her to another adopted Vietnamese girl, hopeful that the two would become friends.

She resisted. "The Vietnam War to me is exactly that -- it's history," she said. "I just wanted to be American."

She learned German -- her adoptive mother's native language -- and took summer trips to Germany. Her master's degree is in Spanish from Middlebury College in Vermont, her father's alma mater. After school, she moved to Washington and landed a public relations job specializing in Latin American issues.

Only then did she begin thinking about Vietnam.

"As you get older," she explained, "your history becomes more important."

Five years ago, Delahunt accepted an invitation to travel to Vietnam with a group of adoptees and officials from Holt International Children's Services, an Oregon adoption agency that placed many of the children from Operation Babylift.

This trip was dubbed a homecoming. It didn't feel that way.

After mastering two foreign languages, Delahunt thought she could learn a few Vietnamese phrases, but the unfamiliar tones overwhelmed her.

Everywhere, she saw young children. Some sold chewing gum; others held out empty plastic bowls.

Delahunt had seen poverty on trips to India and Chile, but this was different. "That could have been me," she said, shaking her head. "I could be in Vietnam on the streets right now."

What Delahunt found on her trip, she said, was a comfort with other Vietnamese Americans. After the trip, she attended a conference with other adoptees, and some became her close friends.

"For the first time in my life," she said, "I was with people who were like me."

A friend introduced her to Asian American LEAD, a nonprofit group in the District's Columbia Heights neighborhood serving disadvantaged immigrant families. Delahunt became a mentor and eventually, a member of its board of directors.

Almost every week, she meets with 15-year-old Man Pham, who immigrated with his family in 1997. He gives her advice on computers, and she helps him with his Spanish homework.

During the visits, Delahunt sometimes sees his parents, Minh Pham and Phuong Nguyen. Their exchanges are short and awkward because of the language barrier.

She is more comfortable with Man, who like her, thinks of Vietnam as only a part of himself. Once, when Man asked, Delahunt told him that she left as a baby and was adopted. His response: "Cool."

Different but Determined

In this city, Phuong Nguyen is nearly invisible.

At a hotel in downtown Washington, she cleans empty rooms. Customers at the U Street nail salon where she works part time barely acknowledge her, except to pick their polish. In the international melange of her Columbia Heights neighborhood, Nguyen's looks attract little attention. She doesn't mind.

In Vietnam, she was singled out for her pale skin and faced discrimination for it. Here, she believes her opportunities are limited only by how hard she can work.

"This is nothing," she said, doing laundry in the bathtub after a 12-hour workday. "In Vietnam, life is much harder."

Her ticket out was her face.

The Amerasian Homecoming Act, passed by Congress in 1987 after much debate, allowed children born in Vietnam to American service members to come to the United States with their families. Few people had documents to prove their heritage, so U.S. Embassy officials based their decisions, in part, on whether they looked "American." About 26,000 eventually immigrated.

Nguyen, 35, said she knows little about her father. He left in 1969, before she was born. Her older half-sisters told her that he was a doctor for the military. Her mother never spoke of him.

Early on, Nguyen realized she was different. In a culture that values family background, Amerasians were considered the products of shameful liaisons. Nguyen recalls the taunt from her classmates, con lai -- half-breed.

"I would beat them," she said, her voice rising at the memory. "Boys, I would beat, too. They called me names. How dare they?"

Still, even a determined girl who towered over her classmates -- thanks to her "American" size -- could do only so much in Vietnam.

Shortly after the war, the communist government ordered her family from the seaside city of Vung Tau to the remote highland. Accustomed to city life, the family had to pick coffee beans and pepper on collective farms. Nguyen dropped out of school after the fourth grade and settled for what was expected of her: marriage, children and work.

When news of Amerasians being able to emigrate reached the countryside, Nguyen said she didn't hesitate.

"Older people always said, in America, everything is possible," she remembered. "They said people even had fish in cans."

She lives with her husband and three children in a studio apartment that is cramped but spotless. Canned fish is no longer a novelty -- they've moved onto bigger things: two televisions, a desktop computer and a sport utility vehicle.

Nguyen has changed, too. When Man, her eldest child, was having trouble in school, she sought help from Asian American LEAD. She has worked with caseworkers to learn more about American schools and how she can help her son and daughters.

A couple of years ago, she accompanied a social worker to a conference in San Diego, leaving her husband to care for the children for the first time.

Nguyen said she has no desire to find or meet her American father -- "I don't need him. He left." She only wants his citizenship.

She has struggled to learn English and fears that she cannot pass the citizenship test.

U.S. law usually allows citizenship for children born overseas to Americans, but Amerasians don't qualify. A bill in Congress that would have granted that right to Amerasians living here died last year in committee.

"I want to be an American," Nguyen said. "I don't want to go back to Vietnam to live."

In 2002, Nguyen returned to her homeland for a visit and, as usual, she stood out.

Friends envied her smooth skin and confident walk. They were tanned and worn from farm work.

In the cities, when shopkeepers noted she was a bit taller, paler and plumper than typical Vietnamese, they quickly fingered her as a Vietnamese who lived in the United States, a Vietnamese American.

The strangers, she recalled with a shy grin, never called her con lai .

In Community, a Mission Emerges

Sandy Dang keeps the letters of complaint in a white notebook.

They are dated from 1998, after she founded Asian American LEAD, and were written by Vietnamese Americans to officials in the District government.

"Sandy Dang cannot speak Vietnamese correctly," wrote an older woman questioning whether Dang could properly represent the community. Several others accused her of seeking publicity. A few called her a communist, probably the worst epithet among Vietnamese Americans.

"Can you believe this?" said Dang, 37, a petite woman with a loud voice. "I was really disappointed. But I am stubborn."

She persisted, determined to challenge what she said is the patriarchal tradition that dominated Vietnam and immigrant circles here. "We have to rebuild," Dang said. "You can't call yourself a community and just have a group of old men sitting around the table."

Dang was 7 years old when the war ended. She only knew that the bombs had stopped falling and she would never have to hide again.

The conflicts within a community, Dang soon learned, never end.

In Hanoi, her ethnic Chinese family members were never considered "real" Vietnamese. They didn't fight in the war. When fighting later flared between Vietnam and China, they fled north. In China, though, they weren't considered "real" Chinese. The Chinese government sent them to labor on sugar cane plantations.

In 1979, Dang's family bought passage on a fishing boat crammed with more than 300 refugees from Vietnam. The family spent three years in a Hong Kong refugee camp before immigrating, eventually landing in New York.

Her father worked as a janitor, her mother as a seamstress. Dang was the eldest of four children and served as her parents' translator. For 10 years, the family lived in a one-bedroom apartment.

Dang escaped through her studies, excelling in school and winning scholarships to Duke University. She arrived on a Greyhound bus. Her classmates drove luxury cars.

When she came to Washington to earn a master's degree in social work from Catholic University, she found a Vietnamese American community of 50,000 still governed by rules and hierarchy from the old country. Elders have priority, and men are the leaders.

Many families from the elite social circles in South Vietnam -- who escaped the country as soon as Saigon fell -- had little interaction with the poorer, less educated families who came later. Such as those in the enclave of about 5,000 Vietnamese living in Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights.

These immigrants, who arrived in the 1990s, were the last significant wave of refugees. Many were Amerasians. Others had been imprisoned for years in communist "re-education" camps and immigrated under political asylum. Social service agencies in the District were ill-equipped to help.

Dang found her mission. "I know this as an extension of my family. I know how difficult it is to be in this country and come here with nothing."

She started Asian American LEAD as an after-school program, and it has grown into a nationally recognized group with a $1.2 million budget. President Bill Clinton invited her to the White House.

The number of Vietnamese immigrants in the District has dwindled to about 2,000, Dang estimates. Many families have moved to the suburbs; Dang jokes that some of them now drive cars fancier than her Honda Civic. Those left, including Phuong Nguyen's family, are planning to follow soon.

Dang, too, is moving her life beyond the organization. For years, she has been so consumed with work that friends worried about her. Last year, she married, and her husband, Sanal Mazvancheryl, has no connection to Vietnam. He was born in India to an upper-class family and is a business professor at Georgetown University

Dang returns to Vietnam every few years. Her Vietnam no longer is bombs falling from the sky. It is fresh, ripe mangoes, she said, firecrackers exploding at Lunar New Year and quiet, green vistas.

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/23/AR2005042301543.html)

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April 24, 2005

VIETNAMESE IN U.S. TAKE STOCK OF COMMUNITY

By Erin Texeira
AP National Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - As bombs pummeled Saigon, Hai and Son Nguyen escaped the city with a few suitcases and piles of worthless Vietnamese cash. They came to America and for years did domestic work as they started life anew. Three decades later, they are successful entrepreneurs, and their American-born daughter, Linda, is a city council candidate. If she wins, she will become the first Vietnamese American ever chosen for a citywide office in this Silicon Valley city.

The Nguyens' is a classic American immigrant tale of hard work and prosperity, one replicated often among the more than 700,000 Vietnamese who became refugees to the United States.

But, a generation later, not all have been so successful.

Making up one of the biggest refugee groups in U.S. history, most Vietnamese arrived unprepared, with few resources. Today, even as many still struggle with isolation, high poverty rates and persistent crime, particularly among low-income youth, some in the community are increasingly making their voices heard outside their ethnic enclaves - and becoming more a part of the nation's fabric.

In coming weeks, those enclaves will host ``celebrations of how far we've come and how far we have to go,'' said Hien Duc Do, a sociologist at San Jose State University. ``There are college students and professionals, and we've made headway. But a lot of us are not doing well - that's what we need to discuss more.

``It's time to turn in on ourselves and ask, 'How do we want to construct this community?'''

Of the 1.2 million Vietnamese Americans counted in Census 2000, one in three lives in California. They also have a strong presence in neighborhoods from Houston to Alexandria, Va.

San Jose, population 900,000, has the biggest concentration of Vietnamese of any American city: Nearly one in 10 residents has roots in the southeast Asian nation that has been in turmoil since the 1950s, when a communist government seized power. (Orange County, in southern California, has the most Vietnamese Americans of any county: 140,000).

From San Jose's renovated art deco buildings downtown to its bustling Mexican American carnicerias and gleaming Asian supermarkets, the prosperous bedroom community is still growing in spite of a tech-induced economic slump.

Some Vietnamese residents have participated in the prosperity. In Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose, Vietnamese residents own more than 5,000 businesses, according to De Tran, publisher of the weekly Viet Mercury, the only Vietnamese-language newspaper in the nation published by a mainstream news company, the San Jose Mercury News. Those businesses are no longer mainly mom-and-pops: The Viet Mercury's biggest advertisers are Vietnamese real estate developers and dentists, he said.

Some of those successful entrepreneurs live in the new Evergreen Valley neighborhood, with its $1 million-plus tract homes and its sweeping views from the city's green hilltops, said H.G. Nguyen, president of San Jose's Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce.

But down the hill and across town, in crowded apartment buildings and crumbling Craftsman style homes near San Jose State's campus, low income families struggle day to day. Citywide, 13 percent of Vietnamese households received public assistance in 2000 compared to 4 percent of all households, census data show.

``We have a small subgroup among Vietnamese refugees who are in the professional class - I don't want to minimize that - but mostly Vietnamese tend to be less well educated and less fluent in English,'' said C.N. Le, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

``Refugee groups, because of their experiences, they have very little time to prepare (before they emigrate),'' he added. ``You either get out or you stay and risk being killed. ... For a lot of first generation Vietnamese immigrants, they came here with a lot of disadvantages.''

These struggles are obvious in Oakland, 40 miles north of San Jose, where more than one-third of the city's Vietnamese live below the poverty line and per capita income is half that of the overall population, census data show. Poverty contributes to other problems, particularly crime, said Gianna Tran, deputy director of the East Bay Asian Youth Center in Oakland.

``Vietnamese youth, nationally, have the highest rate of incarceration among Asians,'' she said, adding that the myth of Asians being model minorities hits these teenagers particularly hard because few expect them to need help. ``There's a lack of awareness of the problems.''

A big hurdle is that most parents don't speak fluent English, according to Thanh Nhat Pham, a counselor on Tran's staff.

``There are language and cultural barriers,'' said Pham, who estimates that only one in five parents has strong English skills. ``The family is obviously detached from what the Asian youth are doing.''

Ironically, experts say, this isolation is rooted in one of the community's biggest strengths: strong, cohesive neighborhoods and business districts offering Vietnamese-language services. For example, along a dozen city blocks on International Boulevard in Oakland's Little Saigon district, there are business signs for beauty salons, accounting services and international phone cards - all in Vietnamese. It is possible, Tran said, to live, work and socialize in this and similar areas and only speak Vietnamese.

But, among Asian groups in California, Vietnamese have the lowest rates of English language proficiency, according to a recent report by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and this means many have minimal communication with public officials. In the San Jose Police Department, for example, just two percent of sworn officers are certified as fluent in Vietnamese, a spokeswoman said.

Political representation also is lacking. There are only a handful of Vietnamese American elected officials nationwide, including Van Tran, a California state assemblyman recently elected to represent Orange County. Though most Vietnamese qualify to become naturalized citizens, experts said, they often opt not to because of language barriers - and so voting rates are lower than average.

Linda Nguyen and Madison Nguyen hope to change that in San Jose.

The two women, who are not related, are among eight candidates who want to fill a vacant city council seat in a June 7 election - and become the first Vietnamese American elected to a citywide public office here.

Madison Nguyen, 30, whose family came to America when she was 6 years old, is president of San Jose's Franklin-McKinley school board. In 2003, she garnered attention after organizing protests when a Vietnamese woman was shot to death in her kitchen by a San Jose police officer who mistook her vegetable peeler for a cleaver.

``There are cultural differences and cultural misunderstandings,'' Nguyen said recently. ``The officer also lacked in cultural training.''

If either candidate is elected, ``this will mark the coming of age and political maturity of the community,'' said Tran of the Viet Mercury.

But one of the biggest hurdles will be simply convincing former refugees that they have a stake in the political process. Even today, decades after they left, some still feel more connection to their distant homeland than to America.

Many send money back to relatives and keep close tabs on social and political changes in Vietnam.

``People have built homes in Vietnam,'' Duc Do said. ``They call them Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.''

(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/04/24/national/a094507D21.DTL)

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April 24, 2005

ON BEING VIET KIEU (VIETNAMESE AMERICAN)

By Katherine Nguyen
The Orange County Register

I went out to dinner with Co Thuy and the family last night. I was hoping it would just be a simple dinner with Co Thuy, Trinh and her dad, but nine people wound up showing up, three of whom weren’t even relatives. Earlier in the day, she had asked me what I wanted to eat and I told her that I’d leave the decision to her.

She chose a Chinese seafood restaurant. When I asked her if she regularly ate there, she cooed, "Of course not, we’ve only come for big occasions like weddings, but otherwise, we could never afford it."

While I looked around incredulously at the fancy banquet hall with hanging glass chandeliers, Co Thuy gave a quick laugh and said, "Oh, I only chose this place because I wanted you to feel comfortable in a nice surrounding, I know you probably wouldn’t like the normal places we go to, it would probably be too dirty for you."

We sat down and my uncle ordered a round of Heineken beers for everyone. I tried not to gape as Trinh downed several glasses. I never drink in front of my dad. At family dinners, when I try to order a beer, my dad gives me a stern look and I settle for lemonade instead.

Throughout the course of the night, they ordered 12 beers.

While everyone dug into their sauteed crab and coconut steamed shrimp, I tried to inquire about their lives, how their day went. I got one- or two-sentence responses, everyone was too busy eating. Nobody asks me about my life. They ask me how much cell phones cost in America because it’s the status symbol these days in Vietnam. They comment how great it must be that the government in America takes care of public school costs and that the parents do not have to pay for tuition for public elementary and high school education. My aunt then launches into a spiel about how she has to pay tuition for each semester of school, about $100 a year from the time the children are in first grade to 12th grade and also college.

All this makes me distinctly uncomfortable and it makes me realize that, come to think of it, in the few conversations we’ve had, my aunt has spent a considerable amount of time lamenting the myriad of things she can’t afford. It’s like she is so bent on showing me how poor they are. She tells me they have only the most beat up Honda (motorbike) and that it’s so old compared to the newer, more expensive models that they want but don’t have the money for.

Her son, Nhan, 18 just enlisted in the army. She says she couldn’t afford to pay the $200 a year the government demands in order to keep him out of military service. That it’s so hard for him, he has to scoop manure with bare hands and they have to bribe the authorities there to make sure he gets the proper food rations. That she wished she had the money to keep him out of such a harsh existence.

It becomes painfully awkward for me, because I have no idea how to reply to that. "Um, I’m sorry, that must be rough?"

When the bill arrives for dinner, my aunt and uncle make a grab for it. It’s only to see how much the entire meal for nine costs. Then they smile and pass the bill to me. It’s $100, extremely extravagant by standards in Vietnam.

I am shocked to look up and see blank looks on their faces as I slowly pay the bill. Nobody says thank you. By now it is painfully clear: I am just a cash cow to them, they do not care to get to know me. They are happy with what they presume: That I’m a rich Viet Kieu living in the States and I should be obliged to pay for them because I owe it to them, because compared to me, they live in such obvious poverty.

Later, my cousin Trinh invites me to go to a club with her and a friend. I find out that what that meant was a night on the town on Kat’s dime, er, dong.

Just before we leave the restaurant for the club, Aunt Thuy says to me, "This probably means that Trinh should sleep with you in your hotel room tonight because you will be out so late."

I politely inform her that the hotel prohibits any guests not registered with the hotel inside the rooms. Her face falls.

At the club, my cousin moves her body on the dance floor, provocatively swaying her hips and rubbing her body suggestively against her female friends. She is freaking on the dance floor and that totally freaks me out!

She laughs at me and asks why I’m dancing so stiffly and so far away. She tries to pull me in and I clumsily shy away.

When the bill arrives for our cocktails, Trinh slides the bill over to me, smiling.

"Do you need help counting out the money?" she asks.

I force myself to laugh. Again, not a word of thanks.

(http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/04/24/sections/travel/travel/article_492300.php)

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April 25, 2005

PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release

Contact: Top Media Advertising (Press only) 1 800-803-4845
pr@journeyfromthefall.com

General comments/questions:
Contact@journeyfromthefall.com

Website: www.Journeyfromthefall.com

JOURNEY FROM THE FALL COMMEMORATES 30 YEARS THE FALL OF SAIGON
Limited Screenings in Orange County, Arlington, and San Jose

April 30^th: Orange County, CA: Regal Cinemas Garden Grove, 3:00 P.M. & 6:30 P.M.
May 1^st: Arlington, VA, Regal Ballston Common 12, 7:00 P.M.
May 8^th: San Jose, CA, Camera 12, 7:00 P.M.

Ticket price: $20 pre-sale; $50 at the door
Tickets available for purchase: Nguyet Cam Music (714) 934-6200
Washington Music: (703) 538-4979
Senter Video: (408) 298-1854

Duration: 135 min (Thailand/USA), in Vietnamese/English, with English subtitles

WESTMINSTER – Journey from the Fall, directed by Ham Tran, starring Kieu Chinh (The Joy Luck Club, Face, Green Dragon), Long Nguyen (Green Dragon, First Morning, Coyote Waits), Diem Lien and introducing Nguyen Thai Nguyen, will be specially screened in 3 cities that have a large Vietnamese population to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. After these three limited special screenings, the film will be shown at festivals prior to wide distributions.

Set in fractured moments of war-torn Vietnam, re-education camps, and the journey to a better life, Journey from the Fall follows one family’s fight for freedom. In April 1975, against his wife’s wishes, Long Nguyen chooses to stay in Vietnam and fight for his beloved country. He urged his wife, Mai, to leave their homeland for safer shores. Together with her son and mother-in-law, Mai reluctantly boards a tiny fishing boat bound for America. They begin a perilous journey, across the sea with nothing but hope to keep them alive.

Meanwhile, as Saigon falls under communist rule, Long is captured and imprisoned in a series of re-education camps. There, he endures solitary confinement and witnesses the death of his friends. Believing his family is dead, Long’s faith is revived when a mysterious visitor brings news of their survival in the new world. Long sets a dangerous plan to escape and join his family in motion.

“In our vision, Journey from the Fall is to the Vietnamese community as Schindler’s List is to the Jewish community. It is a tale of faith triumphing over tyranny,” Ham Tran wrote in his Filmmaker’s Statement. “There is a pattern of war and silence that occurs with any generation that informs us of our present, and guides us forth into our future. For this reason, we feel that this part of Vietnamese past must be reclaimed in order for Vietnamese-American to move forward.”

Journey from the Fall is dedicated to the millions of boat people and survivors of the communist re-education camps.

Ham Tran and his producer, Lam Nguyen, spent 3 years researching books, films, photos, and interviewing families who have survived the war. “We have collected personal recounts of political camp imprisonment and familial memories about ‘the boat experience,’ and we know what it was like to grow up as refugee in the United States. These stories are part of the history that has made us who we are, a history too young to remember, but too old to forget,” Ham says.

Ham Tran graduated from UCLA with a Master in Fine Arts Degree in Film and Television from UCLA. Ham’s short films won him numerous accolades including the title of National Finalist for the Student Academy Awards 2 years in a row for his shorts “The Prescriptions” and “Pomegranate.” Last year, his thesis short “The Anniversary,” which was also produced by Lam Nguyen, earned over 30 domestic and international awards.

For more information on Journey from the Fall, please visit www.journeyfromthefall.com.

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April 26, 2005

ASIAN-AMERICANS STEP UP TO BALLOT BOX
Survey finds surge in first-time voters

By Stephanie Ebbert, Globe Staff

More than 40 percent of Asian-Americans who cast ballots last November in Massachusetts were voting for the first time, according to a survey released yesterday by a civil rights group.

That proportion of first-time voters was higher in Massachusetts than in many other states surveyed across the country, according to exit polls conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Advocates said they hope that the results point to increasing civic engagement.

''It shows the light at the end of the tunnel," said Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association in Boston's Chinatown.

Asian-Americans who are registered to vote in Massachusetts tend largely to be Democratic or unenrolled -- except for Vietnamese-American voters, who lean Republican and who overwhelmingly backed President Bush for reelection, the survey indicated.

In the Commonwealth, 79 percent of Vietnamese-American poll respondents backed Bush, with just 21 percent favoring US Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Nationally, the poll indicated that Vietnamese-American respondents favored Bush over Kerry 72 percent to 28 percent.

That disparity probably reflected not only the tendency among Vietnamese-Americans to vote Republican, reflecting the political beliefs of refugees who escaped communism, specialists in Asian-American politics said during a press conference yesterday. It probably also stemmed from concern over Kerry's antiwar activism and his later advocacy for normalizing relations with Vietnam, the specialists said.

''There was a very particular threat that John Kerry represented because of his anti-Vietnam War activism," said Peter Kiang, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. ''From the perspective of the refugee exile community, peace with the victor was an enormous threat."

The massive survey by the Legal Defense and Education Fund, a New York-based group that advocates for voting rights, used 1,197 volunteers at 87 polling sites in eight states. During the November 2004 election, they collected 10,789 surveys, which had been written in seven Asian languages as well as English, to track voting trends and root out any voting barriers. The volunteers fanned out to polling places with large concentrations of Asian-Americans and locations with a history of voting problems.

In Massachusetts, volunteers surveyed 777 Asian-American voters at about a dozen polling places in Chinatown, Dorchester, Mission Hill, Quincy, and Lowell. The pollsters aimed to get a picture of voting trends that was clearer than those provided by slimmer samples in national surveys. The survey did not calculate a margin of error.

''We're not extrapolating to use these numbers to reflect the overall population. That said, we do feel these numbers are reliable and paint a picture of the community because of the sheer numbers," said policy analyst Nancy Yu, author of the report.

The Bay State's Asian-American population soared 68 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to the US Census, and individual candidates are making forays into politics -- most recently with a Korean-American aiming this year to become Boston's first city councilor of Asian heritage.

But many Asian residents are not citizens and so not legally allowed to vote; many more are not registered to do so, or simply fail to show up at the polls.

''The report shows that the Asian-American vote is strong, but that we face many of the same barriers that other immigrant communities have faced historically," said the City Council candidate, Sam Yoon of Dorchester. He is currently on leave from his job as housing director for the Asian Community Development Corp., and did not attend the press conference at its offices.

The defense and education fund contends that many Asian-Americans face voting or language barriers at polling places. In Massachusetts, exit polls found that 55 percent were not proficient in English. In the last election, more than one-third of voters polled needed some form of help to vote; a number of jurisdictions in the state provide language help, and voters have the right to bring a friend to translate a ballot.

Yu acknowledged that those results might have been different if exit polls had also targeted polling places in higher-income suburbs of Boston. ''We're looking for people with language barriers," she said.

In Massachusetts, 42 percent of Asian-Americans surveyed at the polls in November were first-time voters, compared with 38 percent overall in the eight states polled.

Among the survey's other findings:

Forty-four percent of Asian-Americans registered in Massachusetts were Democrats. Only 18 percent were registered as Republicans, while 36 percent were registered but not enrolled in either party.

Asian-American voters in Massachusetts favored Kerry over Bush 68 percent to 30 percent in November. Chinese-American voters backed Kerry 89 percent to 8 percent for Bush. Cambodian-American voters picked Kerry 86 percent to 13 percent for Bush.

Asian-American voters who backed Kerry cited the economy and jobs as the most important factor driving their votes, followed by healthcare, the war in Iraq, and terrorism/security. Those who supported Bush cited terrorism/security as the most important factor influencing their vote, followed by the economy and jobs, the war, and healthcare.

More than half of Asian-American voters polled in Massachusetts got their news from the ethnic press, rather than mainstream media. More than a third got their news from Asian-language media.

(http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/04/26/asian_americans_step_up_to_ballot_box/)

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About NCVA
Founded in 1986, the National Congress of Vietnamese Americans is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community advocacy organization working to advance the cause of Vietnamese Americans in a plural but united America – e pluribus unum – by participating actively and fully as civic minded citizens engaged in the areas of education, culture and civil liberties.

UPCOMING NCVA EVENTS: Our signature youth leadership program, the Vietnamese American Youth Leadership Conference (VAYLC), will be held at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC on June 22-25, 2005.  Visit www.vaylc.org for more information.

The 19^th Annual Convention will be held in San José, CA on October 21-23, 2005.

Copyright material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107