SPECIAL REPORT * A year after a Little Saigon merchant touched off protests by displaying a Vietnamese flag . . . A Divided Community Returns to Daily Life

WESTMINSTER —  It was to be the start of a new movement, a reawakening of anti-Communist sentiment in Orange County’s large Vietnamese community.

It began last Jan. 17 when a video store owner put up the flag of Vietnam, sparking furious protests that members of the Vietnamese community hoped would galvanize an international protest against the Communist regime. But a year later, there is no sign that a larger movement was born.

In fact, many say such a broad movement never was even possible, because the Vietnamese community unintentionally thwarts itself with conflicting passions and personal agendas.

“How can we launch a worldwide movement? We are so fragmented, we can’t even organize and elect somebody to represent us on the state level,” said Irvine resident Duc Au, 32.

Some say the protests sprang from furious anti-Communist sentiment that will always exist among the Vietnamese. Others say it was nothing more than a spasm of ethnic pride when young and old saw a chance to unify the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam.

Either way, Orange County’s Vietnamese community has moved on with daily life, and remains as politically fractured as ever. The video store where the flag and the image of Ho Chi Minh first appeared is now under new management and is as anonymous as any other business in the strip malls of Westminster. People who shop nearby scarcely remember the incident, which gained attention from Hamburg to Hanoi.

A few lives were permanently altered by the protests--among them that of Truong Van Tran, the storekeeper who set off the furor. Attacked by protesters, jailed for illegally duplicating videotapes and unable to find work, Tran says he was misunderstood, that he only wanted to spark debate and exercise his American freedom to speak his mind.

Tran, of Stanton, says he is unhappy, regretful that he put up the flag and devastated by what he sees as the loss of his right to speak freely.

“They want to hit me, they want to kill me because . . . I showed the flag. That is not . . . freedom. There is no freedom to say what you like in the Vietnamese community. I was trying [to] debate and talk with them and show the freedom here. But they acted here like the Communists do in Vietnam.”

*

The protests began in front of Hi Tek TV & VCR on Bolsa Avenue in Little Saigon when Tran displayed the flag of Communist Vietnam and a picture of the late Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Encouraged by angry voices on Vietnamese-language radio, 400 demonstrators filled the shopping center parking lot the next day to draw attention to human rights abuses in Vietnam. Eventually the crowds peaked at 15,000.

Many activists said the incident would lead to a movement, uniting Vietnamese across the world in pressuring the Communist government to become more democratic. Leaders even convened a workshop in March for Vietnamese emigres from around the nation to plan strategy; a similar meeting is scheduled for today at which activists will discuss what lasting effects came from the flag protest.

“With this crisis, we’re turning a new page in advocating for human rights and democracy in Vietnam. There’s tremendous momentum coming out of this,” said attorney and activist Van Thai Tran at one of the many rallies last year.

Some say the protests at least planted the seed of a unified movement among younger activists. “Yes, the movement is there,” said Duc Trong Do, president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, one of many groups that claim to represent the Vietnamese population in Orange County. “You don’t see it. [Vietnamese] won’t go out because there is nothing to protest . . . right now.”

But most say the moment, indeed, was wasted.

“People did not set aside their personal differences,” said Luan Tran, a lawyer who represented some protesters. That “really stands in the way of some kind of worldwide movement. All we’ve seen so far is internal fighting. . . . The younger people are sick and tired of the older generation bickering.”

Many experts say the Vietnamese community is simply too fragmented to influence global politics. It is most obviously divided between young and old, between those who feel as Western as they do Asian and an older generation still fighting the Vietnam War.

“Many Vietnamese still want to go back to Vietnam and are still very attached” to the homeland, said David Szanton, director of the international and area studies program at UC Berkeley. “There’s so many different agendas and backgrounds . . . a world movement is not even possible.”

By comparison, Cuban Americans have forged a unified and effective lobby to pressure the Communist regime in Havana, Szanton said. Their clout was demonstrated in successful efforts to keep Elian Gonzalez in the United States over the objections of both American and Cuban officials.

While Orange County’s Vietnamese community is concentrated in Little Saigon and remains isolated by cultural and linguistic barriers, Cuban Americans have more completely joined the American mainstream, Szanton said.

*

If there are lasting effects of the flag protest, they are subtle.

Westminster Police Capt. Andy Hall, who acts as the department’s ambassador to Little Saigon, believes one result is that Vietnamese residents of the city are now more aware of their potential political strength.

“Day in and day out, it is not visible,” he said. “But there certainly, at a deeper level, is a significant [realization that] they will be a different type of political force to be reckoned with.”

If there is a lasting result, it is seen in a new community center on Harbor Boulevard, established with money donated by protesters during the rallies last year.

Tuan Anh Ho, a 60-year-old leader of the flag protests, faced criticism after the rallies from rival activists who accused him of misspending some of the $250,000 raised on travel.

Ho, president of the Committee for Just Cause of Free Vietnam, says that he spent a small portion of the money on one trip to Europe to promote his group’s anti-Communist message and that he is $130,000 in debt after creating the Garden Grove community center. No formal complaints were ever filed by his critics.

Even Ho is pessimistic about prospects for a worldwide movement. “Here . . . we fight among ourselves,” he said. “All of our hopes and dreams are on our children, the next generation. We hope to teach them about our history so they can understand our struggles for democracy, so they can feel compassion and help the people in Vietnam who are not so lucky as they,” he said.

The flag furor also is credited with launching at least two other protests in Orange County: rallies to protest artwork from Vietnam at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and picketing outside Tony Lam’s Garden Grove restaurant.

Both, however, fizzled in time.

By the end of the Bowers exhibit in late summer, there only were three protesters pacing a sidewalk outside the museum, said curator of Asian art Janet Baker. The protest “was an attempt to keep the movement alive,” she said. But after the Bowers exhibit was over, “it all seemed to end.”

Protests have ended outside Tony Lam’s restaurant as well. The Westminster city councilman, the nation’s only elected Vietnamese American official, was vilified by his political rivals for failing to appear outside the video store during the flag protests.

Lam says he “went through hell” last year because many Vietnamese “didn’t know what to do when the protests were over, so they focused on me.”

Lam sued in March, accusing political opponents Ky Ngo and Xuan Dang of disrupting his business during the 73-day picketing campaign; in the fall the two were ordered to pay him $8,500.

Lam says he still lies awake at night thinking about the protests and how his community turned on him.

The Vietnamese community, he said, “in a lot of ways is very immature. I would love to help the Vietnamese have a unified voice, but they don’t want it. We were always divided. We lost Vietnam because we never had a unified voice.

Lam tells an old story to make his point: “There’s a Vietnamese and an American fisherman catching crabs. The American catches the crabs and closes the cover on his trap so they do not escape. The Vietnamese fisherman only lowers a bucket and does not put a cover on it. The American asks him why he does not need a cover. The Vietnamese fisherman doesn’t worry. He said the crabs are Vietnamese crabs. When one tries to crawl out, the others will drag him down again.”

*

Times correspondent Quyen Do contributed to this story.