TIME FOR POLITICAL DIVERSITY

COMMENTARY For NHA Magazine
May-June 2005 issue © Vu-Duc Vuong

Before 1975, there was only a handful of Vietnamese in America: diplomats and their families, military officers in training, and a few hundred exchange students around the country.

Since the war ended, over a million Vietnamese have arrived on these shores, at first as refugees and later as immigrants. Today, with their U.S.-born children, the Vietnamese American community is bumping against the two million mark, with almost half living in California.

But one must wonder on this 30th anniversary, is the diversity of the V-A community reflected in terms of the community’s political discourse?

It seems as if someone had stopped the clock on April 30, 1975 and still has not released it. For three decades, a diminishing but vocal segment of the V-A community has dictated a rigid political agenda for everyone, and viciously attacked any attempt at rapprochement or normalizing with the home country.

The Vietnamese-language media in the U.S., by and large, is a major player in this political intimidation. They chastised early returnees, even for going back to bury parents. They embarrassed businesses that advertised for money transfers or travel packages to Vietnam. They protested against visitors and officials from Vietnam. They condemned early performers who crossed the Pacific to share their talents with “the other side.” The attacks were all meant to whip up the anti-communist feeling and to keep the community “in line.”

Perhaps the worst failing of the V-A media is their “one-way” political agenda of: absolute anti-communism.

The irony is not lost on anyone. As the Vietnamese-language media condemn the Vietnamese regime and urge boycotts at every opportunity, the same papers or radio programs make their money from advertisers that sell trips to Vietnam, business opportunities in Vietnam, and even retirement or vacation homes in Vietnam. They vilify their counterparts inside Vietnam as incompetent and political pawns, but the V-A media rely on their Vietnamese colleagues for the majority of their news about their home country.

As they accuse the Vietnamese regime of violations of human rights, civil rights and abuses of the freedom of expression, they themselves attack any Vietnamese American who disagrees with them. In the first half of this year, Thich Nhat Hanh and Nguyen Cao Ky, two names that I would have never dreamt of juxtaposing in the boiling days of the 1960s, are the favorite targets of the V-A media, simply because they openly return to Vietnam, one to preach reconciliation, the other to whip up business.

Back in the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher who reconciled Christian faith with Aristotelian reason, confessed “Timeo hominem unius libri” (I’m scared of the man with only one book). It is equally dangerous and counterproductive, for our Vietnamese American community to be driven by one orthodoxy, one agenda and one way of thinking. It is high time that we open up the cultural and political discourse, accepting that life is multi-faceted, that people can think for themselves, and that diversity is exciting. Vive la difference!

Vu-Duc Vuong is a teacher and writer in the Bay Area. Contact him at vuduc.vuong@gmail.com.