The host of a Vietnamese variety show is under siege for supporting her father's decision to return to Vietnam, a country he fled as it fell to the Communists nearly 30 years ago.
Critics of the former South Vietnamese prime minister's ongoing journey are urging a Little Saigon-based production company to bounce Ky Duyen Nguyen from her role as host of a popular series of videos called "Paris by Night"-- cabaret-style videos that have swept her to fame in immigrant communities and Vietnam.
Her father, Nguyen Cao Ky, inflamed the Vietnamese emigre community after returning last month to Vietnam to make peace with a government he once fought. Anticommunist Vietnamese Americans from Southern California, home to the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam, decried his trip as a traitorous mission.
Ky Duyen said she was invited to join her father a week before his departure but declined because of work commitments. Still, she supports her 73-year-old father's decision.
"He's old and hasn't seen his homeland. He wanted to visit his mother's gravesite, see the temples and visit tourist areas, just like everyone else," she said. "I didn't know he had any political visits in mind."
Ky, who was scheduled to return this weekend, has extended his trip, during which he has played golf with Communist leaders, urged a reconciliation between Vietnam and those who fled and hinted that he might even move back to Vietnam.
"I sympathize and understand people's frustrations," Ky Duyen said at her Garden Grove home. "But my father is his own person and I am my own person. Don't oppose me just because I am my father's daughter."
Orange County's Little Saigon has long been a hotbed of anticommunist sentiment. Shopkeepers display the South Vietnamese flag. A statue of a South Vietnamese soldier fighting alongside an American dominates the Westminster Civic Center. The community erupted in violence in 1999 after a video store shopkeeper hung a picture of Ho Chi Minh, the late Communist leader, and the flag of Communist Vietnam.
The critics have now turned on Ky's daughter, barraging the entertainer with venomous e-mails and blasting her on Vietnamese talk-radio shows. They have put pressure on Thuy Nga Productions to remove her as hostess of the "Paris by Night" videos. Even those who have interviewed her on television have been scolded. Virginia-area residents plan to protest a show she'll be hosting in Washington to raise funds for stranded Vietnamese immigrants in the Philippines.
